Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.06.2012, Blaðsíða 26

26
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2012 Read more of/about Eiríkur at www.norddahl.org. Also, can you believe we're quoting
Bloodhound Gang in our headlines? Isn't that AMAZING? You and me, babe, we ain't
nothing but mammals. Etc.
B O O K I N G S : T E L . : + 3 5 4 5 6 2 2 3 0 0 W W W . L I F E O F W H A L E S . I S
Whale-Watching Tour Duration: 3 hours
The tour includes a stop by Puffin Island 15th May - 20th August
APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEPT OCT NOV-MAR
08:55 08.55 08:55 08:55 08:55
12:55 12:55 12:55 12:55 12:55 12:55 12:55 12:55
16:55 16:55 16:55
ADULTS: 47€ / 7.500 ISK
CHILDREN: 7-15 22€ / 3.500 ISK
CHILDREN: 0-6 FREE

Other Tours
Puffin Island Tours Duration:1-1,5 hours
15th May - 20th August Every day
10:00 | 12:00 | 14:00
ADULTS: 3.800 ISK• CHILDREN: 1.900 ISK • CHILDREN: 0-6 FREE
Sea Angling and Grill Duration: 3 hours
May - September Every day
17:00
ADULTS: 10.500 ISK • CHILDREN: 5.000 ISK • CHILDREN: 0-6 FREE
Grapevine’s former poetry columnist collects his work, clears his desk
“To any English speaking literary agent or publisher
reading this I'll say: translate all of it or admit total spiri-
tual defeat!”
Literature | Interview
Hooray For Boobies!
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is surely one of
Iceland’s finest authors/experimental
poets/literary translators. Although
Eiríkur spends most of his time in
Finland (when he’s not travelling the
world, relentlessly marketing his ex-
perimental poetry at fancy confer-
ences, clinking glasses with the glitzy
superstars of modern literature), most
of what he writes is in Icelandic. Aside
from some anthologies Eiríkur edited
and various collaborative projects—
many under the banner of now-de-
funct poetry collective Nýhil, which he
co-founded—he has thus far published
three novels, five books of poetry and
a meditation on copyright and piracy
in Icelandic (with a fourth novel forth-
coming this fall).
Through it all he still somehow found
time to get married, conceive and
raise a child and write dozens of awe-
some poetry columns for Reykjavík
Grapevine—most of which have now
been collected in an omnibus of his
English-language writing. We wrote
him some emails to ask about it.
Hi Eiríkur. We hear you've compiled
in a new book some of the many fine
columns you wrote for us back when
we were younger and more innocent.
Is this true?
It is!
What is it called?
‘Booby, Be Quiet!’

Is this an attempt to boost sales by
passing your work off as pornogra-
phy? Why/why not?
It's an allusion to W.H. Auden's transla-
tion of the Elder Edda: “The ignorant
booby had best be silent / When he moves
among other men, / No one will know what
a nit-wit he is / Until he begins to talk.”
Booby also means fool, but for marketing
reasons I don't tell people that until they've
bought the book.

Where can we get it?
You can get it online—for instance on nor-
ddahl.org (go to the English part of the
site).

SADLY, NO IRON MAIDEN
Did you include that five thousand-
word Iron Maiden live review of yours
we published on a spread back when?
Why/Why not?
I did not. That was an oversight. I am an ig-
norant booby. I will include it in my upcom-
ing nostalgic metal review book—when
I've gone to enough metal concerts. But it
does include my seventeen thousand word
insightful rant on Icelandic literature and
the crisis.
Does the book include all of your
columns that we published? Or just
some? How did you choose?
At around the same time I wrote said Iron
Maiden live review I also wrote a few bad
columns for the Grapevine and got fired.
Later, with a new editor in charge, I was
rehired (the new editor may not have read
my bad columns). I did not include any of
these bad columns, only my excellent col-
umns about poetry. Except the first one,
about the mad poet Tobbi—that one ended
up cannibalized in a larger essay that's
also included.
What else is in there?
Essays and lectures about poetry and
literature written for a foreign audience.
I travel quite a lot to festivals to perform
sound poetry and sometimes they ask me
to talk or contribute an article for some
publication. Most of these have been writ-
ten in English (and then translated to Pol-
ish, Danish, Faroese etc.)—but one was
written in Icelandic and translated to Ger-
man and I translated it to English myself
(fucking personally!) for the book. It's a
book of poetics, aesthetics—about the art
of word. There's stuff in there about sound
poetry, about Nýhil, about politics and lit-
erature—about half of the book is the short
Grapevine columns and the other half is
the longer essays.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO pAY HIM OR
ANYTHING
Can you get it as a DRM(Digital Rights
Management)-free e-book?
You can totally do that—and you can
choose to donate a few euros to me
through Paypal if you like. If you're broke
you can pay me later when you're rich.
Or not. This is not really a moneymak-
ing scheme. I should add though that the
printed book is really pretty and has great
texture! My friends at poEsias (my pub-
lisher) have done a great job. So maybe
you just download the e-book and then
buy a copy of the printed book if you like.
Will you be upset if it gets pirated all
over the place? Can we send a copy to
our friend Einar?
Yes, of course, I would love it if Einar read
the book, I'm sure he'd like it. If you tell
him about the donation thing, that'd be
good too.
You've written about the subject of pi-
racy and copyright quite extensively.
What is your conclusion?
A) Readers should not steal books be-
cause writers and publishers need to eat
too—even when they don't like the books
and are never going to read them again,
they should pay for them (e-books distrib-
uted on a donation scheme, like ‘Booby’,
are an exception—it is the right of writers
and publishers to make these exceptions;
these rights are not for the reader to take).
B) Publishers should not overcharge
for books or lock them up with useless,
expensive, socially restrictive, geographi-
cally absurdist and undemocratic DRM
mechanisms and laws.
C) Information should be free and
it should be the job of government (and
non-government) institutions to make
sure that information can be free—with-
out the people of the information industry
needing to starve or whore themselves
out.

EVIL IS COMING
What are you up to these days?
I am finishing the mother of all holocaust
novels. It is called ‘Illska’ (“Evil”) and is
about a young Lithuanian immigrant in
Iceland, Agnes (Agné) Lukauskas, whose
family comes from a town called Jurbar-
kas on the Kaliningrad border where, in
the summer of 1941, half of the inhabitants
(the non-Jewish) killed the other half of
the inhabitants. Agnes is born and raised
in Iceland, but obsessed with her holo-
caust past.
Cool! When is that due out?
September 15.
How about in English?
As soon as possible! (I don't have an Eng-
lish publisher for it).
Can our foreign readers access any
of your fiction in other languages?
Where? Is there more coming?
My second novel, ‘Eitur fyrir byrjendur’
(“Poison for Beginners”), is available in
Swedish and German (‘Gift för nybörjare’
/ ‘Gift für Anfänger’). There'll certainly be
more coming at some point, or so I hope.
It would be fine for me if my books were
never to be translated again, but horrible
for almost everyone else.
Which Icelandic authors should we be
seeking out and reading? Who, in your
opinion, needs translating the most?
It's hard to name a few. For one thing
we all tend to have the clearest vision of
the literature that is closest to us—so in
nepotistic Iceland I just start naming my
friends. We all do this when asked. And I
could and perhaps should do that—Steinar
Bragi, Ófeigur Sigurðsson, Kristín Eiríks-
dóttir, Hermann Stefánsson, Haukur Már
Helgason. They're all brilliant authors.
But I'd also be forgetting a lot of authors
(both friends and strangers, and certainly
I'd never mention any of my sworn nem-
esi) and maybe it's not about authors but
about books. And then the list could go on
and on.
Specially if we're speaking about Eng-
lish translations—the English book mar-
ket is notoriously disinterested in other
literature than its own, to the extent that
Horace Engdahl (a member of the Swed-
ish Nobel Academy) has suggested that
American authors should not receive No-
bel prizes due to their insularity; that is
to say, by translating very little literature
they are choosing not to participate in
the wider world of literature (these are of
course horrible generalisations—and I am
to an extent putting words in Engdahl’s
mouth—and the same standards would
leave Icelandic literature totally out of the
picture—but let's still say it's 65–85% true).
So to any English speaking literary agent
or publisher reading this I'll say: translate
all of it or admit total spiritual defeat!
HAUKUR S. MAGNúSSON