I think I'm going to move on and read some translations.
Jóhann Hjálmarsson is still alive.
He began writing when he was 17 and continues to write.
He was a newspaper reporter as a living.
He was a travel writer and an art critic.
He wound up going to Spain and studying Romance languages
and became a translator himself, in fact one of the most
prolific Icelandic translators.
And in becoming a translator, he essentially taught himself,
and he then was separate-- he separated himself
from the Icelandic poetic tradition, which
even though Iceland had its own kind of modernist movement,
It wasn't as radical as the modernist movement
in the United States or in Europe.
So he was writing poems that people didn't understand.
I mean, the Icelandic readers were so
used to poems that had rhythm, and rhyme,
and things like that, they didn't
know what to do with a poet who was experimenting
with surrealism, or a poet who was using blank verse.
I mean, he was quite avant garde for his time.
Here's a poem out of the Selected Poems
that will be coming out this year by Green Integer Books.
This poem. is called "Desire and Disbelief",
it's in two sections.
One.
As I appear from outside the train window,
the world stares up at me from the blank page.
What became of the unfamiliar soldiers at the gate,
a woman spinning out of her thread.
When I came upon your expression of alarm on bare knees,
my teeth grew out over the borderlands.
Two.
I look for my death in your life,
my dry lips find your roaming hand, the sun, a simple fruit,
probable seed.
Days no one comes down the trail that ends under our flat stone
twin-sexed plants.
We are a river flows near by the current tugging at the hand
of the child in its depths.
I have seen too many drownings.
I am certain this child is me.
I don't want to live suspended anymore.
Birds will sing about my death, fog
will continue to spill into the valleys,
fish must wake in the night.
A woman arranges her hair into a flood,
your one foot instructs the other, angels fly
across the roof, illuminate my objections
that covet this world.
Hope and truth spill out of the tree, God's reward
to winter without charity.