Poet (and building superintendent) Sturla Jón Jónsson, is the Icelandic representative to this Lithuanian poetry conference. Which makes sense—he just has a new collection out that’s getting a lot of praise . . . Well, that is until he goes away and a major newspaper runs a story accusing Sturla of plagiarism. And that’s just the start of Sturla’s troubles. In Lithuania, someone steals his new overcoat, so he decides to swipe someone else’s jacket—which, obviously, doesn’t end up working all that well for him.

Here’s how Karen Russell—author of Swamplandia put it in a recent issue of PEN America:

Bragi Olafsson’s English language debut [Ed. Note: The Pets was his English language debut, but whatever], The Ambassador, is the strange, hilarious, and brilliant story of Sturla Jon Jonsson, a building superintendent who also happens to be a venerated Icelandic poet. He’s on his way to Lithuania to represent his nation at a literary festival, opening the door for all kinds of scathingly funny insights into the “situation of the writer.” It’s a tricky book to paraphrase—boozy, literary Icelandic black comedy? Icelandic picaresque? No “elevator story” exists for it, according to the book’s publisher, the fabulous Open Letter. It’s unlike anything else out there, anda joy to read. Sturla gets into all sorts of jams over the course of this short, weird novel, from being accused of nicking his latest poetry collection from a dead cousin to losing his overcoat, the only piece of clothing with a high thread count that this starving artist has ever owned. Kafkaesque yuks and keen insight are brought to you by the badass genius translator Lytton Smith—one of my favorite poets and author of the acclaimed debut The All-Purpose Magical Tent—and he uses all his creativity and rigor here, as well as his deep knowledge of Icelandic culture. Sturla’s inimitable voice can now infuriate and delight an American crowd.

And Agni just stating:

When we read as consumers we are consuming a product; but reading a novel like The Ambassador requires us to look at literature the way my father looks at ferries—to see an ingeniously designed, carefully constructed assemblage of parts, an assemblage that is good and valuable because it functions so well. Ólafsson’s novel has no flashy packaging—the main characters are devoid of youth, beauty, and conventional charm, the pacing is slow, and the plot wanders—but he has assembled these homely and mismatched materials into an exquisitely crafted novel that is gratifying to see at work.

One other bit about the book before we get to the sample. In The Abassador, everyone who attends this Lithuanian poetry conference receives a copy of featuring translated poems from a number of the conference participants. Well, Lytton actually recreated this book, which is available as a $.99 ebook and features “translations” from writers such as Jason Grunebaum, Jesse Ball, and Matthew Zapruder. So, for the price of a John Locke novel, you can get some faux-international poetry! (This actually is a brilliant collection—both the poems themselves and the games surrounding these poems are immensely satisfying.)

At long last, here’s a bit of The Ambassador. This is actually the editorial Sturla Jón Jónsson writes for the newspaper before taking off for the international poetry conference (after the jump):

“Two Hours Away from the City”
by Sturla Jón Jónsson

Poetry lives in all things. That
is the chief argument
against Poetry.
—Miroslav Holub

The trip scheduled from Vilnius to Druskininkai takes just two hours. The Czech poet Nezval wrote about the five minutes distance from the town but here we are dealing with a longer distance. From Vilnius to Druskininkai, it is a two-hour
trip by coach.

Vilnius? Why talk about Vilnius? And what in heaven’s name is Druskininkai? What does the unintelligible name Druskininkai signify?

Well, I have been invited to an international poetry festival in a little village in Lithuania called Druskininkai, which is southwest of the capital city Vilnius and directly south of the ancient capital city, Kaunas, where the Dalai Lama once went when he visited Vilnius. No other Icelanders have been invited to the festival in Druskininkai; I’ll be traveling alone and I am supposed to show up in this country in mid-October.

It is certainly tempting to state the obvious and say that Druskininkai is an absurd name for a village, even taking into account that the village is in Lithuania, a country where anything goes when it comes to giving names.

But such temptation is too obvious for a poet to give in to it. And no less so when we are discussing a poet who has reached the stage in his art where he believes he has nothing more to accomplish as a poet.

Druskininkai means the same thing as Salzburg in Austria. Although Salzburg isn’t considered a very happening place at the moment, still, it is hardly possible to say that nothing good has come from there.

“I am called Dainius Navakas and I come from Druskininkai.” This doesn’t sound convincing though there is evidence of an individual with the name Dainius Navakas who lives in Druskininkai.

After I received an invitation to the poetry festival, I looked up information about Druskininkai on the Internet and found, among other things, the name Dainius Navakas. From what I understood from the homepage of the town of Druskininkai, this Dainius Navakas works as some kind of information official.

But now to the poetry festival. The last thing I want to do is seem ungrateful towards the people who organized it, but at the same time I have to mention that I was astonished when I saw the first event would be a recital by three American
poets.

I discovered this information in the documents about the festival that were sent to me by e-mail. Actually, the three women poets are supposed to read in Vilnius itself, in the cultural center at the American Embassy, and although that will take place before the festival formally starts, I notice on one page of the documents which were sent to me that their reading will signal that the festival has begun.

All this is a reason for even more amazement, when I think about how the international poetry festival in Druskininkai is originally Nordic, certainly not American or Anglo-Saxon.

If I’ve learned anything from my past experiences of poetry festivals of the sort we’re discussing here, then I know that nothing will prevent these three American poets from reading at the opening of the festival. Neither a bomb attack on their embassy in the city, nor unforeseen deaths back home, be that in Wyoming or Nebraska, will prevent them from being at the podium at the designated time.

No doubt it will surprise people that I react to the matter like this, by declaring my opinion that nothing will prevent the American trio from doing what they’re supposed to, yet in reality the plans of the people who devise the program for a festival of this caliber seldom go wrong. I speak from experience in this matter.

For example, I don’t foresee that, instead of these three American women, three male poets from Finland who no-one is expecting to be in Druskininkai in October will suddenly jump up from nowhere. Three very fat and dead drunk Fins with everything showing, in all senses of the phrase.

No. Nuh-uh, as people say out in the country, people who have no idea that a gathering like the Druskininkai gathering exists anywhere in the world, and who wouldn’t give a hoot if they did.

If something unpredictable were to happen at a poetry festival like this, it would be along these lines: a few minutes before a reading, somebody would notice that the texts from one of the foreign participants, which have been translated into Lithuanian like everybody’s else’s poems, are not actually his own poems, but some entirely different pieces which are totally unconnected to poetry.

An obituary about a deceased relative? A letter to a newspaper which the party in question wrote to protest the planned organizational changes to the city center in the town where he lives?

The poet accidentally e-mailed the wrong document overseas, and the translator, who had naturally never read anything by the poet, and so had no sense from reading the article how it ought to sound, hadn’t noticed anything wrong, and so translated the whole caboodle without hesitation, trusting that the continuous and somewhat lumbering text is just one long and rather detailed prose poem.

Lithuanian is a very old language. The oldest in Europe, if Icelandic is not counted. I’ve read works in Lithuanian and heard it spoken on board a ferry to Norway, and I really think it would be exaggerating to describe the language as beautiful in either texture or sound.

I, at least, can’t make it work to lyrical ends. It needs some great changes to become a useful tool in the hands of the poet, at least those poets who have developed any feeling for sound and rhythm.

According to the program of the Druskininkai festival, some domestic poets will be showing off. I can already hear the rattle when all the Antanases and Vytautases begin booming loudly into the microphone in the festival hall.

That will be an unbroken hour of torture and we’ll have to listen to it. And then the reading will continue with the translated poems of the participants, with the proud translators rising up from their chairs and reeling off the obituaries for deceased friends and the newspaper articles about planning matters, and then one will deeply wish, just like the young student Rastignac—when he stood before Monsieur and Madame de Restaud, having dropped old Goriot’s name—that the earth will open up and swallow him.

But let us assume everything goes as it should as far as the translation of the foreigners’ poems is concerned. Let us allow the natives the benefit of doubt in this respect.

There is still, on the other hand, the question of whether one will be able to actually read one’s poetry, even though that is the reason for the trip to Druskininkai.

Three or fours years ago, I was invited to take part in a comparable festival in the city of Liège in Belgium, although that festival was perhaps on a considerably greater scale than the one I will be attending in Lithuania.

Despite the fact that I stayed in Liège for four whole days, and though the organizers were good enough to see to everyone’s needs while we were there, it turned out, when it came down to it, that there wasn’t enough time to read my poems.

In the first place, so many poets had been invited to the festival, from every corner of the world, that there were very few poets left in the countries they had come from; it would have caused serious problems if the invited poets hadn’t returned to
their native countries. And secondly, the program in which I was included stretched so far in excess of the time limit that, when it was time for me, the time set aside for the reading had already run out.

The festival organizers announced the immediate departure of the coach that was going to deliver the participants from the reading hall back to the hotel.

At that very moment I was beginning to get dry in the mouth, out of nervousness at having to read in front of such esteemed people from so many countries.

There was no way, apparently, to make the coach wait. The driver needed to get home. And the question I asked one Belgian poet, a young man who I had talked with earlier, during one of the many midday breaks, was this: “To his home where? Is his home so far away that the organizers of the festival need to worry about him getting there in good time? In good time for what?”

For my part, I’d come all the way from Iceland to read poems in Belgium, and because this Belgian driver, who had been hired to drive me and the other poets home to a hotel after the recital, needed to get home right now and go to sleep, there wasn’t time for me, the next-to-last poet in the program.

Nor for the South African poet, who was last in the program.

It seems the poetic democracy they have in Belgium is like the freedom of speech in the Parliament of the Communist party in Moscow: the Chief Secretary and his comrades from the Party’s Executive Branch Committee reported, in a speech lasting many hours, all the magnificent qualities of the red power and the Party’s mercy, but the people’s delegate to Parliament was only given three minutes to make his own recommendations.

The difference, of course, is that the black South African and I didn’t get a single second to showcase our excellent abilities.

We could just as well have stayed home; he in his faraway Johannesburg (if that’s where he lived) and I in Skúlagata, in my cozy little Reykjavík.

And so I’ve still never read my poems in Belgium. Even though I was sent there for four days for precisely that purpose. The only thing I got for my trouble in making that journey to Liège was a daily meal with the other poets in the assembly hall of the conference center where the festival was being held.

And wine. There was certainly unlimited wine with our food, both during the festival and in the evenings.

The food itself was nothing to complain about, although some poets, at least one from Iraq and another from Cyprus, did have some criticisms, particularly about the relative portions of meat, fish, potatoes, and salads on their plates.

This all begs the question, of course, as to whether something similar, that is, in terms of the amount of time for reading, is in the cards for Lithuania.

“In the cards for Lithuania?” That reminds me of the story of a man whom I met by chance in a restaurant in downtown Reykjavík two or three years ago. He had been invited to Lithuania, but unlike me was he on a business trip (although in a certain sense you could say that my dealings with that country are a little business-like in character).

While I earn my living as a superintendent and a poet, this man works on the other hand for a wealthy firm in Reykjavík, and the hotel which he stayed at in Vilnius, located on the main street in the city center, was, according to his account, the best of the many hotels he’d stayed in.

It was comparable to the best hotels in New York and Paris. There was a roomy Jacuzzi, a thirty-inch flatscreen on the wall facing a California King-size bed, a DVD player, and not just a box of assorted chocolates laying on his pillow on the bed, but
also a little bottle of champagne and a cloth bag containing orange-flavored chocolate.

I can’t help but suspect I’ll be thinking about the magnificent description of this hotel when I step over the threshold to the dormitory, or hostel, or shelter, which is were I assume I’ll be staying in Druskininkai and Vilnius.

Unbelievably, that is in fact the usual situation for invited guests if you make your living as a poet. Even the Faroe Islands, the one nation out of all nations which ought to comport itself well towards Icelanders, is no less apathetic when it comes to dealing with Icelandic artists and literary folk.

A few years ago I went to a kind of “culture week” in Þórshöfn, where poets, visual artists, and musicians from all the Nordic countries and Greenland come together, and it was not until the small welcoming committee greeted me and the other Icelanders at their poky little airport in Þórshöfn that I found out I wouldn’t have a private room at the hotel. I wouldn’t be based at the hotel at all, but instead in a boarding house at the edge of town.

I ended up sharing a room with a Norwegian who had come over from Norway and spoke the absurd children’s language nýnorska, or New Norwegian, and who was purging himself through some kind of detox, letting nothing pass his lips the whole week except lemon-flavored water.

It was, evidently, incomprehensible that this miserable individual should choose exactly this week for his self-centered cleansing ritual. The smell emanating from his mouth every time he opened it (which wasn’t infrequently) was the sourest
halitosis I have ever experienced from anybody.

That we were roommates made other participants at this Faroese poetry farce look at me with compassion for having to share a room with this New-Norwegian phenomenon, but also with ironic glances, which I interpreted as indicating they had
formed an opinion that I, the Icelander, deserved to spend the darkest hours of the day in Þórshöfn in an atmosphere transformed by the cocktail of lemon juice, water, Norwegian exhalations, and unused digestive fluids.

I am not saying for certain that the same thing will happen in Lithuania, but, given how the program is organized for the Friday, with the recital of the American poets, I don’t exactly have high hopes.

It will begin with the farce the American trio have prepared for us. Kelly Francesca, Daniella Goldblum, and Jenny Lipp.

The first day proper of the festival is Saturday. All right, I say. All right. Nothing wrong with that.

But that the first item in the program is called “After Midday with German poet Günther Meierhof” is not only typical but even an inevitable discrimination against poets who speak and write in minor languages; that seems to be a given at festivals
like this, whether they are held in England, Sweden, or Iceland.

This so-called “After Midday” with the German poet (a poet no-one outside of Germany has ever heard of) goes on for two hours, and then, only then, does someone else get a turn.

First up are the domestic poets, and things proceed with them offering some outlandish play, no doubt some sort of “lyrical” play—I can’t understand why people haven’t seen through this phenomenon long ago, since the theater has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry.

There seems, in fact, to be something missing from the program on Saturday: it ends after this “performance” and participants are simply left afterwards in an empty space. There is not even any mention of supper.

The second day starts with the formal registration of participants at something called the Dainava center at 16 Maironio Street.

Why on earth do the people who organize these things assume that we all know where Maironio Street is? Most of us have come to Druskininkai for the first (and last) time in our lives.

But at the end of the registration period (which I don’t expect will be any better; I imagine we’ll get some kind of card with our name on it, which we’re expected to wear hanging on our chests) we suddenly jump into a recital by some poet from
Wales, some totally unknown poet who has decided to go by the name Niphin Bush, absurd as it sounds.

It doesn’t take a powerful imagination to predict that such people are more accurately called drinkers. A poet bearing the same last name as an American president doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a poet.

I don’t intend to cast specific aspersions on the job of the American president—haven’t we had enough of that grumbling?—but trying to make a career as a poet who shares a name with George W., Jeb, and George the elder is about as clever as sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck that’s going at full speed only to find the steering wheel is missing.

I perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to make assertions about people I’ve never met. But if anyone is allowed to do this, then I think I should be the one.

Before I went to the poetry festival in Liège, the one I mentioned above, I carefully read the documents about the festival which I’d been sent, and one participant caught my attention: a fifty-something poet from Ireland (exactly the way you’d
describe me, if you changed the “r” in Ireland for a “c”). This person has published an incredible number of poetry books, as well as some books on the art of poetry in general (as if there aren’t enough books about that already).

Although I didn’t have a picture of this person, I immediately knew he had to be a drinker, and I was also sure his sole purpose in visiting Liège was to sample the Belgian strawberry and cherry beer.

Indeed, I had a very vivid image of this person in my mind, long before I met him, and in that image he was sitting at a Belgian beer bar with a huge glass of light-red strawberry beer in front of him, and beside the beer were two or three whisky glasses which he had gulped down between mouthfuls of beer.

And then I met the man: the only thing wrong with my prophetic image was his preference for Irish rather than strawberry beer; he drank Guinness with whisky. But his main purpose in turning up at the poetry festival was, as he himself put it: “One has poetic license to drink more than one usually drinks on a working day at home.”

I don’t know whether I should recount the other items on the program for Sunday. To tell the truth, what most attracted my attention in the program was the midday, coffee, and supper breaks, which could be more frequent, based on a quick glance
at how compressed the poetry program is.

There, at least, you get some nourishment, something you don’t get from all the Nordic drivel which will be poured over us by the bucket-load at the festival.

And barely have I got my head around the term “creative writing” than, between one o’clock and half-past three on Sunday, we’re offered a lesson in this sort of writing.

I am fairly sure the trio of American poets will do really well at that gathering, shouting interjections in the form of pretentious-sounding questions which have no value besides disturbing the moderators of these so-called lessons from their attempt to share their limited knowledge with the simpletons who go in for the creative-writing lark—a group which definitely won’t include me.

And that about covers the major points of the Lithuanian program, which I have here in front of me, except for the Sunday night, when they’ve planned some universal gathering of poets. And, following that, there’s an item in the program with
the embarrassing name “Night of the One Poem.”

Monday, the last official day of the festival, naturally begins with breakfast. Some people won’t exactly be bright-eyed that morning.

Then there is some ridiculous performance planned for the tired, ready to depart participants, some nonsense called “The disagreement between fire, water, air, and earth.”

I’m going to make myself disappear while this torture takes place.

At the end of all this, there’s a festival publicity event to introduce a festival poetry collection which is being published on behalf of the festival.

The only good thing about both the presentation and the publication is that—mixed in with all the stillborn poems by Jespers, Bengts, and Kláuses—you can find my own poems in the collection, the poems of a poet who has turned his back
on poetry.

Actually, the poems will be in the odd Lithuanian language, but nevertheless they will be there, and as far as I’m concerned it will be enough that people know the poems were originally written in the one Nordic language you can definitely describe
as having a somewhat lyrical tone: the Icelandic language.

And then, as a way of concluding this tragicomic presentation, all kinds of reading groups take over the program. We poor devils will be arranged into groups according to some rigid system one of the festival committee members has been devoting months to, and I’m assuming that these groups will perform an autopsy on one of the poems.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up choosing a messy effort by one of the American housewife-poets, or by the Meierhof Phenomenon; it certainly won’t be a poem by that drunkard Bush or by me, who is from the back of beyond.

And finally, when we’ve all been over-stuffed with the art of words, the organizers will reveal to us who is the idiotic winner of the poetry contest they announced on the first day of the festival.

At this moment, I will be asking myself why in the world I accepted the invitation to this strange festival. Especially as I’m already thinking about, eagerly anticipating, the moment I get to take off in the airplane from Vilnius, free from all that crap,
at least until the invite to the next festival arrives.

Nevertheless, I am going to go there in mid-October; not long now.

Indeed, I got my tickets in the mail this morning. Keflavík—Copenhagen—Vilnius and back. The tickets were sealed in a stupid envelope which was so tight a fit that I tore them on one corner when I tried to get them out.

It felt to me like I was playfully tearing banknotes in half. The feeling was painful and tender at the same time.

I imagined some crazy rich rapper in Los Angeles excitedly setting down his gun and beginning to tear dollar bills apart in front of a photographer who has come to visit him.

Why don’t they invite this sort of larger-than-life guy to Lithuania for the festival?

Someone people know. Someone who can compose on the spot and actually has something to say about the situation in the world. Or the situation in South Central.

I can imagine this rapper sitting at the breakfast in Druskininkai, his baseball cap on backwards and thick gold chains dangling into his oatmeal.

The organizer of the festival is standing outside the breakfast room, and he has taken up smoking again.

“Birthday” was what really put The Sugarcubes on the map, and evokes a very particular period of time (for me at least). It’s charming song, one that Bjork referred to as a “tasteless pop song.” In her own words:

“It’s a story about a love affair between a five year old girl, a secret and a man who lives next door. The song’s called Birthday because it’s his fiftieth birthday, but not many people can figure that out of the lyrics ‘cos it’s more about the atmosphere around it and how they touch. It’s a tasteless pop song—not even that. A pop song—very unusual”

“I was always changing my mind about what the lyrics should be about. I had the atmosphere right from the start but not the facts. It finally ended up concentrating on this experience I remembered having as a little girl, among many other little girls’ experiences. It’s like huge men, about fifty or so, affect little girls very erotically but nothing happens . . . nothing is done, just this very strong feeling. I picked on this subject to show that anything can affect you erotically; material, a tree, anything.”

Yep. More Icelandic music and books tomorrow!

Additionally, this issue contains a lot of pieces from the 48th Congress of International PEN, which took place back in 1986, and became the basis for this year’s Festival since it “explored how writers use their imagination naturally and gracefully to speak to one another across boundaries, and the way governments, too, are capable of using their vision to improve the world’s troubles.” Included in this issue are pieces by Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, John Barth, Salman Rushdie, Kobo Abe, Danilo Kis, Adam Zagajewski, Gunter Grass, Margaret Atwood, etc., etc. (Really looking forward to exploring all this.)

But the main reason I’m writing this post is to praise “The Good Books: A Forum.” Basically, this grew out of the idea that all the writers at the festival could bring a book they love and swap it with the Gideon Bible in the hotel where they were staying. (BTW, DO IT!!! This should become common practice among all.)

Instead, PEN put together this feature in which scads of authors recommended the one book they would bring to some sort of mythical “book swap.” The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa was recommended any dozen number of times, and Don Quixote got plugged a couple times. The whole list is interesting, but for obvious reasons, the one that caught my eye was Karen Russell’s The Ambassador:

Bragi Olafsson’s English language debut, The Ambassador, is the strange, hilarious, and brilliant story of Sturla Jon Jonsson, a building superintendent who also happens to be a venerated Icelandic poet. He’s on his way to Lithuania to represent his nation at a literary festival, opening the door for all kinds of scathingly funny insights into the “situation of the writer.” It’s a tricky book to paraphrase—boozy, literary Icelandic black comedy? Icelandic picaresque? No “elevator story” exists for it, according to the book’s publisher, the fabulous Open Letter. It’s unlike anything else out there, anda joy to read. Sturla gets into all sorts of jams over the course of this short, weird novel, from being accused of nicking his latest poetry collection from a dead cousin to losing his overcoat, the only piece of clothing with a high thread count that this starving artist has ever owned. Kafkaesque yuks and keen insight are brought to you by the badass genius translator Lytton Smith—one of my favorite poets and author of the acclaimed debut The All-Purpose Magical Tent—and he uses all his creativity and rigor here, as well as his deep knowledge of Icelandic culture. Sturla’s inimitable voice can now infuriate and delight an American crowd.

You can purchase your own copy of The Ambassador by and you can get PEN America right (FYI: this post is so on top of things that the new issue isn’t even available for sale yet. But it should be up there momentarily.)

In the novel, this book is referenced, and a few of the festival-goers are described, but not very many, which is what led translator Lytton Smith to come up with the fun idea of having American poets and translators Each of the participants invented a poet, and a poem by that poet that they then supposedly translated into English . . . In other words, this is a collection of fake poets, falsely translated, and plays off of the themes of truth, fiction, and plagiarism that run throughout the novel. (There was a panel at this year’s ALTA on imaginary translations, which this would’ve fit into perfectly.)

Click to download a PDF, EPUB, or Kindle edition of the collection, which features “translations” from such writers as Sawako Nakayasu, Jason Grunebaum, Idra Novey, Eliot Weinberger, Jesse Ball, Matthew Zapruder, and Becka Mara McKay.

There’s also this playful intro from Lytton himself:

From the mystified pop culture references of Argentine poet Silvia Plata to the almost intangible tracings of Danish-Yogaslavian-Croatian poet Lørpsliç Bierkegårt, from the deeply personal lyrics of Greek poet Ioanna Theodorou to the distressed political writings of Hindi poet Radhika Matiyani, the selection of poems before you, translated by English-language poets from America and the U.K., offers a rare glimpse into the world of translation.

These poems originate in a strange volume, titled The Season of Poetry. _The Season of Poetry apparently gathered poems by writers from across the world who had come together in Lithuania for an International Poetry Festival one October. Based in Vilinius and the spa town Druskininkai, participants in the festival shared their verses, met one another face to face, and attended talks covering topics including “the work of German poet Günther Meierhof” and “references to overcoats in European modernist poetry.”

I stumbled across this book online—and how nice it is to still be able to stumble across a book in this digital age—via a series of chance hyperlinks in a salvo of blog comments about poetry readings and academic conferences. The only document I could find surving from this festival was a fragmentary PDF scanned from an unidentified archive. As far as I can tell, the original, assembled and edited by one Gintaras (his last name was nowhere recorded), contained the poems in Lithuanian translation and, on the facing page, in the source language.

Struck by the beauty and happenstance of this unusual assemblage of poets, all of whom had somehow escaped my notice, I contacted a number of writers and translators to see if they would bring these poems into English. My hope was to honour the original volume’s desire to spread the word about international writing, and in the process to encourage readers to discover international poets as yet unknown to them. Since each poet at the festival was asked to recommend one other poet, we now have, despite the partial nature of the PDF, a set of reading suggestions to which we might turn after this book.

Little else can be ascertained about the project. Gintaras did write a foreword, which promisingly began by explaining his desire to “assemble a poet from every corner of the globe, as though the globe has more than just four corners,” with the hope that “we will have poets we could pin onto an atlas like noticeboard pins, brightly colored and one per country.” However, the foreword soon digresses into a tirade about the pressures of organizing an international poetry festival when the organizer is faced with having to arbitrate between American and Icelandic poets and antiques dealers over the theft of items of clothing from restaurants. The reference (possibly to some work of European or Scandinavian literature?) is confoundingly mysterious.

One poem from the volume surviving as that fragmentary PDF is not translated here: a poem called “The Lesson” (or, in the original Icelandic, “kennslustund”). The poem, a meditation on how much life one is allotted on this earth, would have made a lovely addition to this translation of The Season of Poetry. Sadly, however, there was some debate as to the original author (was it really Sturla Jónsson?) and some question of plagiarism lurking around the text. While my own opinion hovers over labelling this as a case of ‘influence’ rather than literary theft, I decided to omit the poem from the current document in order that everything presented be nothing less than entirely upfront and aboveboard. Should readers be curious about the details of this literary theft, which makes for an intriguing story, they can be found in the book The Ambassador by Bragi Ólafsson (Open Letter Books, 2010).

Lastly, I hope this small pressing of poems might, like some form of rhizome, hypertext us all to other poems. May I suggest as a starting place the other poetry translated and written by the translators who have kindly given their time to this project, a list of which can be found in the Translators’ Bios at the end of the volume?

Lytton Smith

Anyway, we have a really cool promotion for this in the works (some of you already know about this, but I’ll officially announce and explain it later), and in addition, Bragi’s going to be giving a few readings over the next few weeks. Specifically:

Thursday, September 30th at 6:30pm
Scandinavian House, 58 Park Ave. (at 38th St.), NYC

Saturday, October 2nd at 9am
Pages & Places Festival
ArtWorks, 503 Lackawanna Avenue, Scranton, PA

Tuesday, October 5th at 7pm
192 Books, 192 Tenth Ave. (at 21st St.), NYC
(please RSVP by calling 212.255.4022)

I’ll post more about the Pages & Places Festival separately, but for now, here’s the basic info. And I hope you can come out to at least one of these.

To celebrate the release of this book (Bragi’s second with Open Letter, you should also check out ), we’re giving away 10 copies. Simply go to our and click “like” or leave a comment on the “giveaway post.” We’ll select the winners on Friday . . .

Totally biased, but I think this is one of our strongest seasons yet, what with Zone, the new Bragi Olafsson novel, the first of a million or so Juan Jose Saer books (one of my absolute favorites! If you can’t wait for our book, check out The Event from Serpent’s Tail—absolutely incredible), and our first poetry title . . . You can download a pdf of the catalog by clicking the link above, but here are links to each of the books, along with their respective copy:

by Juan Jose Saer. Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Argentina)

It’s October 1960, say, or 1961, in a seaside Argentinian city named Santa Fe, and The Mathematician—wealthy, elegant, educated, dressed from head to toe in white—is just back from a grand tour of Europe. He’s on his way to drop off a press release about the trip to the papers when he runs into Ángel Leto, a relative newcomer to Rosario who does some accounting, but who this morning has decided to wander the town rather than go to work.

One day soon, The Mathematician will disappear into exile after his wife’s assassination, and Leto will vanish into the guerrilla underground, clutching his suicide pill like a talisman. But for now, they settle into a long conversation about the events of Washington Noriega’s sixty-fifth birthday—a party neither of them attended.

�������’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse.

by Mathias Enard. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (France)

Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic’s specialty.

Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .

One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence—Mathias Énard’s Zone provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean.

Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. (Catalonia)

Collected here are thirty-one of Mercè Rodoreda’s most moving and challenging stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda’s most beloved short story collections: Twenty-Two Stories, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories, and My Christina and Other Stories. These stories capture Rodoreda’s full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition—Rodoreda’s “women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty” (Natasha Wimmer).

by Bragi Olafsson. Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith. (Iceland)

Sturla Jón Jónsson, the fifty-something building superintendent and sometimes poet, has been invited to a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, appointed, as he sees it, as the official representative of the people of Iceland to the field of poetry. His latest poetry collection, published on the eve of his trip to Vilnius, is about to cause some controversy in his home country—Sturla is publicly accused of having stolen the poems from his long-dead cousin, Jónas.

Then there’s Sturla’s new overcoat, the first expensive item of clothing he has ever purchased, which causes him no end of trouble. And the article he wrote for a literary journal, which points out the stupidity of literary festivals and declares the end of his career as a poet. Sturla has a lot to deal with, and that’s not counting his estranged wife and their five children, nor the increasingly bizarre experiences and characters he’s forced to confront at the festival in Vilnius . . .

Bragi Ólafsson’s The Ambassador is a quirky novel that’s filled with insightful and wry observations about aging, family, love, and the mysteries of the hazelnut.

by Andrzej Sosnowski. Translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff. (Poland)

Lodgings is the first representative selection of Sosnowski’s work available in English. Spanning his entire career, from the publication of Life in Korea in 1992 to his newest poems, this is a book whose approach to language, literature, and the representation of experience is simultaneously resonant and strange—a cocktail party where lowlifes and sophisticates hobnob with French theorists and British glam rockers, unsettling us with the hard accuracy of their pronouncements.

One of the foremost Polish poets of his generation, Andrzej Sosnowski’s work demonstrates a dazzling range of influences and echoes, from Ronald Firbank and Raymond Roussel to John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop. Also an influential editor and critic, he has received most of the literary honors available to poets in Poland, including the prestigious Silesius Prize.

It should be rather interesting . . . And assuming we have an internet connection, I should be able to blog about all my adventures. I actually have to fly from Rochester to Atlanta to Paris to Sofia, where I’ll eventually take a bus to Sozopol . . . Given my recent travel record (a night spent in JFK, a night spent in a hotel near JFK, a 5-1/2 hour volcano related delay, a flight that lasted an additional 2-1/2 hours as we rounded Iceland, etc.), this all seems like it’s never going to work.

Actually, it seems like I’m living Bragi Olfasson’s forthcoming novel, The Ambassador, which is about an Icelandic poet who is invited to a poetry conference in a small town in Lithuania. He flies to Vilnius, is supposed to take a bus to this other town, decides to skip it after his overcoat is stolen at a restaurant, drinks a lot, etc. . . .

This should be a lot of fun, and I may even have time to catch up on some things—such as my e-mail. (Seriously, if you’ve emailed me recently—or not so recently—and are awaiting a response, I’m getting there. These trips jack my ability to keep up with certain things. I’m not ignoring you, I’m just working through the tons of messages I’ve been receiving . . .)

• Kristín Ómarsdóttir has been a guest at the Ledig House and participated in the PEN World Voices Festival. So she’s not completely unknown in the States, although she has yet to have a book published in English . . . I think that’s going to change pretty soon though. Anna Stein is representing this poet, playwright, novelist, and art performer, and recently received an amazing sample translation of Kristin’s recent book ��é�� (Here) that is creepy and unnerving in a very compelling way. It opens with a soldier killing a family and his fellow soldiers in hopes of escaping the war and living a more peaceful life as a farmer. But it’s the scene with the eleven-year-old-girl and her barbies that’s really disturbing . . .

• Steinar Bragi also hasn’t made his way into English yet, but his novel Konur (Woman) was a huge success, and quite controversial. It’s also supposed to be rather disturbing (the short sample I read hinted at some of the creepiness in this book), but in a much different way. From talking to others, it sounds like the sort of novel that pisses off a lot of its readers, but these same readers tend to praise the book in the end for having the power to piss them off so thoroughly. (Intriguing, no?)

• ����ó�� is the author of a number of novels (including which was published in English by Telegram last year) and collections of poetry. But he’s probably most well known for writing the lyrics to a few Bjork songs, including “I’ve Seen it All” from Dancer in the Dark, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Phil Witte reviewed The Blue Fox for us a few months back, and called it “a pretty, touching, funny little book.” (Although he did have some issues with the translation.)

• Gyrðir Elíasson has been published in English by Comma Press in the UK. I received a copy of his short story collection when I was in Reykjavik, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Bragi Olafsson gave it some high praise though, and said that Gyrðir’s writing was very quiet and subtle, and that his most recent novel was amazing.

• Bragi Olafsson is one of Iceland’s most talented authors, and I’m not just saying that because he’s an Open Letter author. We published last fall to great acclaim, and will be bringing out The Ambassador next year. But it’s his novel that’s coming out in Iceland later this fall that has a lot of people excited. . . . A much longer work than his previous novels, the section I’ve read from this is incredible. Reminds me a bit of Flann O’Brien’s work, with a number of digressions and a somewhat absurd plot revolving around a guy who inherits a bunch of shoes. Hopefully we’ll be able to run a full review of the Icelandic edition in the near future.

• Andri Snær Magnason works in a number of genres and mediums and is a really nice, really funny guy. He wrote a kids book that was going to be translated into English, but the Canadian publisher wanted him to remove a) the reference to eating seals and b) all the mentions of friends hugging. Totally mental, and we assume it’s because they were afraid of what Midwesterners would think. (And yes, I’m from the Midwest, so I know you’re not all crazy.) But Andri’s big work is a book about the crazy free market economics that severely damaged Iceland and the impact these political and business deals have had on the environment of this beautiful, peaceful nation. Dreamland was recently made into a full-length documentary (I have a DVD copy and will write a review next week), a trailer for which can be Andri also deserves a special shout-out for taking me on a tour of the totally abandoned “Financial District.” (And really, those aren’t unnecessary quotes—on a map of Reykjavik, there are various areas that are labeled. Places like Down Town, Up Town, Skyline, and “Financial District.” When I asked people about the quotes around this one particular part of town, they told me that it was intentionally ironic and due in part to the fact that the largest glass building in Reykjavik—a building that was supposed to serve as the HQ for the banking sector—is completely empty. It’s beyond spooky.)

• Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is a crime writer with two titles available in the U.S.: and As most everyone knows, Scandinavian crime fiction is a hot commodity, what with writers like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, etc., etc. During Kristjan B. Jonasson’s speech about the future of publishing in Iceland, he pointed out that Icelandic crime fiction didn’t even exist until 1997 or so. And that when he first read an Icelandic crime novel, he thought it was “total bullshit,” since there is no crime in Iceland . . .

More information about these and other Icelandic authors can be found at the website (Agla at bok at bok.is is the person to contact for sample translations, etc.) and the site that was set up to promote Iceland culture in advance of their being Guest of Honor at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair.

With its 99.9% literacy rate (seriously), and a roster of great authors (Halldór Laxness, Hallgrímur Helgason) that belies the fact that it has a smaller population than Bakersfield, the nation of Iceland could fairly be called a book lover’s paradise. (There’s even a “Library of Water” there, which, according to my Icelandic American partner, delivers exactly what it promises.)

It could also be called a rock lover’s paradise — it’s home to the acclaimed band Sigur Rós; the world’s most beloved swan-clad chanteuse, Björk; and — because no nation can claim rock cred if the stiffest available beverage is lemonade — Brennivín, nicknamed Black Death, an ungodly strong schnapps that tastes like rye bread soaked in sulfuric acid and then set on fire. (I speak from experience here. Bitter, bitter experience.)

With that in mind, it’s not entirely surprising that Iceland has given the world one of the best novels written by a former rock musician.

(Two quick notes: I have an unopened bottle of “Black Death” that Bragi brought for me during his tour. His description of how nasty—and strong!—Brennivin is sort of scared me off. But if anyone wants to give it a go . . . And secondly, in the category of random promotions, in addition to Björk and Sigur Rós, anyone interested in cool Icelandic music has to check out Múm, especially Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy. Incredible CD. And now back to The Pets . . . )

After describing the plot of the novel—Emil’s frightening old acquaintance Havard shows up in Reykjavik and, through a sequence of events you simply have to read, ends up in Emil’s living room while Emil hides under his bed for hours narrating this novel—Schaub makes his case for The Pets as the great rock novel.

So what we have is 157 dark, scary and unbelievably funny pages, much of which is narrated by a man hiding under his own bed. That might not scream “rock” at first blush, but the novel is infused, in its own way and very much on its own terms, with music. Emil is a borderline-obsessive jazz fan who takes maybe a little too much pleasure in his Miles Davis collection; Havard’s musical tastes run toward playing Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” ad nauseum and, at one point, buying a ukulele for no discernible reason. Kraftwerk’s paranoiac “Computer World” makes a brief appearance, too, at just the right claustrophobic time.

But if you were building an argument for the true rock novel being as unselfconscious about rock as possible, The Pets could be Exhibit A. More than most fiction that concerns itself with music, Bragi’s novel captures the dark side of rock — paranoia, fear, self-doubt and the cowardice that’s sometimes, maybe often, the flip side of rock-star braggadocio.

Of course it’s possible that this is all rock-nerd wishful thinking, and that Bragi didn’t intend to write a slyly great rock novel, but rather just a less slyly great novel. Perhaps it’s just his biography getting in the way. I don’t think so, but either way, we win. So how long do we have to wait for English versions of his other books? Open Letter, get Janice Balfour on the phone. Takk!

Oh, and about future books of Bragi’s, next fall we’ll be bringing out The Ambassador, which is being translated by Lytton Smith as I type. (I’ll post a sample in the not-too-distant future . . .)

In a few ways, The Pets parallels Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which Ólafsson translated into Icelandic. Both focus on chance meetings; both feature a linguist. Auster’s interest in possessions, or loss of possessions, seems influential as well: the duty-free liquor in The Pets is a source of comedy and a partial cause of Emil’s extended entrapment—that and his inability to face the messy entanglements in his living room. Emil, frozen by embarrassment, unwilling to emerge, instead worries about the mishandling of his CD collection.

Ólafsson, who cites David Lynch as an influence, enjoys comic “scenes that are very shallow and profound at the same time.” The bed premise affords exactly this sort of comedy.

The other is from which focuses more on reading this novel in light of Iceland’s financial implosion:

Let economics professors conjecture about how and why Iceland flat-lined; fiction probably furnishes more understanding of the self-destructive reasons behind the country’s financial breakdown. Creative writers often deal with accounts due, moral, financial, and otherwise; they can also train a prophetically comic and/or philosophical eye on the national collective unconscious, in this case a blend of cowardice, blindness, and greed.

I suspect that is not what novelist Bragi Ólafsson set out to do in this breezily acidic short novel (first published in 2001), but as a study of radical denial, a small scale vision of blindfolded lemmings marching toward the cliff, The Pets works as a raffishly amusing allegory of utter irresponsibility. It blows a warning whistle that sounds far outside of the Arctic Circle.

Ironically, Ólafsson himself was once a lucrative Icelandic export; he played bass in The Sugarcubes, Björk’s first band. The Pets, the first of his four novels to be translated into English, received critical acclaim in Iceland, as have his other books. Judging by this tale, Ólafsson specializes in a kind of impish deadpan, wry studies in what happens when the links between real estate and the psyche break.

The book (which we did in a beautiful—and cheap—paper-over-board edition is available at bookstores everywhere,