The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1963, Side 25

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
23
J. Oleson, who has an historical article
written in English prose.
My second emotion as I look over
this venerable jury of twelve Icelandic
poets—six in their eighties, five in
their seventies and one in his high
sixties—is a sense of deep regret that
another decade or so will see their
pens laid down, their voices silent,
their chapter closed. They are the last
witnesses to an epoch of Icelandic
poetry abroad, and they have no suc-
cessors. They are stately icebergs float-
ing down from the glittering seas of an
earlier day but they are doomed to
melt in the Gulf Stream of North Am-
erican English.
One sign of forced adaptation to a
changing era has been the consoli-
dation of the Winnipeg weeklies,
Heimskringla and Logberg, into a
single periodical, for whose precarious
survival all its friends have anxiously
rallied. Adjustment of a different kind
came twenty years ago with the far-
sighted foundation of an English-lan-
guage quarterly, The Icelandic Can-
adian. In 1962, moreover, the Icelandic
National League, at its annual con-
vention in Winnipeg, passed a unan-
imous resolution that the editors of
the Timarit be authorized to include
in it an English section that would be
devoted primarily to Icelandic history,
language and literature. The 1963
Timarit, in the 44th year of that ad-
mirable publication, has therefore be-
come officially bilingual. Unless the
younger generation, however, which
now uses English as its primary lan-
guage, maintains also such a secondary
competence in Icelandic as to be able,
almost as a Tour de force, to write
creatively in it, then the Icelandic
poetry, drama and fiction that have
adorned the Timarit for four decades
will disappear from its pages as soon as
the primordial generation of poets dies
out.
And what shall we say of the chief
characteristics of the poetry of these
twelve venerable survivors and of the
twenty-four other Icelandic-American
poets, now dead, who are listed by Dr.
Richard Beck in the last chapter of his
History of Icelandic Poets, 1800-1940
(Ithaca, Cornell University Press,
1950. They are a projection “West of
the ocean” of the Icelandic poetic tra-
dition; and most of them have perpetu-
ated it not as erudite men of letters
but as farmers, cobblers, schoolteachers,
fishermen, journalists and others of
proud but simple occupation who have
regarded poetry as natural community
activity. Their verse shows the merits
and the defects of such an origin.
Perhaps the most obvious category
of poem is one written to honour a
wedding, a birthday (especially the
60th, 70th or 80th) or a golden
wedding or to express communal or
personal grief over a death. Of the
same sort are tributes to members of
the community who are in the news
because of some achievement. The
weekly newspaper has a constant
stream of such verses but it rarely rises
to the rank of real poetry. And yet
this literary type did not go wholly un-
appreciated. An example of the better
sort is Thorsteinn Th. Thorsteinsson’s
tribute to Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
When I published an English transla-
tion of this in my Canadian Overtones
(1935), Vilhjalmur jovially sent me a
copy of his own latest book, On the
Standardization of Error as “grouncl-
bait”, and begged for a copy of my
book as a quid pro quo.
A second common type of poem
among the Canadian Icelanders is the
brief epigram, usually four lines in
length but carrying a sting in its tail.
Its use is comparable to that of the