Edited by Anni Sumari & Nicolai Stochholm
Slope Editions 2006
Reviewed by Jim Wood
Tröllasögurnar eru komnar
Most people tend to be at least a little bit curious about cultures and societies separate from their own. Seeing strange and fantastic cities and landscapes, where they are neither strange nor fantastic to those that inhabit them, is probably one of the primary reasons for the siren song of travel abroad, summoning us to spend time and money visiting places that other people see as normal and unremarkable. These places are interesting to us, no doubt, because they developed on a trajectory of their own, with seemingly little or no concern for the development of the society/city/landscape that could be appropriately characterized as our comfort zone.
The same could be said for the exploration of foreign literary traditions, except that sometimes we fail to acknowledge the independence of literary development, filtering whatever we encounter through the traditions we are familiar with. We judge other worlds on our own terms, as it were. To some extant, this is inevitable: it is virtually impossible to step out of your own eyes.
This is just one of the problems we invariably encounter when we attempt to engage an unfamiliar literature. We also face problems of translation and selection. That is, when the language needs to be translated into our own, we may wonder how much content and connotation to attribute to the original writer, and how much to the translator. In addition we may wonder how representative the selection we choose is of the literary tradition it came from. Again, these problems are to some extant incircumscribable, but should be kept in mind.
The Other Side of Landscape, in its title, implicitly addresses the motivation for assembling and/or reading a small anthology of Nordic poetry: a taste of something which may seem foreign or fantastic. Indeed, such a volume couldn’t hope to (and apparently never claims to) give more than a taste. An attempt at anything more would belittle the literary tradition at hand.
As far as selection, the book takes a delightful approach, going for geographic and linguistic breadth over depth. Five Nordic lands are represented: Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The first four speak North Germanic languages which are more or less related (i.e. they have all evolved to varying degrees from a single common ancestor language), and the last is a linguistic isolate: Finnish is unrelated to any other European language (save perhaps Hungarian and Estonian), and some scholars think it is a leftover from the languages spoken in ancient Europe before the Indo-European tribes moved in and, basically, took over. The only disappointing aspects of the editors’ selection strategy are (1) no representation from the Faeroe Islands, which have a very rich literary tradition and produce more books per capita than any other country in the world and (2) the choice of breadth over depth has the obvious consequences of under-representation for each land (e.g. there are only two Icelandic poets).
The choices they did make lend themselves nicely to satiating the appetite of those who want to explicitly explore another land: “I love Denmark, occupied as it is by ghosts/ with painted human forms/ and crows that sing Carl Nielsen.” We also get to encounter lines and images that we would be less likely to find in our own tradition, appealing to our sense of the fantastic: “The snow never melts/ in the ears of trolls/ that have turned to stone/ at dawn on the moors.” Trolls, for example, have a much more prominent place in the cultural and literary inheritance of Iceland, than they do in many other places. We get to imagine wild, jagged, snowy rocks on the empty moors, and the reference to trolls reminds us that we really aren’t in Kansas. At the same time, the poems in this collection are consistently human in a way that requires no reference to any place outside of our own: “I wash my face, earlier this year/ I drained the well and collected spiders/ in huge jam jars.” Doubtless, spiders have connotations that cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. Some evolutionary psychologists have even proposed that humans are genetically programmed to be afraid of them, and let’s face it: I don’t care what language you speak, they’re downright creepy.
The problem of translation comes up now and again. For one thing, the reader is bound to wonder whether the choice of yearn in “like the darkness I yearn into you” faithfully represents an equally corny word in Norwegian, or if the translator didn’t do justice to some nicely descriptive word in the original. Similarly, take the following line: “for they know not/ what they are missing.” The problem here is that in Icelandic know not is the ordinary, vanilla-flavored way to say didn’t know. When we translate word-for-word, we end up with an English sentence which, while grammatical, has an extremely archaic or formal flavor. Again, it is possible that there was some element of archaism in the original, and the translator did a brilliant job of carrying that over, but it is more likely that something (in this case, ordinariness) was lost in translation. Either way, it is distracting to the reader and can detract from the poem itself to have to consider these things. Some of these problems, I have to emphasize, are intrinsic to translation and partially unavoidable.
One way to approach the issue, at least the most natural way, is to take it as it is: an object in space-time, the result of a variety of collaborators, with no reference to its origins embedded in another language and another cultural context. The book in my hand can be its own result, judged on its own terms as an object. The question isn’t, “What would this have done for me had I been a native Swedish speaker reading this in Sweden,” but rather, “What does this collection of English poems do for me now, as it is and as it stands.” The danger here, though, is that to judge it without keeping its origins in mind (not to say that you have to constantly dwell on them) will necessarily result in an interpretation clouded by your previous literary experiences. There is no such thing as judging it on its own terms, because you will unavoidably judge it on your own terms. Failing to acknowledge this will only cause the worst kind of misunderstanding: the kind that doesn’t recognize itself.
And when judging these poems on their own terms, you’ll likely find consistency across the board—not necessarily greatness, but consistency. The title of the poem alone reveals the heavy-handedness of Sweden’s Jörgen Lind in “A Theory of Evolution (The United States of Amnesia)” (as do sentiments like “We force ourselves, squeeze ourselves…”). Plenty of strong poetry to go around though; Ann Sumari’s touch in “Fete” is comparatively elegant: “we lose our way in the unobstructed darkness— / into the lime white painted darkness.” However “English” the poems have become, some cultural elements become undeniable, unavoidable, and quite satisfying; here Didda’s Icelandic is translated into English, but the poet’s use of the Danish for “I love you” remains:
And I sat there with them,
sang a song and there was whispering
of “jeg elsker dig” by many different voices.
Given the problems of reading translated poems, of unfamiliarity with the literary tradition, and of the unavoidable limitations of representativeness, how do we, or should we, encounter a collection such as this? With celebration. Celebration for what it is, with blatant recognition of the intrinsic difficulties as such. The reason is because although we never see the “other side” the way the inhabitants of the “other side” do, it broadens our view and delights our spirit to flirt with different versions of ourselves. It is a curious, new flavor of the human perspective. In reality, we are a world of humans, and any sense of “them and us” is just a natural imposition of human cognition: discreteness where there is only spectra. If we want to become scholars of Nordic literature, the applications of this book are obviously supplementary to a whole library of works. Otherwise, we do well to delight ourselves in exploring something that is perhaps a bit outside our comfort zone; we may not, in fact, certainly won’t, understand all of it, but we do get a chance to see new things, described by other eyes, and translated from other languages, a refreshing taste of variety within the same human theme.
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