There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

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There Lives a Young Girl in Me
Who Will Not Die

by
Tove Ditlevsen

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die
Author:	Tove Ditlevsen
Genre:	Poetry
Written:	(Eng. 2025)
Length:	215 pages
Original in:	Danish
Availability:	There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die - US
	There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die - UK
	There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die - Canada
	Una ragazzina che non vuole morire - Italia

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

This selection originally published as Der bor en ung pige i mig, som ikke vil dø (2021)
A selection of fifty poems from collections first published between 1939 and 1978
Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
With a Foreword by Olga Ravn

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Our Assessment:

B+ : a fine selection of strong and very personal poetry

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Guardian	.	3/1/2025	David Wheatley

From the Reviews:

"Bitter and dependable as a black coffee and a cigarette, these are hymns to desolation, disillusion, ennui and abandonment" - David Wheatley, The Guardian

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die is a selection of fifty poems by Tove Ditlevsen first published in eight collections (the last a posthumous one) that appeared between 1939 -- when Ditlevsen was just twenty-one -- and 1978.
'Ritual', the first poem, from the 1939 collection, opens: "When I am dead, please lay me / to rest in a jet-black coffin", and the next few poems are titled: 'Anxiety', 'To My Dead Child', and 'The Cruel Years' -- so it is immediately obvious that this isn't the most up-beat of collections. (A suicide at age fifty-eight, Ditlevsen also did not mellow over the years .....). It's not all wallow in darkness -- with 'Ritual' also including the verse:

No drab or dreary men
shall carry my coffin,
give me eleven choir girls
to whisk my corpse away.

But the poem also concludes with a summing-up whose torn atitude is echoed in much that follows, the twenty-one-year-old writing:

So waste your grief on another,
for though I loved life dearly,
I longed to sleep and now I rest
here in my jet-black coffin.

In 'Confession' (from a 1961 collection), Ditlevsen offers a revealing self-assessment (though by this point in the collection it's not a surprising or shocking one):

I long for tenderness. For soft words,
from which a lasting comfort grows.
I long for a steadfast kind of love
whose bright flames will never burn out.

But I am not tender. And soft words
cannot thrive in the tracks I leave behind.
My heart taunts those devoted to me.
I pity the soul who seeks respite here.

In 'And It Was a Night like This' she looks back on losing her virginity, when: "one hundred romance novels / were hidden between my legs", and how:

I ended up staying with some man,
as is so often the case.
I left my heart on a well-worn path,
I have no use for it.

As the title-poem suggests, the past proves inextricable, still haunting her, whether looking back, as in 'Childhood Street' ("I'll never forget those endless hours, / surrounded by death and decay"), or in the present, as in 'There Lives a Young Girl' where her younger self: "stares back when I look in the mirror, / searching for something she longs to recover". Throughout, too, we find variations on the failure of adults towards children, from her observation that: "you're more likely to hear / the truth from kids / than adults" to her disapproval of "children whom adults dotingly trim into shape" (in 'Children') to the stark portrayal of parents (who: "kneaded and moulded us") and adults in 'Growing Up', which begins:

The doors they pointed at
when we asked for the exit
were always locked, or else they were
simply fake.
When they led us to a window,
the garden, the houses, the entire landscape
were painted on the inside of the glass.
They smiled in surprise
at our disappointment.

       As she sums up in 'Children': "I loathe the pruning shears upstanding adults wield".
       Among the longest poems is 'Lola', where she assumes another identity pretty much only in name ("My name is Lola"), while there is also a sequence of four poems titled 'Self-Portrait', as much here is autobiographical and confessional. The pull of love is strong, but lasting partnership elusive -- she finding herself caught (like all women, she writes), between being: "in love and truly loved" -- and so also, unsurprisingly, she admits: "The best time of my day / is when I am alone".
       In her Foreword Olga Ravn notes that much of Ditlevsen's poetry is formally old-fashioned. Much of her poetry is in rhymed verse -- though the translators take a freer hand, explaining in their Note that they: "let the poems guide us" in making their choice what to prioritize from poem to poem -- imagery, rhyme, rhythm. The translations read quite well but it's a shame that this is not a bilingual edition where readers could get a better sense of the originals. (The later poems are in much freer form; presumably the translations of these resemble the originals more closely.)
       There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die is an impressive collection, surprisingly consistent in outlook and many of its concerns over the decades, even as the style of the poems changes considerably. It is a very personal collection, and gives a clear, good sense of the poet.

- M.A.Orthofer, 21 January 2025

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Links:

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page
Penguin Classics publicity page
Gyldendal publicity page
Edizioni Joker publicity page

Reviews:

Bogblogger.dk (Danish)
The Guardian (scroll down for review)
Litteratursiden (Danish)
Poesiens Hus (Danish)
Sein (Danish)
Tid til Tanker (Danish)

Tove Ditlevsen:

Tove Ditlevsen at books and writers

Other books by Tove Ditlevsen under review:

The Copenhagen Trilogy

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Scandinavian literature
See Index of Poetry

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About the Author:

Danish author Tove Ditlevsen lived 1917 to 1976.

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