Translator's Note

In his poetry, Magnus Sigurðsson tends to practice the “bonier music of monosyllables,” stripping his language of superfluity. At the same time, his self-imposed linguistic limitations are transcended through intricate wordplay and attention to morphology, opening up new ways to appreciate and experience the simplest of words.

Sigurðsson’s poetic universe is built out of delicate details. Translating Sigurðsson’s condensed, intricate writing style highlights the importance of a close collaboration between author and translator. His ability to create resonant, arresting poems from the leanest of material poses exciting challenges for a translator, but is also a testament to his inventiveness and aptitude for refashioning his native language.

While translating, I found myself in a monk’s cell, faced with the "echoing silence" peculiar to focused practice. As I dove deeper into the text, I formulated English “solutions” that seemed overly simplistic and devoid of harmony in sound or sense. Sigurðsson’s poetry is comprised of whispers, a contrast to my poetic tendencies toward crescendo and cacophony. Finding the poems in English has meant not compromise, but balance. In order to inhabit this new, dissonant space between languages, I have taken a less polar view of translation. As a language of poetry, Icelandic has remarkable flexibility: something akin to the love child of German vocabulary and Russian grammar. These poems exist neither in English nor Icelandic, but a third realm, the hyperborean land of Thule: the space wherein writing recalibrates thought by opening up language to new possibilities of meaning. 

Meg Matich

In the Classroom