Andreas William Heinesen

Birthday of a writer I've never heard of but am now quite interested in learning more about...

It's the birthday of the Faroe Islands' most famous writer, Andreas William Heinesen, born 110 years ago in Tórshavn (1900), a place he called the "navel of the world." The islands, which belong to Denmark, are in chilly waters halfway between Iceland and Scotland.

He spoke Faroese at home, a language descended from Old Norse and now spoken by fewer than 80,000 people in the world. But he wrote his novels and poetry in Danish, which he'd learned at school. Despite critical acclaim as a poet, he was so fretful that his Danish wasn't good enough that he read every single page of his first novel out loud to a native Danish speaker. That novel, published in Denmark in 1934 as Blæsende Gry, was translated into English and published just last year as Windswept Dawn (2009).

All of his books written in the Danish he acquired at school have since been translated into the Faroese that he grew up speaking. His novels Den sorte gryde (1949) and De fortabte spillemænd (1950) have recently been translated into English as well, as The Black Cauldron (2000) and The Lost Musicians (2006).

How wonderful that his books have been translated back into his native tongue, Faroese, which I assume is one of the world's many threatened-if-not-dying languages. For a translator and publisher to make this sort of effort to make his works available to a small and likely shrinking readership is truly admirable.