Transnational Literature Series: Michael Favala Goldman with Morten Høi Jensen

This event will take place virtually on Zoom. 

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, Literati Bookstore, and Third Place Books for a virtual event with translator Michael Favala Goldman to discuss and celebrate the release of The Trouble with Happiness by Tove Ditlevsen. He will be in conversation with writer Morten Høi Jensen.

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife’s beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of becoming free and happy―without ever truly understanding what that might mean.

Tove Ditlevsen is one of Denmark’s most famous and beloved writers, and her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy was hailed as a masterpiece on re-publication in English, lauded for its wry humor, limpid prose, and powerful honesty. The poignant and understated stories in The Trouble with Happiness, written in the 1950s and 1960s and never before translated into English, offer readers a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of this essential twentieth-century writer.

Michael Favala Goldman is a widely-published translator of Danish literature, a poet, educator, and jazz clarinetist. Among his seventeen translated books are Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, The Water Farm trilogy by Cecil Bøkder, and Something to Live Up To, Selected Poems of Benny Andersen. His most recent poetry collection is Small Sovereign, 2021.

Morten Høi Jensen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen and has contributed essays and reviews to The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Commonweal, The Point, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.