ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s I was once expelled from a used-book store in Frederiksberg, a rather posh suburb of Copenhagen. I had heard rumors of the owner’s temper, but personally I had always found the service in the store excellent. The store was a book-lover’s paradise: The books were stacked from floor to ceiling with narrow walkways in between. The owner appeared to know every single book in the towering stacks and always knew off the top of his head whether he had a particular book or not. Following the path system to the back one discovered a tiny cubicle with proper shelves: the inner sanctum. Here were the books on Greenland. Over the years I had found many treasures here. On the day in question I worked my way back to the register with Signe Rink’s Kajakmænd. Fortællinger af Grønlandske Sælhundefangere (Kayakers: Stories by Greenlandic Sealers), published in 1896. In fact I was no fan of Signe Rink’s (1836–1909). In my opinion, her most interesting feature was that she had been married to H.J. Rink (1819–1893), who had served as the royal inspector (the highest-ranking official) for Southern Greenland for a number of years and who, in 1858–1868, had systematically documented the Greenlandic narrative tradition, mainly based on the Greenlanders’ own writings (Thisted 2001, 2011). After her husband’s death Signe Rink salvaged the collection by selling the manuscripts to the Royal Library in Copenhagen and the drawings and watercolors that illustrated them to the Danish National Museum. Some of the pictures ended up in Oslo through the intervention of the couple’s daughter, as they had originally been rejected, either because they were too reflective of the European influence, which at the time was seen as alien to the definition of ethnography, or because Signe Rink considered the images indecent. Signe Rink did not rebel against the puritanical age she lived in—not in her own literary works either. The book that I had found, however, was a collection of texts by Greenlandic writers, translated by Signe Rink. Signe Rink was born in Greenland and mastered the language, which gave rise to the misconception that she had been more or less in charge of translating the texts that her husband collected. In fact, H.J. Rink received assistance from the Greenlander Rasmus Berthelsen (1827–1901), who was a chief catechist at the teacher’s college in Nuuk. Tirelessly, the two worked every other night for 62several winters, and it was thanks to his own diligence and stamina—and Berthelsen’s patience—that H.J. Rink managed to acquire Greenlandic and became an expert in the narrative tradition with regard to both language and content. At the time, Signe Rink was busy as a homemaker and looking after the couple’s daughter, and she was not involved in her husband’s work. The translations I was holding in my hand were from a much later time when the couple lived in Oslo, and Signe Rink’s translation style is quite different from her husband’s. Regrettably, on this particular day, the owner of the store was in a chatty mood, and he felt compelled to explain what sort of book I was holding, and of course he brought up the usual story about Signe Rink being the actual translator of H.J. Rink’s collections. As I was just in the middle of retranslating these collections, I felt similarly compelled to disavow the man of this misconception. That was the dispute that had me expelled— without the book and with strict orders never to set foot in his store again!
