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In some cases, I mean this literally: I went sea swimming with the first Icelandic woman to swim the English channel. She literally helped me to breathe, less than a month into my life here.<\/p>\n
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But I also took on projects. I want to tell you about one of them (yes, that\u2019s the reason for this long preamble).<\/p>\n
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I work for the Reykjavik International Literary Festival which, surprisingly, only happens once every two years. It\u2019s hosted numerous Nobel prize winners, Pulitzer prize winners, Man-Booker prize winners. It\u2019s hosted some of the most extraordinary authors to have walked this earth: Margret Atwood, G\u00fcnter Grass, Jos\u00e9 Saramago, Haruki Murakami, and THE KURT VONNEGUT. It\u2019s chief purpose is to bring together writers and readers, journalist and publishers from all over the world to the UNESCO City of Literature.<\/p>\n
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And it starts next week.<\/p>\n
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Iceland\u2019s relationship to literature is long and winding. Early settlers had a surplus of sheep for vellum, and little else \u2013 e.g., they didn\u2019t have the tools to make a plethora of instruments, to take up sculpture, or visual art. And so they wrote down their sagas, poetry, oral histories.<\/p>\n
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In the 16th<\/sup>, 17th<\/sup>, 18th<\/sup> centuries, Icelandic families gathered in the evening to recite stories to one another. Typically, the head of the house would tell the stories to the family at that time. Literacy was low at this point, manuscripts, rare. But<\/em> if they did happen to have a scrap of vellum, as in the book Iceland’s Bell<\/em>, they\u2019d use it to patch a shoe, or stuff a pillow \u2013 they didn\u2019t know it\u2019s value, and it was a good insulator.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There were also traveling storytellers during this (very long) time period. They would come to your farm, where they might tell fairy tales, or tell you some gossip about the other farmers. In exchange, you\u2019d offer a meal and a bed for the night, if you could.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Books became a more common object early in the 20th<\/sup> century, or late in the 19th<\/sup> century. But the first Icelandic bible \u2013 called Gu\u00f0brandsbibl\u00eda<\/em> \u2013 was printed in Iceland in 1584. It was printed in 500 copies, and the work took two entire years to complete.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Flash forward to the present. Why are books so important in Iceland? <\/em>I ask my Icelandic colleague–an ethnographer by education–at the Book Festival. She replies, and I\u2019m paraphrasing her Icelandic, \u201cBooks are the oxygen needed to keep our language alive. They connect us to our roots \u2013 reminding us both of the atrocities of our ancestors, and their triumphs. They\u2019re a wonderful warning of the power of memory to change the present. They change us. And we need them to help us to grow ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n She adds, \u201cIn Icelandic, there is a special word for writing. A\u00f0 yrkja<\/em>. It means both \u201cto compose\u201d and \u2018to till a field, to cultivate.\u2019 I think that\u2019s pretty much how Icelanders feel about writing.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As many of you know, I study Icelandic language in Reykjavik, and I am a translator by trade. I work with a number of languages, but Icelandic is chief among them. I lived in New York for several years, growing my talents as a translator and laying the groundwork for a fruitful life of literature…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/icelandic\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2017\/08\/21192835_10155661060904727_452961367920528321_n-350x133.jpg\")