Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.10.2010, Síða 40

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16 — 2010
Literature | Review
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Poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
When this text is eventually pub-
lished the world will know who
received the 2010 Nobel Prize
for Literature. It will have been
announced yesterday. The person in ques-
tion will already be lauded worldwide, in
today’s newspapers next Friday, with a few
dissenting voices perhaps mentioning cul-
tural politics and even fewer voices claiming
that prize-giving is invalid, that it reduces
literature (and by association, the human
spirit) to a competitive sport. But mostly
we’ll just participate in the joy, because
everybody loves a party. And just like we
know that our birthdays and Christmases
and whatever don’t have any gigantic “ac-
tual” meaning, they’re still fun and we’d like
to keep ‘em fun, if possible.
When this text is written, however, the
world (with me in it) does not know who will
receive the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature,
seeing as now it’s Sunday the 3rd of Octo-
ber and the announcement isn’t due until
Thursday. That is to say, your yesterday, in
my four days time. This is all due to a com-
plicated lag in publishing tangible printed
material that I won’t go into. Suffice it to say,
it could not have been otherwise.
I am terribly excited, of course.
The front-runner for the LitNobel this
year, at Ladbrokes bookies, is Sweden’s own
Tomas Tranströmer—a poet most people in
the world have not heard of, but is an im-
mense presence within the inconceivable
world of poetry. The Swedes have not got a
LitNobel since 1974, when Harry Martinson
and Eyvind Johnson had to share one. I don’t
know how that works. Maybe you get half a
gold medal. Or each winner gets a smaller
medal than had he or she won alone.
And it seems Ladbrokes feels poets are
particularly thinkable winners this year, with
Adam Zagajewski (Poland), Adonis (Syria),
Ku On (Korea) and Les Murray (Australia)
following Tranströmer on the list. They are
mostly as or more obscure than Tranströmer
(nobody reads poetry anymore, I say, shak-
ing my head indignantly, last Sunday).
By now (or then, I mean, at publication),
I guess you will know who got it. It probably
wasn’t Tranströmer, was it? Nor was it Philip
Roth? It never is. But they always mention
him. He’s the guy that never gets it. Appar-
ently he’s nonchalant about it, doesn’t feel
it’s any special honour—he feels American
literature has towered over world litera-
ture for decades and that they don’t need
Swedish Nobels for justification. Maybe
he’s right. But it still sounds a bit arrogant,
with a tinge of bitter disappointment. And, I
would venture, it has something to do with
his involvement with American literature—I
doubt that he has read Tranströmer or Ku
On. Americans don’t translate much, as
Horace Engdahl, member of the Swedish
academy has pointed out, they don’t speak
other languages much—and they’re mostly
not in any position to judge non-English lit-
erature (whereas most people, worldwide,
read English-language literature—either in
the original or in translation—which is one of
the reasons why Philip Roth is so famous).
The race for the Nobel is no longer excit-
ing, not where you are sitting, but over here,
in the past last Sunday, we’re still all very
anxious to know. The writer chosen will en-
joy immense rekindling of sales and trans-
lations worldwide, increased respectability
and mentions, interviews, acknowledgment
and critical response. But it doesn’t last. It
never does. In three or four months people
will be going: “Tomas who?” Or “Did Philip
Roth ever get it?” Or “Ko Un who?” (Am I
right, was it Ko Un?) Oh, sure, a few nerds
still remember Elfriede Jelinek and Jean-
Marie Gustave Le Clézio—and a few will
remember Thursday’s winner, but not many
will be able to spell their names correctly
and even fewer than that will be familiar with
their work (although some will have bought
it today—or tomorrow at the latest).
Because despite the good party, the
good fun, the medals and the boatloads of
cash—despite the respect, the myth-making
qualities, the critical debates and the high-
fallutin’ rhetoric—we all know that literature
isn’t a competitive sport and nobody can tell
you which books enlighten and which don’t.
Except for you, of course. But then again,
you might wrong.
future Perfect Poetry
It is a little difficult to decide which of two
ways to describe Sigurður Gylfi Magnús-
son's new book ‘Wasteland With Words’.
Fifteen of the book's eighteen chapters are
about Iceland from roughly 1800 to 1940,
with particular stress on the years from
1870 to 1920. Trained in social history, Sig-
urður Gylfi focuses on now-classic themes
such as childhood, death, literacy, housing,
work, settlement patterns and emigration.
He uses a lot of examples from the Strandir
region, which he has studied in depth.
In this way the book is about the years
when Iceland was transformed from a very
poor farm-based peasant society into a
semi-modern, semi-independent European
country with a fishing-based economy.
On the other hand, the book is subtitled
‘A Social History of Iceland’. One chapter
(chapter ten) deals with the history of Ice-
land from 800 to 1800, and two chapters
(the final ones) cover 1940 to the present.
Including these chapters makes the book
into an alternative to the “standard” Eng-
lish-language histories of Iceland, on sale at
every bookstore here, that usually trace the
island's history from settlement almost up to
the present.
Looked at in this way, ‘Wasteland With
Words’ could be seen as a challenge to
what we could call the Saga-age view of
Icelandic history: the idea (common among
tourists and newcomers to Iceland) that
understanding the age of settlement is key
to understanding the country. ‘Wasteland
With Words’ reads like a long, and in my
view successful argument that if any period
is the key to understanding Iceland today,
it's the Nineteenth century.
As in Sigurður Gylfi's other writing—
most of it available in Icelandic only—he
tells the story of Iceland from the bottom
up, through examples culled from diaries,
newspapers, and the histories of particular
families. He avoids discussing the ceremo-
nial and official. He has read an amazing
number of Icelandic autobiographies. His
writing is fluid, lithe and informal.
The book opened my eyes to the Nine-
teenth-century roots of some current Ice-
landic customs. The popularity of summer
work for teenagers goes right back to the
ubiquity of child labour a hundred years
ago. I understand the ambivalent attitude
towards dogs in Iceland better now: dogs
on farms were the key vector in the spread
of hydatid disease (echinococcosis), a re-
volting and sometimes fatal parasitic infec-
tion that afflicted as much as a quarter to
a half of Icelanders in the late Nineteenth
century. And one reason for the tradition of
out-of-wedlock births in Iceland is that un-
til surprisingly recently—well after America
freed its slaves—powerless, disenfranchised
servants made up 35–40% of the Icelandic
population and were not allowed to marry.
More depressingly, the shackles on
consumer freedom in Iceland and the near-
Soviet feeling to the retail experience here
can be traced to the days when trade with
Iceland was in the hands of a few Danish
merchants. The poor condition of the older
housing stock in places like Ísafjörður and
downtown Reykjavík is a problem with very
old roots. Our relatively low rate of high
school graduation today and the delayed
development of the Icelandic educational
system in the Nineteenth century are two
chapters of the same story. Iceland was not
the only part of Europe that was impover-
ished in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, but the situation here was unusually
bad and unusually slow to improve. Sigurður
Gylfi's book shows how far we have come.
‘Wasteland With Words’ is a very fine
introduction to Icelandic history, but I want
prospective readers to know in advance
that it's mostly about daily life in the late
Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries.
My biggest criticism is that the design and
print quality is not what one would expect
of a forty-dollar book that's being distrib-
uted by the University of Chicago Press.
The margins are too big and the print is too
small. The photos would be easier to ap-
preciate if they extended to the page edges.
Both the ink and the paper are a bit gray-
ish. I doubt that Sigurður Gylfi is making
a lot of money off this book. I wonder if it
would have gained more readers published
simultaneously online, with open access,
and on paper, in a cheaper paperback for-
mat.
Wasteland with Words
by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon
Reaktion Books, 2010
IAN WATSON
This Was The Real Iceland
Divided into sections (‘Intro’, ‘Death and
Life’, ‘Cosmic Dreams’, ‘Day to Day’) with
colour-coded titles, ‘antennae scratch sky’
touches on life cycles, animal instincts,
sexuality, cosmos, fruit and the meaning
of the word “motherfucker”. The 64-page
book contains some good, some bad poems
behind a cover sporting drawings of what
looks like a fat flamingo and a sad, radioac-
tive bunny.
The poems’ are peppered with Greek
gods’ names and vague personifications
of death, life and beauty, like in the poem
‘Centaur,’ but which lacks the ingenuity of
more descriptive poems like ‘Sabbath’ in
which Þórunn describes snowfall as “Un-
written snowy paper/ in the homedrive/
makes a marring sound./ An Arabic snow-
poem/ written by tires.” The poems that be-
gin with simple ideas and expand out create
more poetic congruency than the those that
begin with vague ideas and try to tie in intri-
cate details.
One example where the simple to com-
plex construction works is in the poem ‘Be-
yond the Line’. The poem begins with the
image of a woman throwing fruit waste into
a compost and connects it to the process of
a decomposing human body. “...no pollutive
pyre/ or costly grave. It would serve humans
best/ to be stewed into compost/ reviving
dead forests and deserts.” The poem de-
scribes the metamorphosis of a lifeless hu-
man body into an apple, maggot, bird and
back to an apple, etc. The language of the
poem turns an old idea into something new
without being overly complicated.
The two biggest problems with the
book are the lack of punctuation and centre
alignment of every poem. Some of the lon-
ger poems like ‘mama’ and ‘you’re a good
poet/ I can see it in your face’ read more like
stream of conscious and could greatly ben-
efit from a more “streamlined” construction
instead of centred alignment. Centre align-
ing every poem, without explicit reasoning,
seems lazy and uninventive.
Þórunn’s more playful poems (with
some serious undertones) like ‘Folk and
Felines’ describing the differences between
dogs (who view humans as gods) and cats
(who think they are dogs) are much more
enjoyable to read than some of the heavier
poems like ‘mama’. The poem ‘mama’ ram-
bles on about how “motherfucker is a nega-
tive concept/ making it seem bad to service
her/ let’s make it beautiful, and being a bitch
too” for nine pages. Unfortunately, the con-
troversy overrides the lyricism. The poem
lacks poetic forcefulness to merit such a
complex topic.
Some of the descriptions of fruit relating
to human sexual organs are pretty hilarious,
especially in the poem ‘L’amour dans le jar-
din/ or a fantasy about edible pulpy plants’.
Avid poetry readers might not be too im-
pressed, but for the casual one, ‘antennae
scratch sky’ is worth a read.
antennae scratch sky
by Þórunn Erla Valdimarsdóttir
Poetry | Review
EMILy BuRTON