Lytton Smith
Photo courtesy of Lytton Smith
Bio
Lytton Smith is the author of two full-length poetry collections, While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed By It (Nightboat Books) and The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books), and two chapbooks, My Radar Data Knows Its Thing (Foundlings Press) and Monster Theory (Poetry Society of America). He has translated several novels and works of nonfiction from the Icelandic, including books by Jón Gnarr, Bragi Ólafsson, Kristín Ómarsdóttir, and Guðbergur Bergsson, as well as various poems and short-stories for anthologies and magazines. He is associate professor of Creative Writing, a member of the Black Studies faculty, and director of the Center for Integrative Learning at SUNY Geneseo where he been since 2014.
The translator has been accused of being a text’s betrayer or at best its absent-minded custodian: if translation is where things (poetry, etc.) get lost, the translator can feel like they’ve left their text lying around like an abandoned wallet. Not for nothing is former National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellow Idra Novey’s first novel about a translator trying to find the missing author she’s translating. The phone call with the wonderful news about my NEA Fellowship came when I was traveling overseas, in another time zone, and so felt both magical and rather on point: translation happens in an in-between, still ongoing space that’s neither here nor there. The NEA Translation Fellowship is an anchor amid all that, not just for me, but more importantly for Icelandic literature in translation. To translate one of the world’s older literary languages, to translate on behalf of a country where roughly one in 10 people will publish a book, where more books are published per capita than almost anywhere else on the planet—that’s a humbling responsibility. And a thrilling one. The Icelandic proverb, glöggt er gests augað generously suggests that the guest’s eyes might be keener than the host’s. The NEA Translation Fellowship is an amazing opportunity to bridge Iceland and the U.S., for U.S. readers to be guests within Icelandic plots, among Icelandic characters. I’m particularly delighted that this award recognizes a leading woman writer from Iceland, a country where in 1975 the women went on strike to demonstrate their roles in Icelandic society and in the economy – what was known as the Kvennafrídagurinn or Women‘s Day Off. It led to legislation guaranteeing equal pay. That strike gets mentioned in passing in The Blotting, and Sigrún Pálsdóttir‘s novel traces three generations of women in sharp-edged, unexpected, witty ways. It‘s a delight to get to work with, and try not to lose, her words.
from The Blotting by Sigrún Pálsdóttir
[translated from the Icelandic]
I close the door and push my face up against the front door. The great importance of the moment. I draw deep breaths and then walk in exaggerated quiet, backwards actually, into the living room. It’s nothing more than three or four steps. How can it be that this door hasn’t been visible to me in the whole six days I have lived in this house? Or was it here yesterday? I don’t dare answer the question right away, sitting on the couch and taking from my clenched palm the crumbled paper card, the business card, my sister-in-law gave me; I stroke it and try to smooth it out.
Díana D. Lárusdóttir
Life Coach
Member of the International Coach Federation (ICF)
Fear is that little darkroom
where misconceptions are developed.
Exactly! I feel like I’m losing myself as I try to look at myself through my sister-in-law’s eyes, in concert with the name on the card. Who did she think she was to say goodbye like this? What does she know? As soon as I pose these questions, the possibility occurs to me that her loquacity likely indicates her suspicion that I am facing something more than a fierce headache. That I have some kind of theoretical dilemma: “They are considerable, those last manacles.” Intuition or drivel?
For now, I lean towards the latter, standing up and sticking the card in my dressing gown pocket. I walk toward the door. It’s slightly shorter than the others in the apartment. I run my fingers over the plain surface of the door, grab the handle, and push it down. Then I break off, relaxing my grip; I bend down and gently put my face up to the door, one eye to the keyhole. At first, it’s nothing but dark, so black that it’s like there’s nothing inside, or that the wall is right up against the door. After a while, the darkness dilutes and I feel like I see a faint light in the distance. I straighten myself again and look at the door. I knock on the wall and around the doorway. Then I grab the handle quickly, about to open it. But, of course, the door doesn’t budge. I start to shove and push the door away from me, then to pull at it, and suddenly stop when I sense someone standing behind me.
My husband, Hans. In front of me now. Me with the door at my back. How did he get into the living room with his two shopping bags, his face both questioning and smiling? I say, “What?” And then he replies, “What what?” Kisses me and smirks. Then he takes the bags into the kitchen. I trot behind him.
Why has this door never been opened, not since we moved in? Perhaps for the same reason as the truth about my many years of research refuses to come to the surface: I cannot, of course, think about that hell, no, not even put it into words in my own head. All around me there is a wonderful silence, temporary approval that a little dent to my health, nothing more, has caused the suspension of my studies for an indeterminate period.
About Sigrún Pálsdóttir
Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s previous books—Sigrún og Friðgeir: Ferðasaga [Sigrún and Friðgeir: A Travel Narrative] and Þóra Biskups og Raunir Íslenskrara Embættismannstéttar [Þóra, Daughter of the Bishop, and the Troubles of the Icelandic Elite]—have distinguished her as a leading Icelandic literary voice. The critic Audur Aðalsteinsdottir describes her having a “unique talent for setting personal narratives within their historical context.” One review described Kompa [The Blotting] as “like a cubist work of art” (the newspaper DV). Jóhann Helgi Heiðdal, writing for Starafugl, commended the book’s ability to “integrate an ordinary person’s day-to-day consciousness, conveying their mental difficulties and self-awareness, the ghosts of their past.”