The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Síða 12

122
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SPRING/SUMMER 1995
might destroy the unity which the transla-
tor is trying to create by introducing a false
voice into his translation. When one of my
earlier novels was translated, the translator
intervened too much and tried to rewrite
the book in an academic style, which to my
mind didn’t work. If the translation were
into Spanish or French, I could perhaps
intervene. I like translating. The words are
like a pliable material to me that I can form.
You translate a word or an image or even
whole sentences into another world, and
then you try to make them sound as close
to the original as you possibly can. It is very
creative.
Evelyn: Your latest book is very Icelan-
dic even though some of the characters go
to the Continent. How do you think that
your translator will be able make the Ice-
landic world you create clear to someone
who is not an Icelander?
Alfrun: I have no idea.Jcelandic novels
have a difficult time travelling abroad. Po-
etry seems to do better. But I haven’t
thought much about it because I write pri-
marily for Icelanders — it used to be a tra-
dition in Iceland that most Icelanders read
books and talked about them, no matter
who they were. Unfortunately, that’s not the
case anymore because there is a greater
distinction between the classes now than
in my youth. Like other youngsters, I used
to work during summers to earn some
money and there I met people who had
read Dostoyevski and Tolstoy for example.
Now they no longer do. The vocabulary
and the pronunciation, too, which all Ice-
landers used tended to be the same then.
Of course, even then there were class dif-
ferences; some people had money, others
didn’t, but access to culture was open and
people were interested in culture. In those
days it was impossible to distinguish be-
tween a wealthy and a poor man just by talk-
ing to him.

c*
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