The Ugly Duckling mirrors his life

Things one never gets used to, do exist. Like the privilege of being able to read Hans Christian Andersen in his original language. The Danes are a small population, but how exclusively lucky.

His ‘original language’ is a curiosity. Hans Christian Andersen was born in 1805 in Funen, an island known as the garden of Denmark, with its breathtakingly green landscape and fragrant hedges of blossoms. The beauty of the place where he grew up was a huge inspiration to him as a poet. An interesting detail, which, at least I find, is often neglected considering ‘the sound of his works’ is that in Funen people sing while talking. The Funish dialect is the most melodious of all our dialects. Foreigners notice that Danish, like the landscape, is very ‘flat’. The friendly, little green hills of Funen seem to be reflected in the song of its inhabitants; and this song is the melody he has written. What I love the most about Andersen is the wonderful melody of all his sentences. It makes everything he wrote pure poetry.

Andersen grew up in poverty: his mother was a washerwoman, his father, a shoemaker, who died early. With good reasons to get away, he created his own world – every Danish child knows the story about little Andersen sitting in the shade of the gooseberry bush, playing the characters in the plays he wrote for his homemade theatre. In quest of a career on stage, which he adored, at 14, he left home for Copenhagen. He wanted to dance, act, write plays, whatever. Though he did not succeed in this field, his talents were spotted and influential people took care of his further education by sending him to school.

He published his first poem, The Dying Child in 1827, which earned him recognition. Andersen graduated in 1828, and the year after published his first big work, Journey on Foot. In 1831 he travelled abroad for the first time. "To travel is to live", he claimed and much did he travel. His first novel The Improvisatore appeared in 1835. Two years later came Only a Fiddler, often seen as a novel with some resemblance to his own life, and thereafter three more in the next 35 years. After reading his first collection of fairy tales, the well-known Danish physician H.C. Orsted, his older friend and adviser, observed: The Improvisator would make him famous, but the fairy tales would make him immortal.

Andersen’s first collection of fairy tales was published in 1835, and this is where he found his own original and very special field. In all, he wrote 156 fairy tales, and soon there were translations. They brought fame and respect to the poet who, all his life, intensely longed for recognition. Among the most beloved of his fairy tales, known the world over are: The Little Mermaid, The Nightingale, The Princess on the Pea, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, Clumsy Hans, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, Little Claus and Big Claus, Thumbelina, The Swineherd, The Tinder Box and, of course, The Ugly Duckling, which too is usually taken to be a story about his own life.

His fairy tales deal with life in all its aspects: love and loss, poverty and pride, nature and its beauty, technology and progress — which he worshipped — social injustice, snobbishness, right and wrong, charity and morals…. And Andersen has done it in every imaginable way: humorous and witty, but also ironic, subtle, sentimental, tragic and sad like no one else could. His growing up in deep poverty and the experiences of own life were the central and take-off point for his works. Evidently he wanted to leave that life behind, but never forget it.

He was an extremely versatile artist. Not only did he write both novels, poems, short stories and fairy tales but also useful travelogues and patriotic songs that still move our hearts and are sung even today. He was very skilful at paper cuttings. With an enormous pair of scissors and his enormous pair of hands, he could cut the most delightful, small and fragile ballet dancers -- flowers, clowns and broken hearts that turned into their own little stories.

He was equally adept at arranging flowers. During winter, he would step into a garden, find a withered rose, and with a few simple flicks of his fingers turn it into an item of decoration. His drawings were graceful.

No matter what he did, what he touched, whether writing, cutting paper, drawing, arranging flowers – everything was always distinctly suffused with originality, beauty and poetry.

Andersen died on August 4, 1875. He was loved, and still is. Up there he must be rejoicing, at his stories still being read, still alive in so many countries, watching his 200th birthday being celebrated all over…. His stories continue to make us cry and laugh. Is that why a poet from such a small language gets recognition all over the world? Anyway, this is what you find in so many stories: the strength of love, the need for it, for this strange, eternal imperishable truth.

In Denmark his experience is part of our blood and genes – at first times are tough, and then things get better – as all of us know from his life story and from that of the poor duckling’s. He has bequeathed to us, to our daily lives, an extremely useful optimism, that tomorrow would be better.

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