Translator's Note

As a reader and a writer, I’ve always gravitated toward fiction, within whose structures and conventions I feel very much at home. It is, then, only natural that as a translator, I’ve always gravitated toward prose texts as well. Recently, however, I’ve started experimenting with translating poetry, a process that has forced me to sit down and get my hands dirty—to break open the clockwork of this heretofore elusive form and see what makes it tick.

Inspired by the free-form, experimental poetry of the ‘Atom Poets,’ a loosely affiliated group of mid-20th century poets in Iceland, Kári Tulinius’ ‘breakable atoms’ (perhaps less elegantly, but pretty accurately shorthandable as ‘4x4s’) have been the perfect vehicle for this process of deconstruction and discovery, a crash course in the mechanics of the poetic form. At once rigidly form-bound and endlessly flexible, they are regulated by an ever-changing set of Oulipian-style rules. One poem creates a sort of typeset landscape (mist mist mist moon), strictly adhering to a four letter per word, four word per line structure; the next incorporates longer words, across columns; the next has the same elongated words, but drops phonetically unnecessary vowels, and so on and so forth. No sooner have you learned the rules then they change, forcing you—the reader, the translator—to be an attentive and active participant in the text. As Kári has written: “It is not enough to find the atom of the poem, but rather, it must be broken apart to understand the way it is put together.”

It has been my great and good fortune during this process to be able to work closely and collaboratively with Kári on these translations. The result is then a series of translations that aims to reflect and reconstitute the rules established in each of the original poems, which are very much grounded in the grammatical rigidities and flexibilities of Icelandic, while also transforming them to conform to the very different rigidities and flexibilities of English.

Larissa Kyzer

In the Classroom