Dinesen, Isak | Lynn R. Wilkinson (essay date 1996)
Lynn R. Wilkinson (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: Wilkinson, Lynn R. “Isak Dinesen's ‘Sorrow-Acre’ and the Ethics of Storytelling.” Edda 1 (1996): 33-44.
[In the following essay, Wilkinson views “Sorrow-Acre” as a rewriting of Paul la Cour's “Sorg-Agre” and elucidates Dinesen's authorial intent with the story.]
Isak Dinesen's remarks to Robert Langbaum have served as a touchstone for almost all later interpretations of “Sorrow-Acre” or “Sorg-Agre”. Langbaum, who notes that his conversations with the Danish writer and storyteller took place in 1959 and 1961, reports:
Isak Dinesen told me that she read while in Africa a modern rendition of this tale by the Danish writer, Paul la Cour. She felt la Cour had made a mistake in establishing the boy's innocence, that the point ought to have remained ambiguous. The occasion for attempting her own version occurred many years later, after she had returned to...
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