The conventional CV is found after the brief account of my early years.
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My parents were Danes. Both had left Denmark
for Argentina but for entirely different reasons. They also had radically
different backgrounds.
My father was born in a village in
northern Jutland which was, essentially, rural and poor. The family was large
with no less than twelve children. My grandfather was a respected farmer and mason
in the village. My father longed for independence from his early years and he
learnt how to do agricultural managing at larger estates. In his twenties, he
was the steward on the largest estate in Denmark at the time. Then the
Depression caught up with Denmark – and him. My father always felt that he owed
his loyalty to his employers. He therefore followed the instructions of his employer
and walked from door to door to the old people who according to ancient Danish
customs were entitled to live in humble cottages and off the surplus of the
estate. He had to tell them that they were to be forcibly evicted unless they
moved out on their own. He ended by going to the employer and handing in his
own resignation.
He expected to find the land of milk and honey
in Argentina but the only thing he could get was a horse that would take him to
the next ‘estancia’. For, although Argentina had also been hit by the
Depression, people knew how to behave. Eventually, after much adversity, he
made it to Buenos Aires. He became the chairman of the Association for Young
Danes, grouped around the Danish church in Buenos Aires.
My mother came of a wealthy, bourgeois family
in Denmark as one of the six children of a relatively well-known engineer. My
grandfather had studied civil engineering in Germany because this study was
unknown in Denmark. He merely followed custom in marrying the daughter of the
house in the family where he stayed in Berlin. He introduced trolley buses in
Denmark and became well-known as the first amateur balloonist who later
instructed the Danish army in the use of balloons.
The family had a large house in a wealthy part
of Copenhagen and an extensive circle of friends. My mother was a law student
but got engrossed in the Youth Hostel movement (she was one of the founders of
the Danish branch) and was promoted to the position of ‘International
Secretary’ which – I assume – meant that she had to lick all stamps and take
the envelopes to the local mailbox. Her mother being German, her German was
fluent. Like the rest of the family she watched Hitler’s rise with distaste.
She voiced her dissent at an international Youth Hostel rally that took place
in Germany and where Mr Rudolf Hess, then the appointed successor of the
‘Fuehrer’, was present.
Unfortunately, this was never told to my
brothers and me while she was still alive – for had we known, we might have
shown her more compassion and consideration. I was not told until after her
death. Therefore, I do not know what happened in Germany. I have a feeling that
she was escorted out by SS troops, but it is not mine to know.
What I do know is that less than three months
after this event she was onboard a ship bound for Argentina where her eldest
brother served as the minister at the Danish church in Buenos Aires.
Less than a year later she and my father were
married.
I was born shortly after the outbreak of the
Second World War. Argentina remained neutral (and pro-Nazi) until a couple of
days before the end of the War. Back in Denmark, two of my sister’s brothers
joined the resistance movement and were saved only by, respectively, the timely
intervention of the Danish police and the resistance movement.
Following Argentine law, my mother saw to it
that I was given a Spanish name in my papers. She also uncovered the one Danish
name I was allowed to have ‘Cay’, which 17th century name she found
in family pedigree book. She thus assured me of a name which immediately makes
Hispanic people pronounce my name (about) right – and astounds modern Danes who
some luscious blonde to enter their lives and instead find themselves disappointed
by seeing only yours most humble (who is not female, not luscious, and not
beautiful). My uncle cheated at the christening ceremony in the Danish church
and gave me two Danish names. For reasons that will become obvious in due time,
I have tried to shield the official Danish document that was created for this
occasion (my baptismal record) from too much prying. Hence I often appear under
pseudonyms which even I do not recognise. But the fact is that I am both an
Argentine and a Danish citizen, by, respectively, birth and parentage.
*
Let’s return to the main story line: In
February 1946 shortly after the end of the Second World War, Mr Juan Peron
- already a powerful person in 1943 - became the ruler of Argentina
and introduced a mob regime. His regime allowed Nazis fleeing from Europe
to come. I still recall fighters flying low above the roofs of Buenos Aires.
Hard times fell on the small family, now comprising three boys and living on
the outskirts of Buenos Aires: I went to school and learnt to read. Like my
younger brother, Robert, I marched in innocent procession after the Peronistas
while my mother grieved. The motorbike on which my father rode with a mate to
his work in town was stopped by a Peronista mob, and a can of paint thrown on
my father for not being a party member.
My father and mother decided it was high time
to leave Argentina.
Even to the uninitiated eye, it must have been
a well-planned move. As a highly independent boy even at the age of six, I was
shipped off first, officially in the hands of my minister uncle but since he
was preoccupied with his obsession of becoming a missionary in India, I was on
my own.
My uncle and I went by ferryboat to Montevideo,
Uruguay, and I dimly remember being separated from my parents by a fence at
night.
In Montevideo we found the Danish steamer, the
‘Louisiana’ of the DFDS, moored at the quays. There was not much to see on the
boat except for the daily arrival of the hydroplane from Buenos Aires in the
harbour itself. But the Danish consul had a large family and a hospitable
house. We were welcomed there and I had some good experience of the beaches of
the Punta de Este where the consul owned a house.
Eventually, the Louisiana started the long
voyage across the Atlantic. When we left Montevideo we saw the wreck of the
Nazi cruiser ‘the Scharnhorst’ still beached near the entrance of the harbour.
In the setting sun, I felt a slight discomfort – my only experience with
seasickness. The Uruguayan coast was behind us. The steamer faced the Atlantic and
we chugged away for thirty days. My uncle and I were the only passengers
onboard the ship and we had our meals with the officers and were served by a
boy, Hans, who was 16 years of age.
Every day we would rest at noon – or at least I
was supposed to. My godfather had given me a book about San Martin, the man who
liberated Argentina from Spanish rule around 1820. I managed to read a page a
day and carefully marked the place that I had come to with big cross. The book
is still in my possession. The captain frowned at me; I seem to remember that
he suffered from some disease. The steersman kept an eye on me from the bridge,
but I clearly sometimes escaped his watchful his eye since he had me christen
“The little flying fish” when we crossed the Equator. I loved being in the
engine room with its heavy smell of oil. And I felt comfortable with the
sailors in their small cabins. It was a nice ship to a boy. There was once a
gale where I looked aft and saw right into the frothing mouth of the ocean as
the steamer (in my eyes) lifted vertically from the raging waves.
One day, at sunrise, there was a small dark dot
ahead of us in the horizon. It became bigger and bigger, and by noon, in the
calm, calm sea, a steamer passed us in the opposite direction. No waving, no
saluting. The routes to South America were little trafficked after World War
II.
Eventually we sighted Denmark, passed the
Kronborg Castle at Elsinore, and arrived in Copenhagen in the afternoon of 1st
September 1946. Relatives that I had never met before, gave me a warm welcome,
first of all my two cousins who arrived in the white girls’ dresses, then the
rest of the family.
I spent my first months in Denmark in the care
of my mother’s sister, her husband and children. I went to school and was soon
and despite desperate attempts to stick with my few friends in the first grade,
promoted forcibly to the second grade by the staff when they found out that I
could read.
The day before Christmas Eve, my mother arrived
with my two younger brothers, and we moved in with my grandparents. I went to a
small school in what was then a combination of a village and a modest summer
resort north of Copenhagen. Two teachers taught two separate classes in the
same room. In April, I was sent to the third grade in a school in a township on
the other side of small wood which, in the eyes of the other boys and
consequently mine was haunted by somebody who abducted children. In summertime
my father eventually arrived too.
So, according to my parents’ plan, we were
united.
But fate and reality would have it otherwise.
After the Nazi occupation, there was rationing, shortage of food, and – worst
of all – a shortage of housing in Denmark.
This came as a nasty surprise to my parents who
had – once again – to fight for survival. My second brother and I were sent to
orphanages operated by the ‘Save the Child’ organisation, and my third brother
eventually joined us as well.
Finally, in late 1948, my father personally
went to see the Minister for Housing and explained our plight. We were given a
flat on the respectable outskirts of a working class district of Copenhagen. I
went to the best school in the neighbourhood (my mother always found out which
school was the best) and I even passed the exam for the college I most desired
(because that was where my best friend intended to go).
Then our family was scattered again. My mother
got a post as a teacher at a provincial school while the job my father had been
promised evaporated into the thin air and he had to keep his job in Copenhagen.
Mother took care of her sons – now four, but had to give up and leave us to the
mercy of Roman Catholic nuns (and what mercy!).
We found a place to live in a suburb of
Copenhagen in 1952 and in 1958 I passed the college exam which also served as
the entrance exam for university. Shortly afterwards I joined the army as a
draftee and spent one year and nineteen days on the island of Bornholm, the
easternmost point in the NATO defence where we were informed that there would
be no reinforcements whatsoever coming our way in case of a Soviet attack. It
never came – luckily so – for it would have taken Soviet and Polish bombers and
fighters less than 10 minutes to reach us – and it took us 50 minutes to
evacuate the barracks. In addition the fire equipment was abysmally bad. I knew
because I was trained to be a fire-fighter in case there was a fire. We
expected quite a few if the island was invaded.
I got a slipped disk in the army and was
operated as one of the first ten patients in Denmark. It sometimes hurts, but I
got a compensation which made it possible for me to take three months off for
devoting my time entirely for the first decisive exam at university.
I entered university in 1959 and, merely by
listing the requirements, the then teacher of Spanish quickly convinced me that
I was not smart enough to enlist for the top exam. Instead I opted for English
as my major and Spanish as a minor (I had lost all my childhood Spanish). I
carefully chose this combination to make sure that I would never end up as a
college teacher.
In order to fix my problems with linguistic
proficiency, I stayed in Spain for three months at the prestigious ‘Colegio de
la Santa Cruz’ in Valladolid; and a year at Trinity College in Dublin in Ireland
which, at the time, had a large intake of British students who did not make it
to Oxford or Cambridge.
Although university as such was free of tuition
in Denmark, I had to make a living in all sorts of ways: a postman, a stand-in
teacher, even as an unskilled worker with full membership rights. I finally got
some kind of permanent job as a guide and used to take one day off a week when
my friends and I would go rowing on some lake near Copenhagen, preferably with
some beers and enjoy the sunshine.
I graduated as a ‘cand. mag’ in 1970 and from
then on I worked at the University of Copenhagen at the Department of English
as a part time teacher, a junior researcher, a senior researcher, ending up as
a senior lecturer.
In late 2006, I retired from the University of
Copenhagen.
Together with two colleagues, I conducted
several studies in reader response (they are not finished yet).
My interest in Translation Studies led to
lecturing visits; as a researcher I have visited the European Union Commission
some times, and the United Nations (in New York); as an organiser, I hosted
three conferences in Denmark on Teaching Translation and Interpreting (1991,
1993, and 1995) and had the proceedings volumes published by the well-known
publishing company John Benjamins (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) in 1992, 1994,
and 1996.
As the outcome of the first conference, my
colleagues and I decided to launch a scholarly journal, Perspectives:
Studies in Translatology. I was the editor-in-chief of the journal from
1993 to 2006 and take pride in the fact that it was, during my editorship,
listed in The Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
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Scholarly
career
Undergraduate
Studies:
University of Valladolid, Spain
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Degrees:
Cand. mag. University of Copenhagen 1970
PhD
Posts at the University of Copenhagen 1970-2006
Publications
(5
books) e.g.
Basics
of Translation Studies.
Shanghai: Foreign Language Education Press. 2007
Tales
and Translation: from Pan-Germanic Folktales to International Fairytales. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1999.
Shakespeare,
Hamlet and Denmark: a Study of Elizabethans’ Knowledge of Denmark. 1975. 2nd edition, posted at this
website, 2010.
The
publications that I still consider relevant deal with
-Translation
Studies
-Reader
response research
-English
studies, and
-Literary
theory
All
these articles are posted on this website.
Visiting
professor (of more than one week’s duration) (selected)
Beijing Foreign Studies University, China
Tsinghua, Beijing, China
East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
University of Vilnius, Lithuania
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
The Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Iowa State University, USA
Binghamton University, USA
Guest
lectures (selected)
East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Peking University, Beijing, China
Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Iötvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary
University of Witwaterand, Johannesburg, South Africa
