Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.06.2010, Síða 46

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 07 — 2010
34
Our resident poetry columnist Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is challenged in a
fun reader letter on our 'Sour Grapes' page (page four). His column on
this page is a response.
A reader recently asked,
by way of my editor, that I
share a few words on the
Icelandic poetry communi-
ty. My first response was a long-wind-
ed, athletic “boooooooring” while I
rolled my eyes and pretended to gag.
For a while I was very outspoken
in my criticism of Icelandic poetry.
I found it self-centred, heavily estab-
lished, living in isolation from foreign
poetry (as well as younger poetry),
over-emphasizing metaphor, homog-
enous, amazingly critical of variation
(or fun) and having a snotty superior-
ity complex justified that it justified
with its so-called “modesty”.
“The sheer power of my quietude
will crush the world”, the poets
seemed to say, while reciting their
poetry to nearly no one in a subur-
ban library somewhere off the map.
“That’ll show’em!”
But eventually I more or less gave
up on commenting on Icelandic po-
etry. It didn’t seem to be doing any-
one any good. They got mad (in their
own quiet way) and I got madder (in
my a little less quiet way) and we all
would give each other the evil eye
when passing on Laugavegur. I didn’t
learn, they didn’t learn and almost
everything remained the same. So I
started focusing on things that did in-
terest me rather than trying to play a
draconian pedagogue to the Icelandic
poetry community.
The fact is most Icelandic poetry
doesn’t interest me. But then most
Danish poetry doesn’t interest me ei-
ther. What I’ve read of contemporary
Arab poetry I find horribly sentimen-
tal. Most American poetry (that I’ve
read) is emotional drivel. Come to
think of it I like “scenes of poetries”
much more than I like “nationalities
of poetries”. I like language-inspired
poetry—from Gertrude Stein and
Kurt Schwitters to illuminated manu-
scripts, f larf, langpo, cut-ups, sound
poetry, visual poetry, generative poet-
ry. I like poetry that’s simultaneously
intelligent, amusing and athletic.
And I like poetry communities that
feel like communities and not sectar-
ian dogmas—be it the dogma of one
ruling class (as in Iceland) or the mul-
tiple dogmas in a dog-eat-dog world of
a thousand genres (as in the USA).
Of course there’s loads of interest-
ing poetry happening in Iceland—
though it doesn’t surface much or
generate interest with the bigger pub-
lishing houses who only publish poet-
ry written by people who have already
made a name for themselves, either
as poets publishing with smaller pub-
lishing houses or as something else
entirely.
Take Jón Örn Loðmfjörð, for in-
stance, who’s been writing poetry
machines on the internet for some
years now. He’s publishing his first
book in a few days—Gengismunur—
a generated mash-up of the infamous
nine volume Report (on the crisis/col-
lapse). Or Ragnhildur Jóhanns, who
recently published one of the most
beautiful books of visual poetry to
be published in Iceland, ever—called
Semsé. This year the Nýhil Interna-
tional Poetry Festival will be held
for the sixth consecutive year. Anton
Helgi Jónsson has started publish-
ing again, after a lengthy break. Ísak
Harðarson’s last book was wonderful.
And so on and so forth.
But none of this changes the fact
that a good poem—let alone a good
book of poems—is still an exception
in Iceland. As it is in all the other
countries of the world.
Poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
The Icelandic Poetry Community
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Books | Review
There is certainly no lack for photo-
graphic coffee table books in the spec-
trum of Icelandic publications. Gener-
ally aimed at tourists and Icelandophile
types, these books tend to show the
usual suspects: majestic shots of gla-
ciers, aurora borealis, Jökulsárlón and
waterfalls. Although this book does
show all these things and more—and
even though Iceland is such an impres-
sive country that making it look boring
is damn near impossible—somehow
The Essence Of Iceland doesn’t really
do justice to the land.
Part of the problem is the layout of
the book. The images are laid out in a
varying series of double-page, full-page
and half-page spreads that drag the
viewer’s eye all over the place and eas-
ily lose focus. The sizes of the photos
are also highly variable and often leave
more white space on the page than pho-
tography. Having a more consistent
form of presentation, and much less
blank space on the page, would be more
conducive to appreciating these images.
The images themselves, however,
could be better. Kristján Ingi Einarsson
is by no-means a bad photographer. If
you have spent any time nerding it up
on an Icelandic photo blog or Google
Image, you have probably dropped your
jaw at one of his fantastic landscape
shots of fjords, mountains and shore-
lines. Maybe it’s due to the overexpo-
sure, but very little is offered by way of
new material. It feels rather repetitive
and seen-it-already. Then again, may-
be I only feel this way because I have
seen it already. There is also something
downright snapshot-like about several
images, which reduces their overall im-
pact.
What reduces the impact of the
images the most though is the poetic
text by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson. On
nearly every page, accompanying each
photo is a small blurb of rather trite,
sentimental poetry. Some of it reads
like an overly priced greeting card,
while others sound like saccharine
teenage prose. Posing cheesy rhetorical
questions or stating overly simple wis-
dom—the kind used by stoners in their
yearbook quotes—just doesn’t add any-
thing powerful to the photos or properly
convey the way seeing these things for
yourself could feel. In any case, whether
in print or in person, it’s best to let Ice-
land’s images speak for themselves.
- REBECCA LOUdER

The Essence Of Iceland
Photos by Kristján Ingi Einarsson
Text by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson
Salka, 2009
Outside of the Sagas and Nobel Prize
winner Halldór Laxness there is little
known about Icelandic literature in
the English-language literary world.
For example, few of you non-natives
will be aware of Gunnar Gunnarson
(1889-1975), an Icelander whose oeuvre
spans over 40 works of fiction, poetry
and non-fiction, who wrote predomi-
nately in Danish and was thrice nomi-
nated for a Nobel Prize.
Although Iceland’s two major pub-
lishers, Forlagið and Bjartur, boast a
joint-list of close to 80 contemporary
authors, only a smidgeon have made
the breakthrough in the UK or US
mainstream. And yet there are many
superb works among the two publish-
ers catalogues. Notable gems include
Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets, Hallgrímur
Helgason’s 101 Reykjavík, Sjón’s The
Blue Fox, Vigdís Grímsdóttir’s Z – A
Love Story, and Einar Kárason’s Devil’s
Island trilogy. All of these authors are
brilliant writers in their own right,
and all are—or have been—published
in English, yet they still aren’t known
nearly as widely as they should be.
SURFING THE CRIMEWAvE
I met with Sjón, winner of the 2005
Nordic Literature Prize for his novel
The Blue Fox, to debate this very issue.
“The first major breakthrough came
when Mál og Menning [now part of
Forlagið] managed to sell the rights to
Arnaldur Indriðason’s crime novels,”
he said.
Riding on the wave of Scandina-
vian crime fiction alongside Henning
Mankell and Stieg Larsson, Arnaldur’s
international sales figures now exceed
5 million. Great crime fiction this may
be, but what about literary fiction?
Where are the Ian McEwans, Paul Aus-
ters, and Margaret Atwoods of modern
Icelandic literature? “It has come to the
stage where writing a decent Icelandic
crime novel can almost guarantee you
a publishing deal in Germany,” says
Sjón. “All this exposure is great, but
perhaps it has made the case more dif-
ficult for the literary novel.”
A SORELy MISSEd TRANSLATOR
In 2004, McSweeney’s Quarterly Con-
cern (a high-profile US literary journal)
dedicated its 15th issue to contempo-
rary Icelandic literature, featuring an
excerpt of Einar Már Gudmundsson’s
excellent novel, Angels Of The Uni-
verse, translated by Bernard Scudder.
Bernard Scudder, an Englishman,
but long-time resident of Reykjavík,
translated countless works of Icelan-
dic literature from full-length novels
to poetry collections. Sjón notes that
Scudder was one of the few transla-
tors who was quite comfortable in both
fiction and poetry. American writer
Jeff Sypeck said in 2007, shortly after
Bernard’s death: “Bernard Scudder
was one of the rare souls who helped
share Icelandic literature with the Eng-
lish-speaking world, and yet his pass-
ing was hardly noticed—there was no
mention in the Icelandic Review and
not a single obituary in any English
newspaper.” Months later, in a post-
humous blog, the Guardian finally did
him a little justice, saying: “[Bernard’s
translations] sang in a rhythm mixing
the original Icelandic language with a
lyrical English style.”
Scudder translated many of Ice-
land’s award-winning writers into
English, but possibly his greatest work
was his five-volume compilation of Ice-
landic skaldic poetry, which was even-
tually published by Penguin. Scudder
translated Guðbergur Bergsson, Einar
Már Gudmundsson, Thor Vilhjálms-
son and Þórarinn Eldjárn. More re-
cently he had translated the works of
best-selling crime authors Arnaldur
Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. He
is and will be sorely missed.
SOMETHING NEW MAy BE HAP-
PENING
“I don’t necessarily think it’s the trans-
lators that are the problem,” Sjón pos-
tulates. “Mostly it’s a problem of the
rich offering in the English language,
the grave difficulty in breaking into
an established literary clique. Did you
realise that translations only repre-
sent around 3% of the work on offer
in the English language? Tradition-
ally those Icelandic authors that have
made it onto the wider English lan-
guage circles have had to take the long
route: through Denmark, Norway and
Sweden, then into Germany, perhaps
Holland, Italy or France. English only
comes at the very end. What we are re-
ally waiting for is for one of us to make
the great literary breakthrough into the
UK or US.”
In 2007, Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson’s
short story collection Valentines was
released to critical acclaim. One of
the stories in his collection won him a
2008 O’Henry Prize. Bragi Ólafsson’s
novel The Pets was highly praised in
the American press, and his newest
novel, The Ambassador, is anticipated
from Open Letter Books any day now.
“I feel something new is happen-
ing,” says Sjón. “My latest novel The
Twilight Of Marvels is being released
in the UK by Telegram Press, who
also released The Blue Fox. Rights to
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novel Heav-
en And Hell recently sold to Quecus
Press. Gyrðir Eliasson’s short story col-
lection Stone Tree was released by the
emerging UK publisher Comma Press.
We just have to keep working hard and
getting our stuff out there.”
- MARC vINCENz
Literature | Analysis
Breaking Into The Mainstream
Literary Iceland