Orð og tunga - 26.04.2018, Page 62

Kendra Willson: Splitting the atom 51
yfirleitt til. Það langar mig að vita. (Stefán Hörður Grímsson
2000:71)
[Ether
You who are not here, why should it be clear to me that you
are not here? I throw out this question because I fi nd it strange
that I, who notice very poorly what is here, should observe
what is not here. I want to know where you are, how you
are feeling, whether you are smiling or not, whether you are
awake or whether you are asleep, and how you are if you
wake and how you are if you sleep, and whether you exist at
all. That’s what I want to know. (Translation by Sigurður A.
Magnússon 1982:71)]
The poem appears at fi rst glance to contain litt le imagery besides a
vague image of an absent person. Gunnlaugur Ástgeirsson says that
the poem is “… ekki myndrænt í eiginlegri merkingu þess orðs, nema
segja megi að brugðið sé upp mynd af engu, því sem ekki er hér held-
ur einhversstaðar annarsstaðar” (1980:365) [not visual in the true
meaning of the word, unless one could say that it conjures up an im-
age of nothing, that which is not here but somewhere else]. The poem
constructs this “image of nothing” in part by avoiding conventionally
poetic language or imagery. Nonetheless, the absent person or per-
sonifi ed abstraction is described using vivid, active verbs. Although
it reads like a personal love poem, the text carefully avoids any in-
dication of gender in the “you” and the abstract title invites a more
philosophical interpretation. In the Icelandic poem, the rhythm and
word order echo the content of the poem and hence the grammatical
structure of the poem itself functions as subtle imagery. For instance,
the fact that þú ‘you’, the focus of the poem, appears only in subor-
dinate clauses and in direct address rather than as an argument in a
main clause emphasizes the absence and distance.
The poems of the atom poets vary greatly in their formal techniques,
imagery and tone and it is difficult to find a single poem to represent
the movement. However, the actual substance of the poems is not the
only factor shaping the popular image of the atom poets.
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