The earth was a rose fully opened: Eternidades / Eternities (1916–1917) by Juan Ramón Jiménez

My feeling and the star
were ecstatic in their idyll.

You passed through the garden
and your hand, playing,
paying no attention,
tore off my feeling.

(poem 107, “Flower”)

Winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature, Juan Ramón Jimenez (1881–1958) is widely regarded as one of the most important Spanish language writers of the twentieth century. But, as is often the case, the popularity of his poetry experienced its ebbs and flows over the course of his lifetime, only to be received with renewed enthusiasm in the decades since his death. Born in Moguer, in southwest Spain, he was drawn to poetry at an early age. Before he turned twenty, he was invited to Madrid by leading writers of the Modernismo style and with their support he published his first two books of poetry in 1900 and 1901. But he soon broke away from this group to develop his own distinct aesthetic, one focused on the ideal of beauty. This new approach would ultimately bring him attention and international fame, with his book of prose poetry Platero and I (1914) being translated into at least thirty languages. However, yet another important stylistic shift still lay ahead.

By the time Jiménez made his first trip to the United States in 1916 to marry his American-Spanish fiancée Zenobia Camprubí Aymar, he was already aware of English-language poets and of a new bluntness and astringency in the more recent works by Yeats, but it was the reading of Emily Dickinson that made the strongest impression on him. He would bring this inspiration, and her capacity to convey the experience of an invisible reality in a concise form, home to Spain. Her inspiration is reflected clearly in the work he composed immediately following his journey and in the years that followed. In Diary of a Newlywed Poet—a poetic memoir chronicling his trip to America composed in 1916—Jiménez introduced a new direction and style and the present volume, Eternities, written in 1916 and 1917, and published in 1918, turned on and refined this stylistic shift to focus on the dynamic relationship between the poem and the self, and between the poetic word and the re-creation of the world.

In his thorough introduction to Bitter Oleander Press’ handsome dual language edition of this milestone in Jiménez’s creative evolution, translator and poet A. F. Moritz describes Eternities as “a book that joins—or rather, sees the identity-with-difference of—poetry and Poetry: the making of poetry by the poet, and the presence of Poetry as the inner and greatest reality that is available to everyone and experienced by most.” Notably, in a move from what was known as “pure poetry” to what he would term “naked poetry,” he established a streamlined, yet potentially rich form that would in turn influence the further development of Spanish poetry of the time. In poem 5, “Poetry,” he famously imagines poetry as a woman who comes to him when he is young, but then begins “putting on fashions” to an extent that his initial boyish enthusiasm turns toward hatred and resentment:

. . . But she started to undress.
And I smiled at her.

She stood there in just the shift
of her ancient innocence.
I believed in her again.

And she dropped the shift
and showed herself naked, all . . .
O passion of my life, naked
poetry, mine forever!

This renewed connection to poetry allows the poet to reveal his unveiled self, to speak of the ideas and feelings that are true for himself, knowing that essentially he is speaking to a universal experience of the nature of existence.

Eternidades / Eternities is a sequence of 137 numbered poems, titled or untitled, some several stanzas in length, but many no more than four lines. However, the arrangement of poems appears, at first glance, to be loose, unorganized. But it has its own form. As Moritz puts it:

By the time the first ten poems, say, have been absorbed, a clear if unusual unity emerges that continuously fills itself in. The poems have a radial interconnection rather than a linear, narrative, or logical one. Better said, perhaps, they are constellated. They unite as dispersed points within an area (an orbit or ambit, to use words that Jiménez loved) and with a gradually locatable center of gravity—points that make up a picture and a story.

It is, in the reading, that a natural flow opens, circles, and changes direction as poems complement or contradict one another, even split into two parts separated at some distance across the sequence. Images drawn from nature—dawn, light, trees, flowers, the sky, stars—appear throughout, as do the perennial themes of life, love, death, and the question of time. Moods shift, moving from despair to elation to meditative reflection. A poem that reads:

How I hate the me of yesterday!
How I’m sick and tired of tomorrow
in which I have to hate the me of today!

Oh what a heap of dried up flowers,
this whole life!

(poem 69)

can be followed by one that opens:

I’ll kiss you in the darkness,
without my body touching
your body.

(I’ll run through the shadows,
so that not even the oblivion
of the sky can enter.)

(from poem 70, “World Kiss”)

There is the sense, throughout Eternities, of the poet in conversation with his own insecurities on one level, and with the mysteries of life on another, an echo of existential reality we all can recognize. His curiosity, restlessness, and joy is infectious, and his commitment to the notion of a universality of experience affords the poems in this sequence a startling connection not unlike that which readers often feel with Dickinson.

With meticulous attention to detail, Moritz translated, for this volume, the Nueva y original edición de Eternidades (1916–1917) edited by Professor Emilio Ríos, published in 2007,  including an Appendix consisting of eleven “perfected” versions of poems from the sequence that Professor Ríos appended to his text. He also preserves Jiménez’s distinctive punctuation—exclamation marks, parentheses, and ellipses—features that contribute the intrinsic energy of the poems. The result is an invaluable dual language edition of an important work of Spanish poetry that should readily appeal to a wide audience.

Eternidades / Eternities (1916–1917) by Juan Ramón Jiménez is translated from the Spanish by A. F. Moritz and published by Bitter Oleander Press.

Patience is life: Gold Dust by Ibrahim al-Koni

“We always say that the Mahri is the mirror of his rider. If you want to stare into the rider and see what lies hidden within, look to his mount, his thoroughbred. Now that I look at you more closely, I can see that you’re a young man who’s got everything. Whoever owns a Mahri like this piebald will never complain for want of noble values. You’ve honored our homes, O noble youth descended from noble men!”

Indeed, Ukhayyad, the unfortunate hero at the heart of Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni’s 1990 novel Gold Dust, is the son of the chief of a Tuareg tribe, and the proud owner of a Mahri, a thoroughbred camel, with striking  patterned colouring. He is perhaps a little too proud, and a little naïve too, as he finds himself facing a series of challenges, of both mystical and human design, that ultimately spiral out of control.

But this is more than the story of a man and his camel; it is a tale deeply rooted in a traditional culture long adapted to life in a harsh and unforgiving terrain. The Tuareg, a semi-nomadic Berber people of the Sahara Desert, inhabit a wide region that stretches across a number of African nations, primarily Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. A highly stratified society, the men of the noble classes can be recognized by their distinctive indigo turban and veil known as  the tagolmost. Al-Koni was born into the Tuareg community and grew up in the desert, not learning to read or write until he was twelve. He would go on to study literature at the Maxim Gorky Institute in Moscow and work as a journalist in Moscow and Warsaw. He is recognized today as one of the most prolific contemporary Arabic writers. His work draws on the mythological and spiritual traditions of his people set against the spectacular, but often oppressive environment of the desert.

Gold Dust is not a work of historical fiction though the growing threat of the Italian invaders likely places it in the interwar years; but a tale of traditional myth and wisdom, and the many ways man can be led astray. With a folkloric quality, the narrative moves in a circular fashion or, as translator Elliott Colla puts it:

in cycles rather than lines. Indeed, the desert is not timeless but seasonal—with wet seasons of abundance and flourish, followed by years of drought and hardship. Human time, too, moves in this way in the novel: characters grow and wither, win and lose; caravans come and go, bringing with them holy men and refugees, riches and misery.

Ukhayyad is aware of forces that are threatening his people, but he exists within Tuareg community without any lasting connection to his home tribe (which is dispersed by the colonists after he has already left). His fortunes rise and fall, he makes choices that put his beloved Mahri at grave risk, but in a sense he is unable to find his place in domestic and social settings, especially in the relative comfort of an oasis where demons haunt the dreams of man. He seeks release in the desert:

Here, on the other hand, demons die of thirst, leaving two expanses to reveal themselves—that of the open desert and that of the heart. Here, there was a stillness of the ears, and a stillness of the heart. There was God’s presence in the desert, and His presence inside a man’s chest. And while the waters of the vineyard spring may wash clean the body, only the desert can cleanse the soul. In the desert, the soul empties and clears and becomes free and brave in the process.

Out in the desert Ukhayyad finds a spiritual freedom that evades him elsewhere. He and his Mahri are free—that is, until he learns a terrible truth that sends him back to the oasis to avenge his honour.

This slender book has been described by some as a slow moving tale, however if read in one or two sittings (which is ideal) one might well find it anything but. It is rather like a condensed epic adventure relayed in intense and spare poetic prose, haunted by the curses of witch doctors, warnings of soothsayers, the songs of jinn, and persistent, disturbing prophetic dreams. There is a death defying race across brutal desert, brittle scrub brush, and forested ravines, with young Ukhayyad barely clinging to the tail of his crazed camel, ending with man and Mahri both bloodied and battered, but alive, if barely. Then there is the love that causes our protagonist to be banished from his tribe and driven into exile where he falls victim to the deceitful machinations of a mysterious gold trader intent on stealing his wife and child. The novel ends with a desperate effort to escape murderous men intent on revenge. And throughout it all, Ukhayyad and the Mahri are continually separated and reunited, bound by a connection stronger than life.

Gold Dust by Ibrahim al-Koni is translated by Elliott Colla and published by Arabia Books by arrangement with The American University in Cairo Press.

In praise of ordinary people: Maybe Even Happiness by Ludovic Bruckstein

Imagine a travelling fair in a small provincial town, complete with all of the expected food stalls and amusements. And there, amid the festivities, stands a small unassuming structure with a sign advertising it as a panoptikum—a wax museum. But when our narrator steps inside, there are no heroes or historical figures waiting for him. ‘What is this?’ he wonders:

But because I have handed over my copper coin at the entrance, I go to take a closer look at the wax figures lined up along the walls, and gradually I begin to recognise familiar faces . . . Yes, it’s as if I’ve seen them somewhere before . . .

But when? And where?

I linger in front of one or another of the wax figures and scour my memory. And this small fairground wax museum no longer seems quite so meaningless . . .

This museum of ordinary people is the perfect entry to the fictional world of Jewish Romanian writer Ludovic Bruckstein (1920–1988). The heroes and heroines of his short stories are the everyday folk who encounter life’s joys and sorrows in their own, often unexpected, ways. Strange, sad, or funny, the tales collected in Maybe Even Happiness—drawn from the last two decades or so of his life—owe their charm to the magic of a gifted storyteller.

Born in Munkacs, Ukraine (then Czechoslovakia), Bruckstein grew up in Sighet, a town in the district of Maramures in Northern Transylvania, where his father owned a small factory. In 1944, the family was deported to Auschwitz, where Bruckstein was transferred on to Bergen-Belzen, followed by a series of forced labour camps. At the end of the war, he returned to Sighet to find that one brother was the only other member of his family to survive. Unable to leave Romania once the Iron Curtain fell, he began writing plays and then short stories. After he was finally able to emigrate to Israel in 1972, he continued to write fiction, publishing a number of novels, novellas and short story collections. The thirty-four stories in this volume are selected from several of these collections. Divided into three parts, 1967-1969, 1970-1979, and 1980-1987, each section of the book opens with a return to the small fair with its ramshackle panoptikum, and features quirky abstracted illustrations by the author’s son, Alfred M. Bruckstein.

With the odd angel, jester, or acrobat tossed in for good measure, these are the stories of tailors, office workers, engineers, and others often caught in dead-end jobs, loveless relationships, or solitary existences, who respond to the challenges life throws at them in their own, often hapless ways. Some fall into despondency, others are led astray by unrealistic ambition, while yet others find stubborn contentment within the confines of everyday reality. Some aren’t even really sure what they want. Bruckstein’s narrative style is straightforward and conversational, often playing on repetition, and his characters—all assigned distinctive features or tendencies— are treated with candid warmth and humour. Many of the stories are short, no more than a few pages, and very often the endings are tinged with a little irony, or even left unresolved. Like life itself.

There is a story, for example, about a man with a fondness for hats, as mark of honour and social standing, who purchases a new hat—“A soft, dark brown, very sober hat.” But as he makes his way home wearing it, he encounters several of his acquaintances who fail to acknowledge him, or even turn agitated expressions in his direction. Each time he wracks his brain to try to determine what he could have possibly done to deserve such treatment. And each time, an incident comes to mind. A mix of horror and anger begins to build in him until he reaches his house where, to his surprise, his wife does not even register that he is home. . . until he takes off his new hat.

One of the more whimsical tales, “The King’s Fool”, carries a deeper political commentary. Here a jester who has been floating, a disembodied soul, in Heaven for an unknown length of time (for what is time in Heaven?), becomes nostalgic for Earth and wishes to return to see how those who have followed in his profession are making out. With a gentle push he begins to float downwards (or is it upward, who can tell?) towards the earthly globe acquiring a skeleton, flesh, and skin, not to mention his jester’s regalia, along the way. He walks until he finds an inn where he orders himself a roast chicken and a glass of wine. Nothing seems changed, until he strikes up a conversation with a nondescript man eating soup. He wants to know what’s new and how His Majesty the King comports himself. The man laughs and tells him they haven’t had a king for a long time; they now have a president:

‘Then how is His Majesty your President? Good? Bad?’

‘Good or bad? He’s the same as every other president. . .’ Then, after casting a suspicious glance all around and assuring himself that nobody could overhear, he added, ‘And his lordship thinks that if he eats his fill, then the whole nation is full. . .’

‘But what does his fool tell him?’ asked the fool, intrigued.

‘His fool? What are you talking about?’ asked the citizen, in astonishment at the question.

‘What do you mean? The president’s fool, his jester. . .’

The citizen laughed in great amusement:

‘Our president doesn’t have a fool!’

The king’s fool stared at him, wide eyed with fright’

Through this, and a second encounter with a citizen who places all his faith an opposition which would, once it came into power, likely offer more of the same, the jester comes to realize that there is no one in this new system without questionable motivations who can give a president an honest read on a situation and be listened to (even if initially earning an angry kick to the backside for his trouble). His entire value as a trusted, if unlikely advisor would be null and void in this new world. Or worse, he would be locked up as a madman.

Elsewhere we meet a mild, unassuming middle-aged man who decides after failing to succeed in much, or satisfy anyone—his boss, his wife, his son—that he will commit suicide. Suddenly, the knowledge that he could be gone, maybe the next day or the day after, lifts the weight that he has carried for so many years and alters the way he sees the world. And, in spite of himself, his life starts to change. A personal no-deadline suicide pledge has made all the difference.

Then there’s the tailor who slaves away in his small shop eleven months of the year, living as frugally as he can, so that for one month he can return to his home town, spend generously, hobnob with all the “Important” people, and truly be “somebody.” Once a year. Or the young couple who have, through her job at the Anonymous Shareholding Company, been given the opportunity to stay at a five star hotel—”at a reduced rate, with payment in installments”—and they are so enamoured with their room, and the peace and quiet it offers, that they have no desire to venture outside it. Or, the middle-aged divorced, widowed, or otherwise single men and women, lonely and looking for love (or at least a little sex), who are not really sure what they want or are willing to give up to get it. Whatever it is.

Bruckstein’s stories have a definite fable-like quality to them, but his narrators and protagonists are recognizable, contemporary figures, navigating office jobs and relationships, with dreams and disappointments. And even though it would be misleading to imply that all of these tales have a positive undertone or happy ending, there is something very enjoyable about spending a little time in the company of a master storyteller when there is so much negative news in the world.

Maybe Even Happiness by Ludovic Bruckstein is translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth and published by Istros Books.

A fragmented inventory of being: Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent

At fourteen I decided I would be as hard as a stone and burn as bright as the sun.

At fourteen. Australian writer Erin Vincent remembers being fourteen with a sucker punch to the gut intensity that has haunted her since that day in 1983 when her parents were hit by a truck. Her mother was killed instantly, her father, badly injured, died one month and one day later. As an age that falls into that uncertain space between childhood and adulthood, fourteen can be difficult, awkward, and confusing for anyone, but for Vincent, the age, her memories associated with it, and, ultimately, the number itself became something larger. An obsession. Fourteen Ways of Looking, her dazzling, fragmented inventory of being, is an attempt to finally exorcise the power that that number, and all it contains, has held over her for decades.

This book is not, in any explicit sense, a memoir. Her earlier work, Grief Girl: My True Story, published in 2007, was an attempt to address the reality of her personal loss for young readers, sharing her story through her own fourteen year-old voice. In Fourteen Ways, that same voice is present, but it emerges in fragmented memories of a life shattered by tragedy. She recalls the strangeness of the experience of the death of her parents and the impact it had on her relationships with her siblings, extended family, teachers, and her adolescent sense of self. But here these pieces exist in relation to her adult reflections and observations, and against a tapestry woven of facts and occurrences that each involve, in some way, the number fourteen.

This all started innocently enough. One day I noticed the word fourteen in a novel I was reading. The next day it happened again, in a newspaper article, then a TV show, a film, then another book. Fourteen. 14. I did not go looking for it. It came to me. Now I can’t look away.

But it’s one thing to notice a number and even to start to gather references to it, quite another to see in this harvesting the possibility of a book. Drawing inspiration from her reading of fragmentary literature together with an introduction to the constraint-driven writings of the Oulipo movement, things began to slowly take shape. In an interview with Cristina Politano for Minor Literature[s], Vincent describes her thinking:

And so, I ended up with these notebooks filled with fourteen facts, and instances of fourteen throughout history. I then started writing memoir fragments about the year my parents died and after a while, I thought, “I should start putting these together. I think there’s something here.” So, I set myself a constraint—every fragment had to have the number fourteen in it. Now, how could I do that without driving the reader crazy? It became like a game. Eventually, I loosened up a bit and decided that the meta-reflections that run through the book did not have to contain the number fourteen, but every other fragment does.

The result is a moving and fascinating kaleidoscope of memory, emotions, information, and quotations. Unobtrusive section breaks separate fragments that are somehow connected thematically. Or to let a single fact or reflection stand alone. This allows for a natural internal coherence to develop in unexpected, often exhilarating ways as an “at fourteen” memory or a “14-related historical or biographical detail triggers a series of associated fragments:

Canto XIV in Dante’s Inferno focuses on those who have sinned against God. Their punishment is to have flakes of fire slowly rained down on them.

At fourteen I still believed in God. I knew He existed because He had punished me. He had heard that voice and decided to make me pay. Later I would drop the capital H.

When she was fourteen Leonora Carrington lifted up her dress and flashed a priest saying, ‘Well, what do you think of that?!’

Fourteen or 14 appears in a wide range of contexts throughout this book—as dates, page numbers, chapters or titles of films or literary works, but it is also linked in some direct or indirect way to a significant number of well-known figures who either lost their own parent or parents young, or experienced a notable life change at age fourteen. And although it would be easy to fall into artificial or seemingly contrived arrangements of facts and reflections, Vincent balances the flow beautifully. As well, the fragmented approach allows her to suspend her memories associated with being fourteen and all the years that have passed since, in the sort of unfinished and uncertain dimension that recollections tend to occupy over time. To let her “truths” hang in the air in a manner that feels entirely unforced and authentic—our own truths belong to us, after all, but their tones and colours change as we change. Add in the occasional meta observations about the project itself and the emotional energy it is exacting, and Fourteen Ways of Looking becomes a living, breathing meditation on loss, grief and rebuilding a life.

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent is published by CB Editions in the UK, Deep Vellum in the US, Strange Light in Canada, and Upswell in Australia.

A catalogue of farewells: Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko

. . . I want to record all this, I want to write down that everything is all right, the end of the world is behind us anyway, no machine guns in sight, only the signs of another oncoming flood, it’s early, and at the other end of the train tracks she’s gradually woken up by the seagulls, and the room in which she opens her eyes looks different, in her slumber she may not even comprehend  what’s made this difference, she looks around and realises I’m no longer there, I’m gone at last. . .

The early hours of his journey to Berlin are intentionally cinematic: the protagonist of Ivana Sajko’s short but intense novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye, is on a train, notebook in hand, imagining his present circumstances—he has just left his long-time partner behind—as an echo of a scene from Lars von Trier’s film Europa, dramatic and tragic. He longs for a message to come through on his phone, but he knows it won’t, the relationship he has left was already as good as over after unravelling for a long time. As the hours and days pass he will have plenty of time for self-reflection, regret and heartache. He is on his way to the city where their romance began a decade earlier, hoping to try to start his life over again.

Unfolding in long unbroken sentences that stretch, section break to section break, for four, five, six pages or more, our narrator, a former journalist and self-described failed writer, will attempt to put together the broken pieces of his life, from childhood through to the painful dying days of the love he has lost, hoping that the words coursing through his mind will somehow find their way to the page and break the drought that has crippled him, professionally and emotionally for a long time. It is as if he is slowly and systematically acknowledging and letting go of the unfinished fragments of his past:

. . . every goodbye is a little death, each one clinging tightly to what it leaves behind, and each deserves its own photograph, its own legend, its own notebook. . .

Moving from the immediate observations and interactions that mark his journey, to experiences that shaped his near and distant past, his soliloquy sweeps through many personal, social, and political themes  as the miles and stations pass. He recalls his dysfunctional family, the father who left home only to meet a sorry, isolated end, the grinding  poverty that forced his mother to seek work in Germany, leaving her sons with their grandmother, and the once-close relationship he shared his brother, now lost to a small-time criminal existence somewhere, he’s not sure where. On a broader plane, war in the Balkans, the migrant crisis, economic upheavals destroying communities, the impact of the pandemic, and the question of his own failure to hold to a commitment to fight injustice all come in and out of view along the way.

The relentless nature of the narrative style heightens the emotional intensity of this novel, allowing for an in depth portrait of one man’s past and present to emerge in a relatively limited space. But there is, at the same time, a certain vagueness to the locations of the events that occur outside Germany. Beyond Berlin, where in his memories her protagonist maps out a network of named streets and intersections, Sajko avoids particularity in reference to exactly where  he lived when he was growing up or in the years immediately prior to his departure (we only know it was a coastal community). She says she prefers to write about Europe more generally rather than her native Croatia specifically. But the wars and displacements that have shaped recent Balkan history inevitably shaped her narrator’s younger life too. At one point his internal monologue vividly captures the visceral experience of life under military and psychological siege:

At first, a mass was compressed into the shape of a wall, and only later, in this wall’s shadow, did individual fates and names gradually become detectable, could we observe how the war disintegrated into its elementary particles, infiltrating homes and corners like the bubonic plague; nights and days fused into a constant half-sleep, the mattresses grew soggy with sweat and worry, small apartments constricted, their toxic air smothered the inhabitants, these conditions bred fear and infection, movement was curtailed, curfews were enforced, civil guards patrolled the streets; suffering was collective, yet on the elementary particle-level each person grappled with their own fate while they monitored everyone else and anyone could turn against anyone. . .

The unending sentences and deeply internalized nature of Sajko’s style not only grants Every Time We Say Goodbye its power, but also presents a special challenge for a translator. Mima Simić, who previously translated Sajko’s earlier Love Novel, has known the author for a long time and both are Croatian women living in Berlin, but she admits that capturing, in translation, the intensity of the content and form of her work can be a demanding experience. Nonetheless, the lengthy passages flow very smoothly, losing none of their impact. However, one quality that is lost in English is the specifically gendered nature of the narrative. Croatian, as a Slavic language, has three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—that shape the way one has to speak, but open the possibilities for how one can write. Sajko, who is also a playwright, chose to write this first person monologue in the masculine gender which, she admits, “altered the course  of the novel as it unfolded” and “helped me to step outside myself” and appreciate the way language “truly makes us who we are.” For her writer on a train, words will be, he hopes, a life line to new existence.

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko is translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić and published by Biblioasis.

There goes a happy woman: The Grandmother by Božena Němcová

The premise of the novel regarded as a classic of nineteenth century Czech literature is as simple and unassuming as its title. An old woman enjoying a quiet life in a mountain village surrounded by friends receives news that her eldest daughter is returning to Bohemia from Vienna where she has lived for many years now that her German husband has taken on a position in the service of a princess who owns an estate in the area. However, because she will be alone with the children for the better part of the year while their father works in the capital, she invites her mother to join her at the rural residence where the family will now be living. The woman is somewhat reluctant to leave her home, but it is difficult to resist the opportunity to finally meet her four grandchildren and be part of their lives. And so, in the latter years of her life, the heroine of The Grandmother by Božena Němcová (1820?–1862), takes on a new role and title, earning love and respect that will extend far beyond her family.

When she first arrives in a wagon bearing her few possessions—spindle and spinning wheel, small painted chest, basket holding four chickens, and bundle with two kittens— the children, accustomed to life in the big city, are stunned by the sight of this simple woman in a peasant’s outfit and white kerchief:

The children stood as if frozen to the spot, and it was only at their mother’s command that they offered their rosy cheeks to Grandmother to kiss. They couldn’t get over the unfamiliarity; this was a grandmother different from all those they had seen. No wonder that they kept their eyes fixed on her! Wherever she stood, they walked around her, weighing her up from head to toe.

They examine her strange clothing and investigate her pockets, but in no time she has won their hearts and devotion, and she, in turn, soon makes herself at home. But she never compromises her daily routine, or abandons her habits and convictions. She is also warmly welcomed by others in the community and before long everyone has taken to  calling her Grandmother, only occasionally using her given name. They turn to her for advice, especially the young women, and although she is illiterate, she holds in her memory a wealth of stories, prayers, herbal remedies, and traditional recipes for seasonal celebrations.  She is the ideal Grandmother, but a gently subversive one, in her own modest way.

As Julia Sutton-Mattocks tells us in her introduction to this first English language translation of Němcova’s beloved tale, The Grandmother has often been described as a sentimental evocation of the author’s own rural childhood as there is some overlap in the names and circumstances of her history and her fictional creation. But, she suggests, although there is some value to that interpretation it is both reductive and complicated by the myths that have arisen around  Němcova’s life. Exceptionally well educated for a woman of her class and time, she was engaged in political and social concerns, and an early feminist with strong views on marriage and the value of free love. However, it is also important to understand the context within which she wrote. In the late eighteenth century, the Czech National Revival arose as a response to the increased Germanization and dismissal of Czech cultural and language that had occurred under the Hapsburg Emperors. This nationalist movement encouraged literature that celebrated Czech culture, history and legend. Although the Revival was falling out of favour by the time The Grandmother was composed in the 1850s, the novel clearly reflects Revivalist themes—romanticization of Bohemia and a deep interest (fueled by Němcova’s extensive ethnographic study) in folk festivals and traditional lore—and presents a portrait of a time that would have already seemed tinted with nostalgia.

The Grandmother is an episodic tale, with each chapter centred on an event, a visit, a holiday or feast celebration, or a story recounted by Grandmother or one of the other key characters. Outside of the immediate family there are a few significant subplots, like the troubled courtship of Kristla, the inn-keeper’s daughter, the affairs of the Princess and her charge, Countess Hortensie, and most tragically, the story of the wild woman Viktorka who lives in a mountain cave and wanders through the forest, long after she was apparently driven to madness in her youth.  But uniting it all is the old woman with her wisdoms, her idiosyncrasies, and her particular charm.

Long set in her ways, Grandmother holds fast to her old-fashioned peasant’s dress with the skirts, aprons and starched caps. She gets the children up each day and leads them through their prayers, but refuses to help them dress, having no patience with all the buttons and fasteners. She takes over the household tasks that interest her and leaves the rest to others. Never having seen a doctor in her life, she collects, purchases, and keeps an extensive array of herbs, and has an answer for any ailment that might arise. She is devout, with many a spiritual saying to share, but she holds her religious standards to herself alone, preferring to carry herself in all matters with a measure of humility and dignity.

Always conscious of her social class, her personal appeal frequently crosses the typical boundaries of status, often to the dismay of those who jealously guard such things. She is, for example, modestly at ease with the Princess who comes to stay at the manor each summer, even surprising, perhaps, her noble acquaintance with the famed military leaders she has chanced to meet in her lifetime. She met Emperor Joseph when she was a child, and later spent fifteen years in Silesia while her husband was serving in the King in the Prussian Army. But when her beloved Jiří died of a gunshot wound during the invasion of Poland, leaving her with three young children, she returned to Bohemia and raised her family with the help of her parents. Grandmother wanted to be home. She is strongly attached to her native land and language, but recognizes that not all will feel the same. She accepts her daughter’s German husband and when her younger daughter falls in love with a Croatian man she marvels at how the young are finding love across national boundaries, reflecting not only a certain openness that has come with age, but also her creator’s interpretation of a nationalist perspective that is evolving.

Although to contemporary readers, The Grandmother bears the hallmarks of solid, traditional storytelling that brings to life a rich rural culture marked with a seemingly endless parade of holidays and feast days (and at times strange customs), in its day it signaled a shift toward a more modern form of novel, securing its importance in Czech literature. It is familiar to almost anyone growing up in Czechia, and reading it I could only imagine that for many contemporary youth it might feel ponderous and old-fashioned as a required text, but coming to it from outside the culture and much later in life, I found it to be a remarkably well-paced, moving story with a most fascinating female writer behind it. For that matter, the fact that the classic Czech novel of the nineteenth century should be one written by a woman is not as unlikely as it may sound, because Czech women writers were welcomed and encouraged to add their voices to the literature that was being developed at the time. “To this end,” Sutton-Mattocks tells us, “women’s writing was promoted to such an extent that some Czech men writers even felt it was in their interests to publish under female pseudonyms.” Now that is something worth noting!

The Grandmother by Božena Němcová is translated from the Czech by Susan Reynolds, with an Introduction by Julia Sutton-Mattocks and published by Jantar Publishing.

And she ruled: Queen by Birgitta Trotzig

Through the darkness swept the beam. Capturing – releasing: capturing  – releasing. So deep the darkness when the light released its grip, like falling down through a well, darkness, no end; sleepers were struck by the light as if by a knife; again darkness, all the while they were on their way into darkness downward and downward, whirling, falling. Without pause the lighthouse beam swept across ever-new light-unstruck never-seen waves.

Queen, by Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1929–2011) is an expansive exercise in grey: the landscape, the sea, the central characters all feature in shades of grey that run from the muted, milky white, to the sombre, murky black. But, amid all this greyness lies a tale of stark, mythic intensity that turns with its own tragic beauty. It is a love story, albeit a damaged one, in that the love that holds it together is both fierce and repressed, arising not with warmth but in agony, as if happiness is an unimagined possibility. And yet, as we read it we do hold out hope.

This luminous novel, vividly translated by Saskia Vogel, opens with the arrival of an odd-looking, child-like woman, a widow from America, who is bound for a farm in a village on the eastern coast of the county of Skåne in southern Sweden. It is November of 1930 and the Great Depression is spreading across the world. Exactly who this woman is, and how she is connected to the once-proud farm to which she has been sent, we will not know until later. But her arrival will prove pivotal for the two middle-aged siblings awaiting her appearance with curiosity and distrust.

The farm in question belongs to the Lindgren family. It had once been a large and prosperous venture but at the time this tale begins, at the close of the nineteenth century, it is slowly falling into disrepair, and its sprawling pastures are being sold off piece by piece.  Johan Lindgren, who inherited the thriving farm from his father, finds himself ill-suited to the task of caring for it. He is a man who “did not much love people, they were too heavy, something about them was unsurmountable to him.” Instead he loved animals, especially horses. Lacking the energy to dedicate himself to the work of the farm, he spirals into a cycle of selling assets and acquiring debt. His wife, never a strong personality, weakens and fades into the background after a postpartum illness that never fully fades. Thus it falls to the eldest child, Judit, to carry the load, in the field and in the home. She is stern and responsible, while her brother Albert is shy and sluggish, and Viktor, the youngest, is restless and untamed.

From an early age, Judit is aware that she bears the responsibility of caring for everyone around her: “She never had much time to be a child, but neither did she value such things: her soul had been old and mature from the start.” She rises under the burden, standing straight, tall, unbreakable. She earns the name Queen young and carries the crown boldly, even as her kingdom shrinks and decays around her. But there is a harsh emotional cost, planted early, when at the age of twelve she becomes surrogate mother/sister to her youngest brother Viktor, with whom she instantly bonds. Trotzig vividly depicts the moment everything shifts for her Queen. Sitting on the ground holding the newborn baby, Judit suddenly sense a fissure open in her world. She weeps and weeps, then stops. Her expression closes over:

But deep within that which is locked up the weeping continues. The gray features harden, the gaze becomes clear, dark, tearless. Deep down the weeping continues. Stifled it bores itself ever deeper downward, vanishing undermost in the deadest layer of earth underneath hidden crumblings, through stone chips down in the desiccated rock-hard packed stratum of the ground. There the weeping could no longer be heard, it had vanished from sight and sound, far down in the invisible, in dead earth it whimpered and sobbed.

Viktor, the infant she adores and raises as if he were her own, is a challenge. Their father takes an immediate and unreasonable dislike to the child, unleashing regular beatings on the boy. At school he causes trouble, and as he grows up he becomes more uncontrollable and wild. He does his military service but returns a drinker and gambler. He impregnates a couple of local girls. Finally, when he decides to head to America to build a life for himself, Judit greets the news with a mix of sadness and relief.

Viktor arrives in New York City in 1920, at a time when opportunities abound and he makes his way from one job to another, a journey that ultimately takes him through the southern US. But when economic pressures begin to build he finds his way back to New York. He will never return to Sweden. Meanwhile, back home, Judit and Albert struggle to keep what’s left of the farm going.  Well, more accurately, the Queen does. As the siblings age they are increasingly cut off from the rest of the local community, together viewed as an oddity. And then the stranger from America arrives.

Observed intimately and yet with a calculated distance—one longs to get beneath the surface, to understand what and how the characters are truly feeling if they even know themselves—the protagonists never speak directly. They belong, after all, to a place where silence reigns, where little is said, but rumours pass on the wind. The narrative sweeps across landscapes, rural and urban alike, with an existential heaviness, leaving a tapestry woven of soil, sand, and sea, of lives, limbs, and longings. Time is unforgiving. Years pass. Decades pass. Losses seem to mount. Yet, Trotzig continually reminds us to place our trust in language. Against a plot that is often sketched out with limited details, she intuitively knows when and how to amplify an emotional condition with intense vivid imagery. Life is not easy, but as her characters are pushed further into themselves and against one another, always at risk of becoming too hard or too weak and vulnerable, new cracks appear when one least expects and slowly, a little light seeps in.

In her Afterword, Norwegian writer Hanne Ørstavik tells how she came to know of Trotzig’s work and how it saw her through a difficult transitional period in her own writing, ultimately allowing her to write The Pastor. A brilliant novel of haunting landscape, with characters trying to come to terms with life and death in different ways, one can see the influence. It is exciting to know that Archipelago will be releasing at least three more of this enigmatic Swedish writer’s novels in the near future.

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig is translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, with an Afterword by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken, and published by Archipelago Books.

Even in these half-dark times: The World Is Made Up Every Day by Alok Dhanwa

The lights on the bridges
have no end
My nights are full of them
I will remember
the lights
even in the face of death

– from “Theatre”  (1996)

In recent years, Seagull Books has been bringing the work of under appreciated Hindi cult writers to English audiences, via the translations of Saudamini Deo. The latest writer to receive this attention is  Alok Dhanwa whose defiant and socially engaged poetry combines the personal and the political with deep emotional and intellectual intensity. Born in Bihar in 1948, just one year after India’s independence, Dhanwa grew up alongside his country, witness to its many growing pains. Against the backdrop of the rising Maoist, Naxalite and other Communist movements in the late 1960s and the tumultuous 1970s under Indria Ghandi’s leadership, including the twenty-one month Emergency (1975–77) during which constitutional and civil rights were suspended, there was much for a young working-class poet to speak to—and against. Often drawing on rural themes and imagery, his poems addressed, directly and indirectly, the struggles of ordinary people, earning him a popular cult like status in Bihar and neighbouring states of northern India.

Unsurprisingly, relatively little of his poetry was published during these earlier years. His first collection, The World is Made Up Every Day, did not appear in Hindi until 1998 and was, until recently, his only published volume of work. Now his voice can finally be heard in English, through the resounding notes of Deo’s translation. (Brief YouTube videos of Dhanwa reading in Hindi can be found online and offer a taste of his tone and character that can be carried into reading his poems.) And although the particular political context of his poetry—even when the settings are decidedly bucolic—is essential, in her Translator’s Forward, Deo cautions that to read Dhanwa simply as a poet of the past would be a mistake:

Contemporary Indian milieu is far more complex, with its growing shift towards majoritarian politics and authoritarianism. His lines ‘that India no longer exists / the one in which I was born’ hauntingly resonates with the contemporary reader. Or when he writes: ‘Homicide and suicide are made to look alike / in these half-dark times. Do spot the difference, my friend,’ it feels as though he is speaking about present day India. And, perhaps, there is no end to these half-dark times.

One might venture that such a sentiment has a resonance far beyond India these days. As such, in Dhanwa’s poetry, there are many notes that may ring familiar.

There are direct, often angry, even despairing, references to political violence and oppression in some of the poems collected here, and a certain melancholy when the poet considers his country and the men and women he sees, be they gathering in city centres or working on farms. Dhanwa demonstrates a wonderful facility for employing striking imagery from nature and from everyday objects to  address the concerns that trouble him, as a man and as a poet. The poet, in his vision has a critical role, he or she is tasked to speak to both the immediate and the future. Thus, his is not merely an artistic role, it is at once ancient and urgent, yet he takes it on with a measured humility. In “Water” (1997), he begins with his imagined mission:

People, but not just people,
I believed I would teach
even water to inhabit India.

I believed
Water would be simple—
like the East,
like a straw hat,
like candlelight.

In the golden hour,
the other side is barely visible,
leading us to wander
in a country
yet to appear on the map.

But he ends up wondering if all the words we write are wasted, leading to ruin as water follows its own course in spite of us. He asks:

Do the voices of water
remain in the voices of women?
And what of other voices?

In a sad and broken heart
there is only the night of water.
There lies hope, and there lies
the only path back into the world.

Many writers have, over the years, been described as giving voice to the marginalized, but for Dhanwa this is not simply a matter of speaking on the behalf of those who cannot. In his world, those who might be imagined to be on the disadvantaged side of the endless class struggle are not content to stand by quietly. And he is standing with them. He also holds a perspective that extends beyond the joys and the demands of the everyday—it is civilizational in scope. His world view is not static; it is in motion. In one of the longer pieces in this book, “Canvas Shoes” (1979), he begins with a pair of old canvas shoes left by the railway tracks and imagines a life for this worn and humble footwear that entails a long journey that echoes the history of the world:

These canvas shoes
soft and filled with air
as cigarettes and handkerchiefs.
Woven like nests—
against solid things in this world like murder and rape,
these liquid shoes stand
bending with grass and language,
edging closer to salt—
And for the rats, these canvas shoes are like the alphabet—
it’s where they begin to nibble.

Here, simple shoes carry the density of human existence—in the day to day and over  vast swathes of time. By the final verse the journey is complete yet eternal:

Those canvas shoes are now so old
that one might say,
wherever they move, Time doesn’t exist—
even Death would no longer want to wear them.
But poets do wear those shoes
and tread across centuries.

In the end it is the poet who is tasked with continuing the journey and translating it into words. To speak to the indefatigable human will to resist, to survive. Something that Alok Dhanwa is well versed to do.

The World is Made Up Every Day: Selected Poems by Alok Dhanwa is translated from the Hindi by Saudamini Deo and published by Seagull Books.

“at nightfall, the night herons no longer called”: Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện

these are the chronicles of my village, the vessels of remembering and reminiscing, tale upon tale of yesterday, yesteryear, yestercentury or yestermillennia, now plainly precise, now hazily adrift, an abundance, or maybe an overabundance of news that reads like some kind of a novel, some kind of novella or some kind of essay reshaped into fictional form, they, the news, the chronicles, constantly expand, contract, compel, pressure, evoke and awaken before culminating in a perhaps inevitable explosion, shattering all the burnished grandiose narratives that so desperately try to conceal the fatal historical disabilities of a land.

In a small village, nestled at the foot of Mun Mountain, somewhere in Central Vietnam,  a scribe is recording a history—of his life, his family, his village, his community. Mythical visitors, birds and beasts, dynastical rulers, colonizers, invaders, and ghosts pass in and out of his amorphous, fragmented, non-chronological account. But binding it together are memories, of childhood and family, and of the routines of agricultural life. Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s lyrical Chronicles of a Village cannot easily be categorized. Is it a collection of stories, a novella, a documentary or a prose poem? Labels do not matter. It is a mesmerizing evocation of the passage of time—a record of what is lost, what is gained, and what remains—a shifting portrait of a land and its people.

Chronicles opens with an account of the disruptive arrival of “sightless humans” marching into the village. No one is quite prepared for the danger these outsiders represent. They march the residents out into the open and when the narrator’s father dares to address the invaders, he is tied up and taken away. This narrative is followed by a detailed note further explaining the nature of the man who has been captured and who will, in time, be freed. At this point this work appears to be presenting itself a historical document of some kind, which it is in its way, but what unfolds in the ensuing pages refuses to follow conventions a western reader might anticipate, the story to be told exists on many levels at once. Even the scribe himself is unable to clearly define his project, as in the quote above and at many other points where he approaches the question of fictions and truths, histories and unhistories.

The mythic and magic of Mun Mountain rises above the quotidian routine defined by rice and fabric. The cultivation of fields and the weaving of cotton have supported this small community for centuries, skills originally brought to them by god-like travellers who arrived in the Land of the Upper Forest—or so the legend goes—taught to the people, and passed down from father to son and mother to daughter. The scribe, using the lowercase “i” as first person pronoun, favours commas over full stops to affect a living, breathing quality to the tales he shares. In long, unbroken sentences that that often extend for pages, he writes of his childhood, his parents and older brother, and other important characters of his hometown, of his “birthsoil.” He writes of the forest, the birds, and the mystical creatures that could be imagined in the formations atop the mountain. And, of course, along with stories of the rising and falling political dynasties of the distant past, he recounts the ways the outside world began to impose control, first over his nation and eventually his local region in more recent times.

At first, he recalls, war in his country caused by the French colonists seemed so far away. To adolescent boys it seemed romantic, their heads filled with images of troops fighting on horseback as in the wars they had learned about in school. It seemed romantic, like a fairy tale and they set about secretly weaving grass into horses. But when adult war suddenly arrived, with fire bombings and destruction, the magic was incinerated as were many homes and villages. The lives of classmates, friends and first girlfriends, were lost.

the sound was abrupt yet belonged to an eternity, and afterwards, young maiden, you didn’t come around here anymore, at nightfall, the night herons no longer cried among the dews, my fellow villagers went their separate ways, in two distinct directions along the horizon, to tell the truth no one wanted that to happen, somebody said it was because a venomous wind blew past and entangled everyone’s way of thinking, it was true that my homeland was then tumbling into the sorrowing pages of history

The chronicles, as they unfold, weave together fragmentary, often dreamlike stories that seem, at first glance, to be unconnected. However, each chapter is linked to the next  through images and ideas—that which closes one is picked up  and carried, perhaps in a new direction, in the next. Motifs and phrases repeat, within chapters and across the work as a whole, imbuing the prose with an incantatory rhythm and meditative feel. It honours the past, acknowledges the devastation of war, and offers the hope of continuity, of  resilience:

i’d like to speak of the tokay geckos that lived in the hollows of the sandbox trees by the village entrance as if i were delivering , on behalf of my fellow villagers, a note of gratitude to the descendants of the beastly dinosaurs, those creatures that existed back in the Triassic days of the Mesozoic Era, if those geckos living in the hollows of the sandbox trees by the village entrance were the legitimate descendants of those dinosaurs, evolution might stand a chance of brightening up, for centuries the gecko families had been living in the hollows of those sandbox trees by the village entrance, but once the war began, the trees were all knocked down by bombs and bullets, there was not a single plant left by the village entrance, but in the night one could still hear the sound of the geckos, ‘this century-long exile of the tokay geckos’ . . .

By putting words to the page, the village scribe is preserving the story of his people, and a way of life that is disappearing under the weight of modernization, but he is not alone in his task—the ghosts of his loved ones, now gone from this life, visit him still. In his words and his visions, dead live on.

For all the sorrow running through it, Chronicles of a Village shimmers with a unique beauty, one that runs clear and crisp against a misty backdrop. Translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng has taken great care with the selection of words, creating unique expressions when needed, to best reflect meanings that do not have a direct English equivalent. In a conversation with Alex Tan that can be found here at Minor Literature[s],she shares her approach to some of the language and literary aspects of the original and talks about translation as she understands it.

Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện is translated from the Vietnamese by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng and published by Yale University Press.

The church that falls again will rise again: A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

This is the story of a church, one that exists whether it is standing or not. Standing high above the Mosfellsdalur Valley in southwest Iceland, not far from the nation’s capital, Mosfell Church has,  at the time of the telling of the story—mid-twentieth century—been recently rebuilt, but it holds a history of rising and falling that reaches back a thousand years. Somewhere along the way it became associated with what parishioners believed were the bones of 10th century poet and national hero, Egill Skallagrímsson. However, the self-named inkman who is committing this account to paper has a more specific focus: he wants to put right a report of the events leading up to the last time the building was destroyed, and resolve the questions that lingered in the wake of that event:

Here, the story will be told of how the church was dismantled and razed to the ground for the third time in the latter part of the 19th century. It will be shown how powerful exponents worked together to destroy this church ever since the Danish king ordered its removal in 1774, although one hundred and twenty years passed before that order was implemented. For almost four generations, consequential parties laid their hands to that plow, such as the government in Denmark, the Icelandic Alþingi time and again, the church authorities one after another, bishops and deans as well as lesser parish authorities; finally, local farmers and honest housewives and robust men belonging to this parish, until no one remained to defend this church but a certain aged farmer at Hrísbrú named Ólafur Magnússon, and an indigent girl, a maid of the priest at Mosfell, named Guðrún Jónsdóttir.

In his introduction to A Parish Chronicle, Salvatore Scibona describes the circumstances surrounding Nobel Prize winning Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness’ decision to begin to work on this novella while vacationing in Rome in 1969. In spite of all the successes and accolades he had received by that time, he still felt like a failure because he felt had not yet gained the international readership he longed for and, at the age of sixty-seven, he may have assumed he was closing in on the end of his productive life. Having already lived two decades longer than his own father, he could not have imagined that he still had twenty-eight years and six more novels ahead of him. But he did, and the first would be this spirited tale, originally drafted six years earlier. First published in Icelandic in 1970,  it has finally been made available for English language readers in Philip Roughton’s lively translation.

With its folksy tone and wry humour, this tale begins as the story of a parish and the social rather than religious role of the church in the everyday lives and politics of a rural community, but expands to offer a colourful sketch of the impact of increasing modernization on a nation with a long and deeply rooted culture and history. It attempts to adopt a documentary approach, but the events are often exceptional and the characters are eccentric, larger-than-life heroes and heroines of a homespun saga in which Icelandic poets are quoted more than any Bible passage is, even if a church (or its emptied yet still consecrated grounds) stands at its centre. Some of these folk even had real-life counterparts with the same names living in the Mosfellsdalur region. To be on the safe side though, Laxness included a note to the first Icelandic edition that read: “References to named individuals writings documents places times and events do not serve a historical purpose in this text.”

When it appears that the long overdue order to consolidate two parishes into one and construct a new church, was finally going to be implemented, old Ólafur of Hrísbrú, the crusty farmer and sheep herder, sharpens the blade of his scythe and, accompanied by one of his sons, arrives at the church and threatens to lead a revolt. But, in the absence of locals willing to take up the cause with the same steely vigour, a petition is launched instead. In the end, the only other person willing stand by his side, at least in writing, is the maid,  Guðrún Jónsdóttir, or, as she is known Big Gunna. Their letter fails to hit its mark and the church is taken down and carted away.

For the inkman who is doing his best to faithfully record the events that occurred before his own birth, Big Gunna becomes an important source of information. His interviews with her when she is an old woman are worked into his narrative. Never inclined to take a husband or to accept money for her labour, she relied on the support of the community to carry her through the long years following the demise of the church and the end of her job there. But she is not a charity case. Delightfully plain-spoken, with her own commendable value system, she describes how she traveled around the region offering her services for almost any work that needed doing—the tougher and dirtier the better.

Then in the latter part of the book, a third key character enters the scene, a young runaway who is, against all odds, taken into the home of old Ólafur and unofficially adopted. This young lad turns out to have an uncanny sense of a good deal, an inexhaustible love of automobiles, and boundless generosity. In his own way, he carries the folks of the Mosfellsdalur Valley into a new era in style.

This book is my first encounter with Halldór Laxness and, I am inclined to think it is as good as any place to start as any. Especially with the excellent introduction (reproduced here at LitHub) to the varied and shifting nature of the Icelandic master’s oeuvre.  Known for his ability to be very funny, even in his longer, bleaker novels, the narrative tone of A Parish Chronicle rests on an irresistible sly, understated humour that runs throughout. This passage, for example, describing the typical encounter travellers would have as they passed by Hrísbrú where Ólafur and one or more of his sons invariably could be found standing outside their buildings, captures the centrality of sheep to the rural consciousness:

The folk at Hrísbrú were rather pleasant of manner apart from old Ólafur when he was wrangling with the priest, but showed no particular interest in dragging people out of the mud bordering the walkway and inviting them inside. They asked for news of sheep from all over the country, because life in Iceland was, as it still is today, all about sheep. For example, when talking about the weather, it was only from the perspective of how it suited the sheep. Good weather was the weather that was good for sheep. A good year was one in which enough grass grew for the sheep. A beautiful landscape in Iceland is one in which there’s good pasturage for sheep. People’s livelihoods and outlooks on life were determined by that creature. The Hrísbrú folk were kept informed by travelers of the circumstances of sheep all over the country, and for their part, told stories about the welfare of sheep in the Mosfell district. They remembered exactly what the weather had been like for the sheep year by year for thirty years back. Those people never wore coats, but their woolen cardigans and sweaters stood up to water and wind like the fleece of an Icelandic sheep. All homemade and in the sheeps’ natural colors, mainly russet.

The world Laxness paints is, for all its quirkiness, one shaped by an abiding affection for the land and its people, his land and his people. This is, after all, the area in which he grew up and the inkman dipping his pen into the ink bottle, is a stand-in for himself. There may not be, as he once insisted, a historical purpose to the details of the account he has presented, but it is a thoroughly entertaining story.

A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness is translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton with an Introduction by Salvatore Scibona and published by Archipelago Books.