Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an award-winning Icelandic writer and translator based in Ísafjörður, Iceland. Long noted as an experimental poet, he has become one of Iceland’s foremost prose writers, and has translated over a dozen books into Icelandic. His poem “A poem about the art of standing in a gallery,” in Icelandic and his own English translation, appears in the Spring 2020 edition of Newfound Journal.
KB Thors: Can you tell us about where you’re from, places you’ve worked, and where you’re based now?
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: I’m from Ísafjörður, northwest of Iceland. It’s a town of 2,700 people and it takes about five hours to drive to a town that’s bigger than that. I live there, most of the time, but I spent about a decade away–mostly Berlin and Helsinki, but also different places in the Nordic countries–and even since I’ve moved back, I’ve spent serious time in Vietnam, Honduras and Sweden. Ísafjörður is the best–lively, cultural, with a fabulous movie theatre, beautiful library–but everything else is rather poorly placed in relation to it.
KB Thors: Your books have been translated into German, French, Danish, Greek, Swedish, English, Spanish, and Croatian, with editions in Macedonia and the Ukraine forthcoming. Your novel “Illska” (Evil, 2012), translated into French by Eric Boury and published in France as “Illska: Le Mal” in 2015, was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis Étranger and Prix Meilleur Livre Étranger, and received the Transfuge award for best Nordic fiction. How have you found the process of your work being translated by another person? Are there noticeable differences in how it has been received across languages and readerships?
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Absolutely. Not only does the success vary (the French absolutely loved “Illska,” the Danes couldn’t have cared less) but what it is that people pick up about it and put into focus is different. Some places will see it as a reckoning with history and other places will see it as a portrait of the present. Most will probably recognize that it is both, but the emphasis will be different. I’ve seen reviewers from different countries draw absolutely opposite conclusions about some of the “messages” of the book. For instance whether or not the Holocaust can or should be compared to anything else. The book discusses it but doesn’t say. People do read themselves into books a lot, their preconceptions, and will see their own arguments more clearly than the counterarguments. And then they blame the book for their own ideas.
Another difference is of course the grasp I have on the different languages. I can read Swedish with ease, most Danish, and I have some German and some French. But Greek or Ukrainian – not only can I not read the translation at all, but I’ve given up on google-translating the reviews (also because I have better things to do than obsess).
As for being translated by different people, it’s always a new experience. Sometimes I never hear from the translators at all (which I guess would constitute a re-enactment of the same experience) but when I’m involved it’s been anywhere from a very intense professional cooperation, to friendly relaxed communication, to making a friend for life.
KB Thors: Your translations into Icelandic vary in subject and genre from Anthony Bozza’s book “Eminem” to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry to Lucy Pebble’s play “ENRON.” In 2008 you were awarded the Icelandic Translators Award for your translation of Jonathan Lethem’s tourettic novel, “Motherless Brooklyn.” What compels you to take on a translation project? What do these works have in common?
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Not much. In 2007 I “quit my day job” which meant for a few years I would just take any writing job given. I’d thought that since I’d translated Ginsberg and Lethem I could have some say in what I’d translate from then on, that I’d get more interesting projects, but the marketplace apparently wanted transient, forgettable fun. Which is fine for plowing through on a lazy Sunday but reading crime-fiction at the speed at which one translates is the pits. Lots of bad books were translated in this time. Some of those projects were fulfilling and provided an opportunity to learn new things, such as the structure and style of thrillers and crime fiction, or the floral musings of the more kitschy grown-up literature. Others were just mind-numbingly stupid – racist even – and resulted in me giving up translating for a few years as I’d started to find the process more than a little dissatisfying. For a while that meant I was even poorer than before but eventually things started to even out. And when I didn’t feel I was doing it just for the cash I felt I could start translating again. “ENRON” was actually the first thing I translated after that break.
If I never needed money, I’d probably only translate poetry. Not because poetry is so much better than prose but because as a translation practice, I so thoroughly enjoy it. It’s just crazier – there’s more more there.
KB Thors: “A poem about the art of standing in a gallery,” your poem and self-translation in Newfound’s Spring 2020 issue, is from your book” Óratorrek: Ljóð um samfélagsleg málefni” (2017). What made you decide to translate selections from Óratorrek yourself?
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: I’ve just always been doing it. When I was starting out as a poet, I was living abroad a lot. And I would want to participate in literary scenes. I was very much interested in the stage as a place for poetry (or just the “place” in poetry itself – the “room” and the “audience” and transgressions of both). And that meant I needed to have my poems in English – or “English as a second language”, what the late great Finnish poet, Leevi Lehto, called “barbaric English – the largest language in the world, with little literature to speak of”. Usually I’d know that a text was about to be ready by the fact that I’d get the urge to translate it. Later I would use translation as a tool of composition – Hnefi eða vitstola orð (Fist or words bereft of sense) was composed in these circular translations between Icelandic, Swedish and English, looking for interesting deformations in the gaps.
KB Thors: How does the translation process differ when the material is your own writing?
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Well I get to make all the changes I want, of course. And when translating unpublished poetry (and even when translating published poetry) I can retrofit those changes to the “original.” It’s more akin to actually just writing.
But then my English is what my English is. I’m not a native speaker and it’s not perfect. While looking for a publisher for these translations I’ve emphasized that they probably need a good native editor and, in some cases, probably a re-translation. In any case I don’t feel as an authority, as I would in Icelandic. If you say the language of a poem I write in Icelandic is shit, I can tell you it’s not. I know the tool I’m using and what it does is what I want it to do (mostly). In English I’m a bit more lost. If you tell me I’m shit, I’ll just apologize and move on.
KB Thors: “I can’t help but read “A poem about the art of standing in a gallery” as more than a poem and translation thereof. For the record, I think this poem in your English is a great read, in general and translation-wise. There’s a driving directness to it, though the language is nuanced. Given your formal dexterity and penchant for experimenting, how do you view an exercise like self-translation?
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: All of the poems in Óratorrek were written for an occasion. Well, the first one, which does stick out a bit, “A Poem for My Daughter” just came about as a Facebook-rant when I was feeling particularly irritated (and a bit self-righteous, I guess). But in it I discovered a rhetorical contra-sensical voice that I felt like exploring. And I felt it could be a vehicle through all sorts of language, from love to war to sex to art. A way of traversing through political thought without engaging in its rigid inanity, while still portraying the rigid inanities and, at least at times, sincerely engaging in political thought.
As a form these pieces are somewhere between being poems and an essays or speeches. For a few years anytime anybody would ask me to write a poem or an essay or a speech I’d suggest I do one of these pieces. “A Poem About the Art of Standing in a Gallery” was originally written in English and performed in a gallery in Sweden, at an exhibition of watercolors from the Guerlain Foundation collection. Hence the perfume allusions and references to actual work in the collection. I was a part of the exhibition for a few hours when they were doing tours. I would stand in a corner facing the wall reading it over and over again, quite loudly. It was a very strange experience for me. People are so quiet in galleries. I was never sure if there was one person or fifty or no one in the room. And then slowly my voice was giving in also. Which is fun and something that I’ve always worked with in reading, that breaking point, be it from screaming or speaking fast or even whispering or just cracking.
I tend to like poems that are not quite poems also. Poems that could be mistaken for something else. And I categorically don’t subscribe to the whole “most meaning in the fewest words” definition of poetry.
KB Thors: What are you working on these days?
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Translating poetry! I just finished a new novel – it’s literally being distributed tomorrow. So I’ve decided I will now finish three poetry translation projects. Hopefully. At least one of them. First one is an anthology. I’ve been translating poetry for 20 years now and I did an anthology about 10 years ago, but it was published print-on-demand through Finland and the logistics of distributing it ended up being a nightmare so very few people saw it. But I have about a thousand pages worth of poetry translations – contemporary and 20th century, mostly – that I need to sort through and organize and edit and throw away and see what’ll fit where etc. Second is translating “Tender Buttons” (I’m about a third in) and lastly translating Inger Christensen’s “Alphabet,” I’m also about a third into that.
K.B. Thors is a poet, educator, and translator from Treaty 7 land in rural Alberta, Canada. Her first book, “Vulgar Mechanics” is out now from Coach House Books. Her translation of “Stormwarning” by Icelandic poet Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir was nominated for the PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation and won the American Scandinavian Foundation’s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize. She is also the Spanish-English translator of Soledad Marambio’s “Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else.” Proud to be Newfound’s Translation Editor, she is also the 2020 CBC/QWF Montréal Writer in Residence.