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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.

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Today I want to share our process of making chapbooks that approach novella-length page counts, which we make for winners of our Newfound Prose Prize. Whether you’re a curious writer or a budding press, I hope you enjoy this look into our work.
 

Challenges

A prose chapbook presents immediate challenges. To bind 40-70 pages—double the size of our poetry standard—folding and stitching the pages would appear bulky and amateurish. To even consider hand-binding a work of that volume is a little nuts. Additionally, we need to publish titles in runs of 100 or 200. So, performing an elaborate binding method isn’t reasonable time-wise. Exactly for these reasons, presses send books out to be perfect bound. We stubbornly resisted the idea of a mass market look. Thankfully, after we brainstormed and did some R&D, a solution was born.

Our prose chapbooks include a spine to keep them prose-y. We also went with simple stab stitch to keep the spine its principal design element.

We decided on a Japanese stab stitch method for binding. Which is all well and good until you consider how you’re going to put holes through a stack of paper quickly and perfectly aligned.

We fooled with drill methods recommended by various presses. We found drilling paper to be a messy process. The paper bunches, adding to the thickness, and we couldn’t make accurate or quick holes.

The solution? A needles press, or what Winking Cat calls a “home-made version of the old Rossback Piercer machine.” It doesn’t punch out paper, but slices through a surprising amount of pages in an effortless pull of the lever.

So, step one of making a prose chapbook is…
 

1) Build a Needle Press
What you will need:

• Arbor press: PHASE II Heavy-Duty Bench Top Arbor Press, 1/2 Ton
• Needle: Organ titanium 7X3 794 DYX3 industrial sewing needles (140/22)
• Bit: Quick Change Chuck For Dremel 4486 multi-function tool-9/32-40 grinder
• Base: Cork, wood, or any surface you feel comfortable working on

The entire machine cost us ~$70 to build, including shipping. Be sure to find an arbor press that already has a hole drilled in the ram (the thing that goes up and down). Otherwise, you’ll need to go to a shop that can bore the hole for you. The rest is easy to assemble. The raised base upon which you do your punching should have a hole in the center to keep the needle running cleanly through your paper, so as not to dull the point. Ours is cheaply made out of stacked cork board and some very classy duct tape.

Questions? Comment below.

2) Punch Interior
What you will need:

• Two binder clips
• Hole guide
• Chapbook interior pages

Punching holes is easy on the needle press. Simply binder clip your hole guide onto your interior pages and punch. The extra thick sewing needle makes a hole big enough to pass 4-ply linen thread twice through.

Make the reusable hole guide on a piece of card stock that fits the size of your chapbook. You’ll reuse the same guide for punching the cover holes.
 

3) Score & Punch Covers
What you will need:

• Chapbook covers
• Hole guide
• Japanese screw punch
• Scorer: See below

Hand-made books are amazing because of the range of inks, papers and designs at your disposal to make the physical book as special as the content. We’ve used various printers and printing methods for covers, including screen printing, color laser, letterpress, and risograph. There are positives and negatives to each method, but really the decision will come down to budget and what best suits the design. Whatever method you use, once the covers are cut to fit the book’s dimensions, they must be scored, creased and punched.

Cover stock needs to be scored to ensure a clean crease without cracking. For poetry chapbooks, an easy one crease can be run quickly with a bone folder and ruler on a cutting mat. For the prose chapbook with a spine, however, each cover needs to scores.

If attempting to score 100+ covers by hand accurately is a feat beyond your patience, there are easier solutions. For our first prose chapbook, we worked with a local printer to score the covers. Recently, we purchased a manual scoring machine (MBM GoCrease 3000) to do the work in-house. You can score hundreds of covers with a manual scorer in no time. Just set your guides and go. Electric scoring machines are much pricier, but faster.

Next, if you’re binding with a stab-stitch, you’ll need to punch holes in your covers with your guide and a screw punch tool. We use the AITOH screw punch with a 1 mm bit. I don’t recommend using the needle press on the covers. You want your covers to look as slick as possible, and the needle press will leave them pretty jagged.
 

4) Bind
What you will need:

• Punched covers and interiors
• Thread: 4-ply waxed linen thread
• Bookbinding needle
• Scissors
• Ruler or dull blade

Once you’ve got your holes punched through interiors and covers, it’s time to bind. Binding is the most labor intensive part of the bookmaking process, but it’s also the most fun.

There are numerous ways to thread your pages together. For our prose chapbooks, we use a single, 28 inch length of the linen thread. Due to the spine, we didn’t want any thread to wrap around the cover, as in many typical Japanese stab stitch designs. We came up with a minimal design of three arches, what we’re calling our Newfound signature binding. Though simple on the outside, the thread lattices the interior quite a bit for integrity. Once double knotted in the center bottom of the book, the thread ends are clipped to 1 inch and tucked down into the spine with the ruler or dull blade.

Whatever your style, aim for structural integrity and aesthetic in line and color.
 

5) Trim & Finish
What you will need:

• Stack cutter
• Eraser

Last but not least, you’ll likely have to clean your edges with trimming. We use a Triumph MBM 4300 stack cutter. It’s nearly impossible to punch and bind the chapbook to an exact fit within the cover, so cleaning the edges allows you to create beautiful books without the pressure of needing to be a chapbook god.
 

Questions?
Have a question about our prose chapbooks, gear, or process? Comment here or write us anytime at info [at] newfound [dot] org. We are happy to give back to the literary community that has been so kind to us.
 
Want to see your prose work in a beautiful chapbook edition? See our Newfound Prose Prize guidelines.

Thank you again for supporting our efforts to bring important books into the world.

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Nate Pritts’ collection of poetry, “Post Human” (A-Minor Press, 2015), explores the terrain of living on the edge of what it means to be human. “Post Human” is divided into four sections with verses connected in one form or the other, whether thematically or in style.

The first section, “Pattern Exhaustion,” covers everyday life and the mundane. The narrator of the first section documents and archives minutia in various forms. This section is propelled forward by a sense of ennui while still making an effort to note small quirky habits and observations such as:

“I have learned that rain is easier
to deal with when it ruins you
completely.”

“I spend forty minutes
imagining what it would be like
to stand in the rain

but never consider going outside.
I write a note

to myself so I won’t forget
certain key data.”

“I check my email
for a message from you

twenty-three times

during a typical workday.
I’m too surly

& depressed about everything
about even my shirt.”

The section reads like a lover reliving old memories and patterns, as if mourning a loved one. Our habits may help us continue living during grief, and yet, so can breaking out of old patterns. Sometimes the way to keep living after a tragedy is to radically alter the network of relationships with everything around us. By delving into this conundrum we reach one of the limits of thinking that underlies the divide between the human and the post-human.

“Everything a pattern that can be
discerned                      or else
everything a pattern
because we say so.”

The above concern of the limits of human perception/language, a key concern in much of the philosophical discussion around ‘post-human’, is revisited later in the collection again.

In the second section, “No Filter,” we first encounter the narrator’s cynicism with respect to technology:

“Every person that I ever loved
Is just a trace on the screen today
Just a ghost in my soul
So I need to know
do I feel what I feel
When the machine tells me to?

When can I believe in myself?

Help me believe in myself”

Here the narrator laments the lack of a belief-system while at the same time wondering if feelings do indeed travel across the technological network.

“Dark mornings
abound            crowd the season.
You can’t distinguish

the noise of wind
the rilled air against leaves
from within the sinister engines
of the rain.
I am recording
the final experiences of a human
on this planet                   entangled
with nature.”

The narrator remains ambivalent about man’s relationship with nature and machines in this section, instead recording the events of the present like an archivist. The narrator does pass overt value judgments after a few pages, noting the existence of a consumerist culture and capitalism, as well as their environmental impacts:

“Here I am at the table, these chairs,
all painted fresh to look worn.
They blend in with this present age
of getting whatever you want
even when you have no idea what that is.
We generate more waste.
The days will eat you alive if you let them.”

The third section, “Ship of Nails,” names the concept of the “post-human” outright. The narrator in this section isn’t just a human but a system:

“I am a closed system
With unwanted precognition
A broken system in need of repair”

Even poetry is not idealized; there’s no romanticism to be found in this section:

“Inner wisdom activates you
Awakens you to yourself
The benevolence of the market god
The quiescence of morning as it unfolds
Watercolor sky above
So soft              So pretentious
My thoughts”

Language is no more a medium worthy of attention, a machine that merely generates artifacts. It is crude and not visceral enough to explicate the complexity of the systems around us:

“Participates in life
Is memorable
Events are changing
Feelings are changing
Events suffer powerful feelings
A verbal artifact makes patterns
I mean A linguistic artifact
Words on paper
I am suffering powerful feelings
In words on paper
I live viscerally In thought
Live apart from all this own crude matter”

The fourth section, “Life Event,” turns from deliberate cynical meditation back to the mundane, taking us back to where the first section began. But now the narrator is enriched by the journey and aware of the banality of much of the meaning-making systems that we humans are equipped with:

“You’ve spent so many nights
   trying to learn a shape
you thought you could hold
 an object you thought you could give a name to.

So many miles of night & still
no name for it                 no understanding.

My poetry remembers & forgets
this one self
the way my life            has learned routines
only to leave them
to lose faith
while my body empties of what it collects.”

There are moments of sheer nihilism, overwhelming the narrator:

“We’ve had it wrong. Life isn’t accumulation.
Every day is a slow destruction.”

But the section ends with an image of stillness and indifference, a position of deep resignation. We are no longer led by the lovelorn early narrator, and do not revisit any deliberation on the nature of post-humanity:

“It’s the kind of air that feels like rain
& when it starts I’ll go inside
to watch it.                    I’ll just watch it.”

Quotations from Thoreau and Upanishad are placed in the text to guide readers through the journey of this collection. The first and the fourth sections consider the slow-paced quotidian life and the way it offers us a counter-view to the breakneck speed that we are gathering as a civilization. Thoreau and Upanishad take a romanticist view of the world, especially considering that the latter is a spiritual or religious text. Our narrator takes an ambivalent approach when defining the post-human, yet invoking these romanticist notions gives a crypto-romanticist undertone to the text.

The post-human, for Pritts, is not simply a new age that needs to be dealt with, nor is it welcomed warmly. The future is a milieu from which one can chose to withdraw.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

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The book is arranged in five sections; the first three are the strongest and make for delightful reading. Unlike Lena Dunham’s character in the TV series “Girls,” who seeks out misadventure to help fill up a memoir while she is still in her 20s, Bell’s early life is extremely eventful and required no extra effort to find anguish. Her mother battled prescription drug dependency; Bell is a rape survivor who occasionally binged alcohol. At the end of the memoir readers may wonder how Bell emerged from it all so strong and capable.

I read the book around the time the TV series “13 Reasons Why” was released on Netflix, an adaptation of the young adult novel by Jay Asher, in which a teenage girl named Hannah narrates the reasons for her suicide in great detail. It struck me that that Bell’s narrative was the exact opposite of the fictional events depicted in the “13 Reasons Why”: her anger and despair were hard to put into words or make sense of. The inability to explain things seems more relatable, more realistic somehow.

Halfway through the memoir Bell befriends a guy named Cash. They grow close because of their mothers’ drug habits. She breaks down in front of him at one point:

I finished telling Cash how I’d thought about killing myself. I blamed it, out loud, on not being able to deal with my mum’s behaviour. But when I uttered those words, it felt like a mammoth lie. Mum’s behaviour was not the reason I wanted to kill myself. Yes, it may have heightened it, but it wasn’t the reason. I didn’t know the real reason why. Was I mad?

Can one really quantify a suicide like Hannah does in “13 Reasons Why”? Bell feels desperate like the fictional character Hannah and wonders how the world around her would react like after her death. Yet Bell lives on. Her story ends on a note of optimism, of finding a sense of self amidst extreme chaos, a dysfunctional family, teenage rebellion, and isolation.

Bell guides us through her life by talking to her reflection in the mirror and voices in her head. The “reflection” pieces are more introspective and read as if they serve a therapeutic function for Bell herself. Bell’s main narration style is precise and succinct, without the use of flowery language or overt emotional indulgence. It’s a breeze to read.

That is not to suggest that the text lacks depth. The relationship between Bell and her struggling mother is rich and remains at the heart of the story. It is their relationship that drives the narrative of Dear Reflection forward. The book includes an epilogue, a letter written by Bell’s mother about certain prescription drugs.

Bell moved from Australia to Greece after university, to be with the family of her partner. Her mother followed her to Greece eventually. In many ways the Mediterranean becomes a place of calm, of healing and starting over for Bell and her family. Moving from one side of the equator to another, as if mirroring the rhythm of the climate, changed the pace and tone of Bell’s writing about her life.

Readers do get some answers and clarity, eventually. By the end of the memoir Bell’s teenage life doesn’t really look like a string of unintelligible choices, but tell the story of a girl trying to fit in, find a place and people to belong with.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

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What seismic activity reveals?

But that didn’t explain the separate tracks along which the volcanoes formed.

Scientists have seismic evidence that the deep part of the mantle is a graveyard where long ago slabs of earth were subducted, creating separate regions with different chemical compositions that eventually made their way to the surface in a hot mantle plume as the core heated the rock into magma.

Bottom line

By examining data from the two volcanoes, Mr. Jones and his team suggested an alternative: The chemical signature, along with this double-track volcanism as it’s called, occurred three million years ago when the plates above the hot spot shifted direction, moving north.

This shimmy rearranged zones of magma that are heated under different pressures in the shallower part of the mantle — when they cool, the volcanic rock that results reflects this difference. Previously stacked on top of one another, the movement of the plates exposed now geographically separates magma zones that fed the volcanoes individually.

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