The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2009, Qupperneq 52

194
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
In the last section of the book, entitled
"Language and Ideas," you include "The
Icelandic Language," attributed to William
Jon Holm, which you describe as "A poem
in Icelandic." Bill Holm was not an
Icelander, nor did he, to my knowledge,
ever write a poem in Icelandic—he knew
some of the language, but was not a master
of it. He was, like me, an American of
100% Icelandic ancestry, a Minnesotan
who never visited Iceland or learned the
language at all until he was an adult. Also,
he wrote as Bill Holm, not William Jon
Holm.
He wrote a poem called "The Icelandic
Language," but in English, and included it
in The Dead Get By With Everything, a
collection of poetry published in 1991 by
Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis. It is
close to the one you have, but not the same,
and I have a suspicion that what you used
is an English translation from the Icelandic
version, which was itself a translation from
English (his work is widely translated and
published in Iceland), by someone who did
not know of the poem's American origin.
Here is the version in The Dead Get By
With Everything:
The Icelandic Language
In this language, no industrial revolu-
tion:
no pasteurized milk, no oxygen, no
telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.
In this language, no flush toilet; you
stumble
Through dark and rain with a handful
of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.
But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the
lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black
rocks.
The woman with marble hands whis-
pers
this language to you in your sleep;
faces
come to the window and sing rhymes;
old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam
inside pancakes.
In this language you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts
its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at
last.
Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening conso-
nants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea
moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth. *
Bill published a fair number of books
of poetry and essays. The last was The
Windows of Brimnes, published in 2007,
also by Milkweed Editions. Brimnes is a
small house he owned in Hofsos, a fishing
village in the north, on the Skagafjord,
about 50 miles south of the Arctic Circle. I
highly recommend this book of essays. For
a number of years he conducted writing
workshops at Hofsos. I had the pleasure of
participating in one of these the first week
in June, last year. As it turned out, it was
the last. He died unexpectedly last
February. I am happy that, in the fall of
2008, in the last year of his life, he received
the McKnight Foundation award of
$50,000 as Minnesota's Distinguished
Artist for 2008.
- Henry Bjornsson
Oval Books reply, July 31, 2009
Dear Mr Bjornsson
Thank you very much indeed for your
comments.
I am fascinated by your information
and most grateful to you for taking the
trouble to write at length about Bill Holm's
poem. I have to say that he did not mention
that he was American when we spoke. I