Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.03.2018, Blaðsíða 42

Books 42The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 04 — 2018
An Elegy For A
Murdered Woman
Gerður Kristný’s ‘Drápa’ published in the UK
Words: Björn Halldórsson Photo: Art Bicnick
This month, UK based Arc Publi-
cation will be publishing Drápa,
Icelandic author and poet Gerður
Kristný’s second book to appear in
English. The book is
a novel-in-verse that
takes the form of a
“drápa”—a verse form
often found in Viking
Age skaldic poetry.
Although the form
was originally used
for laudatory poems that hon-
oured kings, lords and gods, and
told of their exploits and might,
Gerður uses the form to retell the
tragic story of a young woman
who is lost and finally murdered
in downtown Reykjavík. Fittingly,
perhaps, as the book’s title offers
up Gerður’s usual aptitude for
wordplay with a second mean-
ing derived from the Icelandic
word “dráp” (“killing,” in English).
True-crime poetry
“The lives of people who find
themselves on the outskirts of
society have fascinated me for a
long time,” the author says. “I was
a reporter for ten years and would
often take trips out to Litla-Hraun
(Iceland’s largest prison) to inter-
view the prisoners.”
“One time, a prisoner who had
just been released from isolation
confessed to a murder during one
of my interviews,” she continues.
“The police couldn’t get a confes-
sion out of him, and then had to
read about it in the magazine.
As a journalist, I also often had
to read court documents and be-
came enthralled with the grandi-
ose language they use. It inspired
me during the writing of Drápa—
along with various other sources,
such as PJ Harvey lyrics, ‘Kill Bill,’
‘Hansel and Gretel’ and so on.”
In fact, the story told in Drápa
is based on real events that Gerður
came across in her work as a jour-
nalist writing about crime. “There
was a young woman whowas mur-
dered by her husband in their
attic apartment in downtown
Reykjavík,” Gerður explains. “I
interviewed him af-
ter he’d completed his
sentence. At the time,
he was still living in
the same attic apart-
ment. Eventually, he
too was murdered
there, many years
later. I couldn’t get this sorry story
out of my head, so I wrote ‘Drápa.’
There’s a great tradition for elegies
in Icelandic poetry, and this is my
elegy for the murdered woman.”
The plasticity of the
poetic form
Despite being set in different
worlds and thousands of years
apart, Drápa has much in common
with ‘Bloodhoof,’ Gerður’s previ-
ous publication with Arc Publish-
ing. There she gave a voice to the
giantess Gerður Gymisdóttir—
the author’s namesake who is ab-
ducted and sold to the Asgardian
god Freyr and whose story is told
in the Poetic Edda.
“For a while, I was inspired by
Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Penelo-
piad’ and thought
that Gerður’s story
was best suited for
a novella,” Gerður
admits. “But when I
tried my hand at retelling the old
legend in narrative verse I soon
discovered that the poetic form
can contain anything.”
The stories of lost and
abandoned women
The two books are united by their
sparse yet traditional poetic form
and share a translator in Rory Mc-
Turk, but the subject of women
being disregarded by society and
abused by those closest to them is
a major theme for both books.
“Gerður Gymisdóttir’s story is
a clear case of human trafficking,”
Gerður explains. “In Drápa, I com-
bine my work as a journalist with
my work as a poet to write about
people who rarely get their stories
told. The lives of these women are
by no means unique. People are
sold into slavery and sent from
one country to another all over the
world, and we hear new stories of
women being murdered every day.”
Evil knows and sees evil
When it came to finding a narra-
tor—someone able to gaze into the
darkest corners of the city and give
an unflinching yet tender account
of events—Gerður discovered that
even her long stint interviewing
victims and violent perpetrators
was not enough for the role.
“I have never been able to find a
proper explanation for what feeds
the evil in this world,” she rumi-
nates. “You can’t just put it down
to poor treatment and lack of so-
cial services—not when you con-
sider the amount of people who
have suffered great hardships but
then go on to lead relatively good
and decent lives. So, I decided to
recruit the devil as my narrator.
He spreads his wings and wanders
through Reykjavík, telling the
murdered woman’s story.”
Old gods and new
The devil is not the only deity in
the book. God also puts in an ap-
pearance, although he offers mere
indifference and is marked by a
blemish familiar to those who
know a little of the
old Asgardian gods.
“The idea of
God being a one-
eyed deity came to
me during a poetry festival in Ni-
caragua,” says Gerður. “I was sit-
ting in a plaza listening to one poet
after another read their poetry in
various languages, and I happened
to glance up at the sky and saw
that it was a full moon. I thought
of Odin, the one-eyed god of the
Vikings, and decided to impose his
blindness on the Christian God. It
helped me explain why we humans
get away with inflicting so much
misery around us here on earth.
God just can’t see us properly.”
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Author Gerður Kristný surveying the scene
“The poetic
form can
contain any-
thing.”
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