[note: Followups set to rec.arts.poems]

Hey.  Recommended summer reading:

    10.  Talk and Writing at Brekkukot
    
    In certain ancient musical scales there are different intervals than
    those to which people are now attuned, and for that reason they seem
    to us to lack certain notes; and yet some of the loveliest melodies
    which are ever sung in Iceland have been written in these modes, such
    as _Iceland, Land of the Blest_, and _Oh, my Lovely Bottle_.
    
    At home in Brekkukot we did not acknowledge all the concepts which are
    now all the rage, and indeed had no words for them.  All sorts of talk
    that was in common currency outside the turnstile-gate at Brekkukot
    struck us as folly; words which were commonplace elsewhere sounded not
    only strange to our ears but were downright embarrassing to us, like
    smut or other shameless chatter.
    
    For instance, if someone used in conversation the word 'charity', we
    thought of it as some sort of frivolous, irrelevant, or untimely
    quotation from the _Book of Sermons_.  'Charity' was called
    'kind-heartedness' in our house, and a charitable person, as one would
    say in spiritual language, was simply called 'kind-hearted', or
    'good'.  The word 'love' was never heard in our house either, except
    if some inebriate or particularly stupid maidservant from the country
    happened to recite a verse by a modern poet; and moreover, the
    vocabulary of poems like these was such that if ever we heard them,
    cold shivers ran down our spines, and my grandfather would seat
    himself on his hands, sometimes on the garden wall, and would grimace
    and jerk his shoulders and writhe as if he had lice and say, "Tut
    tut!"  and "Really!"  On the whole, modern poetry had the same effect
    on us as canvas being scratched.
    
    'Falling in love' did not exist with us; instead it was said that
    someone 'liked the look of' a girl, or that a boy and a girl were
    'becoming close'. 'Courtship' could be mentioned, but that was as far
    as one could go.  I can swear on oath that while I was growing up I
    never heard the word 'happiness' except on the lips of a crazy woman
    who lodged in the mid-loft with us for a time and who is not mentioned
    in this book; I never came across the word again until I was almost
    grown up and beginning to do translation at school.  Even after I was
    fully grown I still believed that the word 'weeping' was borrowed from
    Danish.  On the other hand I can remember that when my grandfather was
    once asked, sympathetically, how the people at Akurgerdi who had lost
    their breadwinners at sea the previous year were keeping, he answered
    at once, "They have plenty of salt-fish."  In the same way, if someone
    asked how anyone was, we invariably replied: "Oh, he's fat enough" --
    which meant that he was well, or, as they would say in Denmark, that
    he was happy.  If someone was not well, one said: "Oh, you can see it
    on him"; and if the person under discussion was more dead than alive,
    one said, "Yes, he's off his food these days."  About someone who was
    on his deathbed, it was said: "Yes, he's packing his bags now, poor
    fellow."  Of a mortally ill youngster it was said that it did not look
    as if he would ever have grey hairs to comb.  When a married couple
    separated, one used the phrase: "Yes, there's something wrong there, I
    believe."  At Brekkukot every word was precious, even the little words.
    
    My grandmother had a habit of answering people with sayings and
    proverbs.  Often there was good-natured humour in the reply, but
    almost absent-minded, somehow, or as if she were talking out of an
    open window to someone standing behind her: the rather tuneless
    drawling chant she used carried a hint of compassion, almost of
    resignation, but never bitterness.  But it was not just proverbs that
    she had at her command; she knew a couplet or a scrap of verse, some
    sort of mixture of wisdom and nursery jingle, for every occasion, or
    else she would quote a bit of a psalm or litany or folk-ballad or some
    other obscure old poetry.  She was such a well of knowledge, in her
    own quiet way, that if one pressed her and tried to find out just how
    much she knew, one never reached the bottom.  She knew whole Lays off
    by heart from beginning to end.  For the benefit of those who no
    longer know what Icelandic Lays are, I shall interpolate here that
    they are a form of poetry about heros of olden times and mighty deeds
    from the days of the epic; this poetry is composed of
    intricately-rhymed quatrains, sometimes so intricate that each strophe
    is a rhyme-riddle.  A medium-sized Lay, that is to say one Lay-cycle,
    can be thirty poems, each of them consisting of at least a hundred
    quatrains.  There are hundreds of Lay-cycles in Iceland, some say
    thousands.  My grandmother also knew whole books of psalmistry.  She
    sometimes mumbled this stuff to herself while she was knitting, but
    not for anyone who was listening, and really not for herself either,
    for she was often quite obviously thinking about other matters.  If
    there was something in the psalm that prompted my curiosity, such as
    for instance what kind of dripping one put on the Bread of Heaven, and
    I started to ask questions, it was as if I had roused her from a
    dream, and she would say that she did not really know what she had
    been reciting; and then she could not pick up the thread again.
    
    I was never actually aware that she preferred any one poem to another,
    any more than a printer does who sets up the type for good and bad
    books alike.  One could undoubtedly have recorded whole volumes from
    her, if anyone had bothered to write it all down.  I do not believe
    that many universities have at their disposal teachers with any more
    literature at their fingertips; and yet I have met few people who were
    further than this woman from being what is sometimes called 'literary'
    and is used as a term of praise for the gentry.
    
    As is known, the ability to read and write was little less rare in
    Iceland before the days of printing than it has been since; and
    actually I think that my grandmother was closer to the people who
    lived before the days of Caxton.  Spelling-books were never used in
    Iceland.  My grandmother said she had learned to recognise the letters
    of the alphabet from an old man who scratched them for her on the ice
    when she had to watch over sheep during the winter.  She learned
    writing from an old woman by making letters with a knitting needle on
    a piece of smoky glass; they used to tinker unobtrusively with this in
    the evenings sometimes, by moonlight.  When she was ninety, my
    grandmother wrote me a letter when I was abroad; it was fourteen lines
    long, like a sonnet.  I lost this letter a long time ago but it still
    exists nonetheless; I can remember her handwriting vividly even now.
    She wrote not only all the more important nouns with an initial
    capital but all the more significant adjectives as well; and that is
    the very style used by Fitzgerald in the poem called _The Rubaiyat_
    which he re-wrote from Omar Khayyam, and which is considered by some
    to be one of the most adroit poems ever written in that part of the
    world which turns towards the bright side of the moon: "Oh, Moon of My
    Delight".  When I read that poem I said to myself, "This man writes
    like my grandmother."
    
    I was five years old when my grandmother took out a book from her
    little chest and said, "Today we shall start to learn to read, Alfgrim
    dear."
    
    This book began with a rigmarole that goes like this:
    
    "Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat Judah and
    Judah begat Pharez with Tamar and Pharez begat Hezron and Hezron begat
    Ram and Ram begat Amminadab and Amminadab begat Nahshon and Nahshon
    begat Salma and Salma begat Boaz with Rahab and Boaz begat Obed with
    Ruth and Obed begat Jesse...."
    
    We spent nearly all winter struggling with this rigmarole.
    
    "What a terribly tedious rigmarole this is, grandmother," I said.
    
    Then my grandmother recited this verse:
    
            "The Bible sticks in my throat like an old piece of fish-skin;
            I gulped it as quick as I could,
            And it hasn't done me much good."
    
    When it was nearly Christmas, I said:  "Why is this rigmarole so tedious,
    grandmother?"
    
    "It's in Hebrew,"  said my grandmother.
    
    But by the end of the winter I had learned to spell my way through this
    dreadful rigmarole, and from then on I could read any book whatsoever.
    
    
          from _The Fish Can Sing_ by Halldo'r (o accent) Laxness, 1957,
          translation by Magnus Magnusson, 1966.  First published
          in Icelandic under the title _Brekkukotsanna'll_ (a accent),
          then as _O//ll re'ttindi a'skilin_ (0 umlaut; a, e accent)
          by Helgafell, Reykjavik, Iceland.  They sell Laxness books
          directly via email if you can't find them where you live.  I've
	  done it with _Kristnihald undir Jo//kli_, 1968. and its English
          trans, _Christianity at Glacier_, Magnusson's, 1972, also fine.

				-- Marek