Source — Kelly, "Stories of Memory, Loss, and Paranoia" (Wild Swims review)
- Title: Stories of Memory, Loss, and Paranoia
- Author: Nolan Kelly
- Publication: Hyperallergic
- Date: 2021-04-02
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/632750/wild-swims-dorthe-nors-stories-of-memory-loss-and-paranoia/
- Type: secondary / book review; neutral-to-critical stance toward the popular "hygge" marketing phenomenon (reads Nors's story as pushing back against it), not toward untranslatability claims generally
- Accessed: 2026-08-28
Extract
A review of Dorthe Nors's English-language story collection Wild Swims (Graywolf Press, 2021; translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra). The collection includes a story titled, in English, "Hygge" — kept as the Danish/loanword spelling rather than translated to an English phrase. The review describes the story's content (coercive sex between an elderly professor and a woman he meets at a senior-care facility) and reads the title itself as pointed: "a pretty deliberate repudiation of the warm, marketable coziness — the Danish concept of 'hygge,' loosely translated as such — that has taken hold in our lexicon as an ostensive tenet of their culture." The review does not discuss translation choices within the story's running text (no quoted passages using the word "hygge" or "hyggelig" internally), only the title and the story's relationship to the popular hygge concept; it identifies Misha Hoekstra as the collection's translator without further comment on his specific choices.
Gaps
- Does not quote or discuss any use of "hygge"/"hyggelig" inside the story's own prose — only the title. Whether the word recurs in the body text, and how it would be rendered there, is not addressed by this source.
- Does not discuss the story's original Danish title or the Danish source text at all.