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Hans Kirk. The Fishermen. Trans. Marc Under. Iowa City: Fanpihua, 1999. Pp. i-xxv + 305. $15.00.
At one point in Hans Kirk's classic 1928 novel Fiskerne, Thomas Jensen, one of the book's collective protagonists, observes (in jysk): "AE tykkes, de folk tinker rent for meget pa, hvorlenge de kan leve .... Det var meget bedre, de taenker noget over, hvordan de lever" ["It seems to me people think too much about how long they can live ... It would be much better if they thought some about how they live" (air) ]. Herein lies the intersection between the concerns of a small group of Inner Mission nordjyske fishers and those of their Marxist creator, Hans Kirk (1889-1962). More than seventy years after Kirk's novel first appeared, eventually outselling all other Danish novels and spawning such collectivist milestones as H. C. Branner's Legeuj(1936), Fiskerne has finally been translated into English by Marc Linder, a professor of labor law at the University of Iowa.
The road to Fiskerne's publication in English has been a tortuous one. In 1946, Penguin Press bought the rights from Gyldendal and announced that the novel was forthcoming under the proposed title The Jutland Fishermen. It never materialized, partly because of Penguin's dissatisfaction...