The Icelandic connection - 01.09.2010, Page 39

Vo!. 63 #2
ICELANDIC CONNECTION
89
her translator's notes, Jakobson points out
that Bjarnason developed the narrative
structure for the work in 1895 some twen-
ty years after he left Iceland as a young
boy, about the very age of Eirfkur when
he begins to tell his story.
What is so fascinating about
Bjarnason's novel is the first-hand
account we gain on the challenges and
struggles Icelanders faced in leaving their
ancestral home, and often arriving penni-
less, and speechless, in a strange new
world. For English speaking Icelandic
descendants, discovering this important
cultural work from the nineteenth century
has involved a frustrating, century-long
wait for the English translation to arrive.
When Bjarnason’s Icelandic language
novel was first published it was deserved-
ly popular among the Icelandic settlers
for its ability to capture their recent life-
altering experiences. Borga Jakobson's
translation now provides the descendants
of those settlers an accurate glimpse into
the world they inhabited and the chal-
lenge of their daily lives.
Writing some twenty years after
Bjarnason, Laura Goodman Salverson
gave the English speaking world the first
fictional glimpse of the Icelandic immi-
grant's experience in her novel, The
Viking Heart (1923). Born in North
America, Salverson's work has the feel of
anecdotes and stories passed down to the
next generation, about the journey to
America and the subsequent struggles to
survive that were told to her and that she
had woven into a romance novel.
Bjarnason's novel, which he insisted
was fiction and not a true accounting of
events, nonetheless, conveys the feel of a
genuine first hand recounting. And while
the story of young Eirfkur Hansson's jour-
ney to America and his years growing up
there may be a fictional account, the
sense that the story flows from real-life
events is inescapable.
The novel opens with this simple
confession: "Since I am going to tell a
story about my life, this story begins in
Iceland. Actually, I can't tell you very
much about Iceland because I was only
seven years old when I left my country..."
What follows is a masterful assemblage
of images from his Icelandic childhood,
glimpses of his amma and afi who are
raising him, the farm they own, precise
details of the animals, streams, fields and
near-by neighbors whose eccentricities
capture the attention of this young
observer. Recounted through the hazy
gauze of childhood memory, as these
delightful memories unfold, new events,
more difficult for our child-narrator to
understand, break into his reverie. When
a poor family spends a Christmas Eve, he
senses the pain they carry due to their
relentless poverty. The following spring
the sky darkens during the day as vol-
canic ash slowly buries the farm. What
becomes burnished into young Eirfkur's
memory of that day was a single word he
overheard an adult utter “Doomsday.”
This last event provoked the most
disturbing fact of Eirfkur's account: Afi
and Amma decided to leave this home
and move to the "Wonderland" called
America. The family prepared to make
the journey by disposing of all non-essen-
tial possessions. They then left home by
horseback on trails crossing rivers to
Sey5isfjor5 where a boat would take
them to Liverpool. From there they
boarded a larger ship and crossed the
Atlantic Ocean for America.
Bjarnason admired the work of the
Victorian writers, especially Charles
Dickens. Despite arriving on North
American soil, Eirfkur's life experiences
take on new challenges that most of