More than any of this, though, Öræfi attempts to see whether the page can give us more experience of place than the image. Bernharður ends up in Iceland because of a story he read in National Geographic; that encounter, definitive of Bernharður’s life, places us as readers in an uneasy position, knowing what we know of the consequences of his reading, what it inspired in him. We first meet him in a sorry state, and things worsen from there. The veterinarian and would-be-savior Dr. Lassi, who stands in as Bernharður’s unlikely field medic, laments her missing library, frustrated in her attempts to understand Bernharður’s story because she lacks key books to consult. Gestur, the Virgil to Bernharður’s Dante, had loaded up Bernharður’s Tardis-like traveling trunk with journals, articles, and guides, warning him that to be unread about Öræfi is to dice with death. For all that Öræfi’s pages bubble with sulphuric gasses and leak glacial floods, they remain pages, which is also to say trees, which is also to say places you might get lost. And getting lost, in Öræfi, never ends well. Reader, you have been warned.
III.
Why, then, did I find myself, in May 2017, my tent pitched yards from the very Visitor Center Bernharður tells us he crawled into, leg gouged by a wild beast? Why had I brought along my two girls, both under four, and my wife? Just what was waiting for me along the hike up towards the relentless Vatnajökull, whose finger glaciers Morsárjökull, Skaftafellsjökull, and Svínafellsjökull reach down towards the coast, hooking as if they might pluck Route 1—the only road around the island, the only road out of here—off the map entirely?
After three days of incessant rain, the sun had finally pushed on through, and our yellow tents were backlit in the kind of illumination that makes you realize why humans have so long prized gold, that useless metal. Behind the tents, I could see the canopy of birch and rowans that comprise the Bæjarstaðarskógur, an Icelandic forest you could just about get lost in, providing you trained a bit first, as though for some kind of anti-orienteering Olympics. Bernharður had been here; had stood at this site and looked east, past these trees to the menacing Hafrafell cliffs. On them I could see the Illuklettar, or Evil Rocks, as he had seen them. From such topography we get the idea that land can be forbidding, foreboding. Illuklettar seemed to roil and lash out, a fraught ocean preserved in stone.
This, and not my empty map, was Öræfi, Several Icelandic words that share the form ör connote violence: darts and scars. The adjective æfur implies vicious anger. Öræfi: a scar that’s angry enough to lash out. To call it that might not be precise linguistics, not a direct replication of language, but here in a pyritic sun, a gentle forest sloping ahead of me, I could see why Bernharður had been daunted—and could see why translating Öræfi as some kind of raging injury would do justice to the word. I could see, in other words, why the novel that bears the region’s name begins with Bernharður detailing the
large, open wound in my thigh, reminiscent of a caldera, and I thought I saw glowing lava well from it, a burning current pouring itself out like a serpent writhing up my spinal cord towards my head which was becoming a seething magma chamber
One of the most ancient truisms of creative writing comes from the Roman poet Horace: Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi. If you want me to weep, it’s your sadness you need to show me first. The narrator must be visibly sad if the reader is to become so. But how to show sadness across translation, when translation requires us to travel so far between places?
IV.
My favorite English translation of Horace’s adage, “if you want me to weep, / First show me your own eye full of tears,” is quoted by Bertolt Brecht, as translated by John Willett, based on a translation of Horace into German by Johann Christoph Gottsched. A displacement, and then some. Brecht hated Horace’s idea of art—he called it “forced emotion,” decried its falsity. Yet this collaborative, free-ranging translation of Horace, who mentions nothing about eyes or showing them, reveals something about the way translation might work as the reflection of place.
There in Skaftafell National Park, I was tracing some of Bernharður’s foosteps just as he had been tracing the explorer-soldier Captain Koch’s. I opted to forgo Bernharður’s extensive luggage and his train of Icelandic horses, traveling instead with a 360º camera and two car seats. It seemed the way to bring Öræfi across from Iceland was not only to help the novel’s Icelandic words into English, but to be in as many of the novel’s places as possible.
The point, I realized, was to find a way for my eye to contain the sights that Bernharður’s had. That to show the reader my own eye full of Evil Rocks and endless black sands wasn’t to show off vague emotions—the abstract tears Brecht lamented—but to reflect a set of images across distance. To replicate Freyung as Freyjugata, as it were, or Öræfi as The Wasteland via an em-dash—that punctuation mark which both pushes words (and worlds) away from one another and means they’re roped together, working in series.
My own travels took me, like Bernharður, to the streets of Reykjavík, to a drive out east across the flinty metal bridges Öræfi narrates being installed to complete Route 1’s ring around Iceland, ushering the modern into the untouched wilderness, bringing tourism and mice. As we drove through hail, I risked the circuitry of my 360º camera to capture the landscape moving around me. As our car sped along the single-lane highway, the rivers a quiet trickle beneath us, I wanted a way to bring Iceland back with me. I think Bernharður did, too.
V.
The 360º camera wants us to believe its image isn’t flat. A 360º image is to still photography what the globe is to the atlas. A globe allows us the full sphere, whereas the atlas admits a geometric problem: the Earth laid flat distorts itself. Everything’s out of place, a photo excerpted from its environment. Bernharður’s aunt had been photographing Iceland when she and his mother ran into trouble. His response? To follow the language of maps, to see land in terms of the words that have shaped it. Landscape, after all, isn’t an objective reality: it’s the way we perceive the world around us. It’s the story behind both the atlas and the globe.
The geologist Nick Warner explained this to me another way as we looked out at the Stampar crater row in the South West of Iceland, where during the Reykjanes Fires of 1210–1240 AD four different lava fields formed across the two westernmost volcanic systems on the Reykjanes peninsula. Becoming a geologist, he said, isn’t just about acquiring the terminology that helps articulate the earth’s shape; nor is it just about understanding the processes by which a particular formation has arisen. At some point, geologists stop seeing the earth the way the rest of us do. They start seeing geologic history replaying itself before them, their eyes tiny movie theaters in which an epic sweep of natural history unfolds, a tuff cone forming at the shore during a surtseyan eruption, magma coming into billowing contact with water.
Show me your own eye full of tears—or full of geologic time playing out. Öræfi—The Wasteland comes into being because of the way volcanic eruptions laid waste to a region once called Herað, or The Province, despoiling it, ridding it of places by ridding it of place names, only to in time give fertile rise to new flora and fauna. “The Wasteland” is a perspective, a way of seeing. And all our ways of seeing are also our ways of speaking, of giving the land we’re seeing to the language that will translate it across distance.
VI.
To translate, then, is to be on location: both to get lost in the forest and to realize what it might mean to stand up within it. When I tell new friends that I translate Icelandic, they almost always ask, So you must speak it really well? What I should say in response is that I hope I see Iceland really well.
To talk about seeing Iceland, though, isn’t uncomplicated. There’s an Icelandic saying some trace back to the father of the Norse gods, Oðin: glöggt er gests auga, meaning that the guest’s eyes see more clearly than the resident’s. The connection to Oðin is fanciful, reliant on that fact that he, like Bernharður’s guide, The Regular, went by Gestur, among other names. T
he link in Öræfi between Gestur and Oðin gets lost in translation. In its place, we get “The Regular,” a known entity, a fixture, someone who frequents a place. How clearly are we seeing here?
Out in the field, there in Bernharður’s wake, I discover it’s impossible to take a 360º video without the videographer showing up. At the base of the image lie the lines that ridge my fingers, the bulk of my hand interrupting the scene. Panning the black sands over which Bernharður drives on the way to his fateful adventure, you see me there, wearing the raincoat I bought to hike Ben Nevis, somewhat impromptu, a decade ago. I’m wearing, too, a white 66º North Iceland hat, which always makes me feel 50% local, 50% tourist eyesore. Filming, I try to hide myself, the finger-length camera held atop my head. The result is a strange image reminiscent of nothing more than the 1988 ZX Spectrum Microprose soccer game: a head, two arms, nothing more. Raindrops dot the image, interfering with what might be a seal head bobbing about in the glacial waters of Jökulsarlón, where glaciers calve and drift out to sea, out to where they can’t be seen.
Perhaps the point isn’t to hide the videographer. Video, first person singular, meaning I see, from the Latin. Graph, also Latin: writing. The rain bows our tents’ roofs. Like Koch and Bernharður before us, we’re freighted with too much luggage, can’t really fit it inside the tents alongside our four bodies. Pressed against the tent’s edges, our bags take on water, imported macaroni shells going tacky, shoes dampening. I do my best to keep the 360º sealed in Ziplocs, only to bring it out in downpours, desperate to capture the surreal blue of icebergs against the ashen slopes leading down to water. I let the rain in, and the videos I write to my hard drive bring that rain with them, flecked evidence from the trip. When, a week after my return, my laptop is destroyed by a freak torrential rain in Red Hook, Brooklyn, it seems that the rain has followed me.
In the end, you can’t remove the I, or the eye. In the rare image where I almost conceal myself holding the camera, my shadow stands on the sand, which isn’t black enough, quite, to hide it. If translation is being on location, it is also being on location, present in place and words, land and language. The amazing Icelandic Literature Center and the Writers’ Union of Iceland offer residencies to translators, helping us spend time in Iceland, not just to work with authors, not just to immerse ourselves in the language, but so we can be on location. Can let sites be sights. I’d love for more of translation to be so site-specific. It takes a rare book like Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s Öræfi to make the locations of translation visible. Whatever befalls Bernharður, places and names alike live on because of what he notices, what he records. The eyes of the guest aren’t clear—they’re flecked with rain—but they’re novel. And what they see, the reader sees too. Reflected, which means distorted, which means we have to look a little closer, and maybe, finally, we get to see a little more distinctly.
There, in Öræfi, at Hotel Fresynes, Bernharður lies waiting. His story needs a translator: in the novel, her name is Interpreter. Nothing happens without her. By the time you find out where Bernharður really is, and has been, what you’ve got is a story of how place is language, and how language is translation. Sometimes, you can’t see the words for the trees until a book brings them to light.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Dr. Nick Warner for his insights into the geology of Öræfi and Southern Iceland. The students who took the Writing and Knowing the Land: Abroad in Iceland Study Abroad course at SUNY Geneseo in Summer 2016, taught by the translator and Dr. Warner, helped bring the area to life with the wonderful ways they saw and wrote about Iceland’s people, trees, and places. A special thanks to Lizzie Pellegrino, who served as research assistant and geological consultant for the translation, providing much needed information about pyroclastic flows, glaciology, and also Rick and Morty. This translation is for Jess, June, and Rosie, who are always ready to share and delight in Iceland with me.
Research for this translation was supported by funding by SUNY Geneseo and the Geneseo Foundation.
Ófeigur Sigurðsson was born in Reykjavík in 1975. He is a graduate of the University of Iceland with a degree in philosophy. He made his poetry debut in 2001 with Skál fyrir skammdeginu (Cheers to the Winter Darkness), and published his first novel, Áferð (Texture), in 2005. Since then, he has published six books of poetry and three novels, in addition to his work as an accomplished translator. Sigurðsson was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 for his novel, Jon, making him the first Icelander to receive the prize. His novel Öræfi: The Wasteland was published in Iceland in 2014 to great critical and commercial acclaim, and received the Book Merchant’s Prize in 2014 and the Icelandic Literature Prize in 2015. He currently resides in Antwerp, Belgium.
Lytton Smith is the award-winning author of four books of poetry and several translations from the Icelandic, including Jón Gnarr’s childhood memoir trilogy, The Indian, The Pirate, and The Outlaw (Deep Vellum); The Ambassador by Bragi Ólafsson (Open Letter); and Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir (Open Letter). His translation of Guðbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson—Bestseller (Tómas Jónsson, metsölubók) was published by Open Letter Books in 2017. He is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York.
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