Anthologist-Preface: Eirikur Orn Norodhal
Translator: Stergia Kavvalou
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Haukur Ingvarsson, Fríða Ísberg, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Magnús Sigurðsson,Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, Eva Rún Snorradóttir, Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir.
Find the book here
In a society generally plagued by an over-abundance of voices aggressively competing for attention; be it from politicians, influencers, ted-talkers, comedians, culture-critics, artists, essayists and other writers; one often gets the feeling that not much of value gets through – or perhaps that, as these voices all arrive simultaneously and with equal fervour we, the perceivers, the readers, are unable to understand, empathize, respond. And that voices with a more complex register tend to lose most frequencies when projected into this screeching bird cliff of modern discourse. What we are left with is a loud, tiresome drone – and the feeling that merely discerning the individual voices, let alone evaluating their worth, is a hopeless task. We may as well not read at all.
But then we turn off our phones, close our computers, these incredible gateways into boundless universes of human knowledge, and open a book, celebrating and basking in all its simplicity limitations. Here, in a book, are only the best thoughts of a single human being at a time, carefully edited and more brilliantly inspired than just plain bored (as tends to be the case online).
Reading poetry in 2019 is, in its way, a subversive act in the middle of a shouting competition – even as the poem itself maybe shouting, maybe loud and raucous, just the consumption of a single voice through a medium which cannot with a click become a galaxy of information and stimuli, is near-revolutionary in many people’s daily lives.
Presented in this book are many of the most interesting younger poets of Icelandic literature today – poets with voices in a time of noise; and poets of beautiful noise in a time chattery voices, from the rekindled modernist stylings of Magnús Sigurðsson and Fríða Ísberg, to the crushing and often humorous imagery of Haukur Ingvarsson and Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, to the avant-garde social-postmodernism of Eva Rún Snorradóttir to the sheer inimitability of Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir’s experimentalist odes. Each of these poets represents something inherently good not just in Icelandic poetry but in poetry beyond all borders – a space for artifice, individuality and splendour.
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl