By Lasse Horne Kjældgaard. Translated by Thomas E. Kennedy.

Karen Blixen’s Den afrikanske farm (‘Out of Africa’) has just been published in the first critically annotated edition by the Society for Danish Language and Literature in cooperation with the publishing house, Gyldendal. Blixen’s book, published in 1937 in two original versions – Danish and English, is her account of the seventeen years she lived as a coffee farmer in Kenya, from 1914 to 1931.
 
The new edition of ‘Out of Africa’ re-establishes the text on the basis of the first edition which in several places is compared with the manuscripts in Karen Blixen’s literary estate. In addition the text is provided with nearly 1,200 annotations, including word clarifications, historical explanations, comparisons with the English text (‘Out of Africa’ – the Danish title, Den afrikanske farm, literally translates as The African Farm) as well as elucidations of the hundreds of literary references contained in the text. All of these literary echoes – both Eastern and Western, high and low, religious and secular – increase the quantity of the dimensions of significance in Karen Blixen’s text.  For example, the text conducts a running dialogue with 'The Book of Job' from The Old Testament, Shelley’s 'Prometheus Unbound', and Shakespeare’s 'King Lear', which the annotations enable the reader to follow closely.

The level of annotation has been differentiated with respect to the extensive and mixed readership Blixen’s writings attract. Both researchers and primary school students in the higher classes as well as the many who read Blixen for sheer pleasure will benefit from this edition’s many annotations.
 
Moreover, this edition includes a variety of historical source references which have not previously been published. This includes, for example, the newspaper articles Karen Blixen used as the basis of the section “Kitosh’s Story” which has played an important role in the history of the book’s reception.

An afterword to this edition tells how ‘Out of Africa’ came to be written and presents a new historical placement of the work as well as a postcolonial perspective on it – a perspective that is an extension of the new understanding facilitated by the annotations. The afterword also facilitates a more precise understanding of the local colonial historical frames for Karen Blixen’s presence in the country, which was called British East Africa when she arrived and the Crown Colony of Kenya when she left – and examines her reflections regarding these frames both in and outside of ‘Out of Africa’.
 
The text itself has been established by Nicolas Reinecke-Wilkendorff, M.A., an editor with the Society for Danish Language and Literature. The annotations and afterword were written by Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. ‘Out of Africa’ is the first volume in a series titled The Works of Karen Blixen which the Society for Danish Language and Literature together with the publisher Gyldendal will be publishing in the coming years. The next volume in the series, ‘Winter Tales’ (1942), will be available in the autumn of 2008.

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