Illustration by Na Kim
Self-Portrait 1 I cannot: cook pull off a hat entertain wear jewelry arrange flowers remember appointments send thank-you cards leave the right tip keep a man feign interest at parent-teacher conferences. I cannot stop: smoking drinking eating chocolate stealing umbrellas oversleeping forgetting to remember birthdays and to clean my nails. Telling people what they want to hear spilling secrets loving strange places and psychopaths. I can: be alone do the dishes read books form sentences listen and be happy without feeling guilty.
Self-Portrait 1
I cannot: cook pull off a hat entertain wear jewelry arrange flowers remember appointments send thank-you cards leave the right tip keep a man feign interest at parent-teacher conferences.
I cannot stop: smoking drinking eating chocolate stealing umbrellas oversleeping forgetting to remember birthdays and to clean my nails. Telling people what they want to hear spilling secrets loving strange places and psychopaths.
I can: be alone do the dishes read books form sentences listen and be happy without feeling guilty.
Self-Portrait 5 I once stood and waited by BT-Centralen for someone who never came. I loved him. My youth fell away in flakes. I pretended to be eagerly reading the news ticker and personally affected by the report of Gustaf Munch-Petersen’s death in the Spanish Civil War. Why didn’t he come? I shouldn’t have denied him my pesky virginity. My friend told me you can tell by a girl’s eyes whether she still has it or not. An old lady stood next me under an open umbrella. The skin on her neck looked like a turkey’s. I wished I were her because she was nearer death. All my life I’ll remember her face all my life I’ll remember Gustaf Munch-Petersen’s name and envy him his fate. In the bookstore’s window stood And Now We Await a Ship by Marcus Lauesen. I never got around to reading it I think of it reluctantly each time I pass by BT-Centralen where a girl in a miniskirt is pretending to be deeply engrossed in the news ticker’s flickering words about Vietnam Biafra and the student protests. For a moment she looks at me and envies me because I am nearer death. She will never forget my face.
Self-Portrait 5
I once stood and waited by BT-Centralen for someone who never came. I loved him. My youth fell away in flakes. I pretended to be eagerly reading the news ticker and personally affected by the report of Gustaf Munch-Petersen’s death in the Spanish Civil War.
Why didn’t he come? I shouldn’t have denied him my pesky virginity. My friend told me you can tell by a girl’s eyes whether she still has it or not.
An old lady stood next me under an open umbrella. The skin on her neck looked like a turkey’s. I wished I were her because she was nearer death.
All my life I’ll remember her face all my life I’ll remember Gustaf Munch-Petersen’s name and envy him his fate.
In the bookstore’s window stood And Now We Await a Ship by Marcus Lauesen. I never got around to reading it I think of it reluctantly each time I pass by BT-Centralen where a girl in a miniskirt is pretending to be deeply engrossed in the news ticker’s flickering words about Vietnam Biafra and the student protests.
For a moment she looks at me and envies me because I am nearer death. She will never forget my face.
Translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith.
Tove Ditlevsen (1917—1976) was a Danish poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Four more of her poems, about divorce, appear in the Winter issue of The Paris Review, no. 238.
Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith live in Copenhagen. Their cotranslation of All the Birds in the Sky by Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s 2020 Translation Prize. They are currently translating My Work by Olga Ravn.
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