Akoya's Assistant Editor, Charlotte Grønbech, caught up with Helle Helle to discuss her upcoming novel they, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

Could you tell us about how you started writing they? How did the characters and their lives come to you?

The book’s opening sentence had been in my head for many years: ‘Later she goes over the fields with a cauliflower.’ I felt that this sentence contained enough material for an entire novel. It turned out that the novel would be about a sixteen-year-old daughter and her close relationship with her mother, who becomes terminally ill. It is first and foremost the two of them who are ‘they’. But ‘they’, too, includes everyone the daughter meets in high school in 1981, when the novel is set.

It also turned out that the novel should be written in a radical present tense – regardless of whether something takes place yesterday or last year. This sometimes results in very strange sentences. But the present tense felt crucial to the story. I think it’s the book’s – and the daughter’s – attempt to keep the mother alive forever, not allowing her to become a memory. 

In the novel, the mother and daughter remain nameless. As the title indicates, the two of them exist as a they. Could you explain how the choice to keep them anonymous came to be? 

I couldn’t bring myself to give the daughter a name. I think it had to do with the difference in age between her and me. I was fifty when I wrote the novel. Even though I can remember almost everything about my own life at sixteen – everything I said, did and thought, and the clothes I wore, what I ate – I felt I had to avoid anything that might create even a hint of detachment in my writing. 

It turned out that keeping both the mother and the daughter nameless helped evoke the feeling I wanted in the novel.

At times, the mother and daughter become almost indistinguishable in the narration of the novel, with the actions and dialogue of the characters overlapping. Was this a decision you made or was this something which came to you in the writing? 

Since the daughter is called ‘she’, it felt logical to call the mother ‘her mother’. This posed quite a few challenges for me, because in Danish there are two forms of ‘her mother’. In one form, it always refers back to the subject. I wanted to avoid that completely, so that ‘her mother’ would almost function as the mother’s name. 

But at times, there was simply no other option within the sentence than to call the mother ‘she’ as well. And then, suddenly, these overlaps appeared as I was writing – and I went along with them. They made sense in the context of their relationship. I don’t think I could have imagined that beforehand. Overall, it is my experience that one cannot think a novel into existence; it must be written into being.

In they, we encounter the characters of Hafni and Bob, both of whom will become main characters in your next three novels, Hafni says, Hey Hafni and BOB. Was they ever a stand-alone novel? At what point did your literary universe start to take shape?  

After writing they, I didn’t know for a while how to continue as a writer. I felt I had used up so much of my core material in they. But then it struck me that the novel could be a new beginning. I decided that in my subsequent novels, the supporting characters from they would take centre stage. Both Hafni and Bob went to high school with the daughter. And she, too, plays an important role in the following novels – she is the narrator, she is an invisible first-person voice, she is the one Hafni is speaking to. 

The four books – and those to come – interact with each other within the novel universe. And in each of the novels I try in different ways to let the very form, the grammar, the narrative perspective, the language itself become part of the story.

How was it working with Martin Aitken on translating they into English?

Martin is a brilliant translator. He has an exquisite eye for all the smallest details and meanings, the flow and the pauses. In truth, my novels probably shouldn’t be translatable. I’m so deeply involved with each single word, attending to the tiniest shades of meaning. Martin sends me questions, which I answer as best I can. He can, for example, ask: ‘What exactly is behind the mother’s “no”? Is it like an “oh, I see”?’ And I would answer: ‘I think perhaps it’s more like a pleasant, relaxed “well”, and he replies “ah”.’ He lets me read the translation while it’s still in progress, and I send him my comments and thoughts. Reading along as he works, I can see how he constantly revisits and refines every line –a truly enormous task.