Translator’s Note

These poems are excerpted from Arndís Lóa Magnúsdóttir’s first book, Taugaboð á háspennulínu (Nerve Impulses on the High-Voltage Power Line), which is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in English translation. It comprises two long, numbered poems that examine human language, and the various forms it can take, as adaptation for survival. The poems intertwine the stories of a child born without the ability to speak and an elderly cruciverbalist who is starting to lose his linguistic acuity. In the space between language, the electric impulses that crackle between neurons produce alternative methods of communication, and other ways of expressing oneself and navigating the modern world.

Arndís writes that “sound is air vibrating / when it meets the world’s / resistance”. In these poems, words peal like chimes and their sounds refract as they travel through different mediums: ocean waves, tongues, languages. Through translation, the new sounds resemble the originals, but have echoed into difference: “muldra” becomes “mumble”, “drafa” becomes “drawl”. I imagine the words coursing through the salty sea air over the North Atlantic, their molecules quivering in the turbulence south of Greenland, splitting into particles that might sound familiar in other languages.

As a non-native Icelandic speaker, I was drawn to Arndís’ willingness and ability to play with the language and its sounds. The first time I read this book, I had only just moved to Iceland and was learning the language. To practice my pronunciation, I would read the poems aloud and learn the shapes my mouth needed to make to produce the right sounds. Not only did this improve my pronunciation, but it also made me understand the role that sound plays in these poems. In the Icelandic poetry tradition, the repetition of sound is a defining feature—one might venture to say a high-voltage power line threaded through each stanza. In the first poem included here, for example, Arndís writes:

“á meðan þú sleikir

saltar skrámur

leitar hann

í bókmenntir eftir svörum”

Here, the s in “sleikir” threads into “saltar”, “skrámur”, and “svörum”. Meanwhile, the ei sound in “sleikir” reaches down into “leitar”. While this is not always possible in English, the translation attempts to evoke this continuity of sounds:

“as you lick

your salted scrapes

he scours

literature for answers”

My translation links “scrapes” across lines and in several directions with “salted” and “scours” through its s and the crisp sc that even reaches up to the ck sound in “lick”, which slithers back down the li to “literature”. The musicality of Arndís’ poetry reverberates off the tongue and through the sinews, proving that language is not only cerebral but a physical inhabitance.

—Rachel Britton