WEBVTT

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I think I'm going to move on
and read some translations.

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Jóhann Hjálmarsson
is still alive.

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He began writing when he was
17 and continues to write.

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He was a newspaper
reporter as a living.

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He was a travel writer
and an art critic.

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He wound up going to Spain
and studying Romance languages

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and became a translator
himself, in fact one of the most

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prolific Icelandic translators.

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And in becoming a translator,
he essentially taught himself,

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and he then was separate--
he separated himself

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from the Icelandic
poetic tradition, which

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even though Iceland had its
own kind of modernist movement,

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It wasn't as radical as
the modernist movement

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in the United
States or in Europe.

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So he was writing poems that
people didn't understand.

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I mean, the Icelandic
readers were so

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used to poems that
had rhythm, and rhyme,

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and things like
that, they didn't

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know what to do with a
poet who was experimenting

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with surrealism, or a poet
who was using blank verse.

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I mean, he was quite
avant garde for his time.

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Here's a poem out of
the Selected Poems

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that will be coming out this
year by Green Integer Books.

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This poem. is called
"Desire and Disbelief",

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it's in two sections.

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One.

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As I appear from outside
the train window,

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the world stares up at
me from the blank page.

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What became of the unfamiliar
soldiers at the gate,

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a woman spinning
out of her thread.

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When I came upon your expression
of alarm on bare knees,

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my teeth grew out
over the borderlands.

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Two.

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I look for my
death in your life,

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my dry lips find your roaming
hand, the sun, a simple fruit,

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probable seed.

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Days no one comes down the trail
that ends under our flat stone

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twin-sexed plants.

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We are a river flows near by
the current tugging at the hand

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of the child in its depths.

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I have seen too many drownings.

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I am certain this child is me.

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I don't want to live
suspended anymore.

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Birds will sing
about my death, fog

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will continue to spill
into the valleys,

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fish must wake in the night.

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A woman arranges her
hair into a flood,

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your one foot instructs
the other, angels fly

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across the roof,
illuminate my objections

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that covet this world.

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Hope and truth spill out
of the tree, God's reward

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to winter without charity.

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