Life Circles the End
The avalanche sweeps her
away with the house
and time stops passing
is suspended in crystal
Past present and future
instantly turn into a
mountain known by three
names in one fjord
A fetus takes shape
in her own time
waking when the snow
crushes her sleeping body
She sees this person
when her eyes open
when the avalanche ends
when she is born
Snowsound
Snowflakes melt into
wet earth the nighttime silence
dissolves in laughter
Upon Seeing Snæfellsjökull Glacier from an Idling Bus
A damp scrap of paper sticks to the sky
I peel Snæfellsjökull from the windowpane
and scribble down what I should
have said to you
1) under a mirror-smooth surface
there is rock that is rock
2) snow melts
becomes a mountain that is a mountain
Snæfellsjökull will be tossed in a garbage can
disintegrate among banana peels
paper cups soda cans candy wrappers
garbage that is garbage
3) poetry documents a landscape
feelings rot
Vanishings of Snæfellsjökull Glacier
Note: Snæfellsjökull is a glacier that can be seen from Reykjavík across a stretch of ocean. More often than not, it is not visible from the city. Kári used to carry a notebook in which he wrote down poetic descriptions of the glacier whenever he could see it. Over a period of five hundred days, he saw it about forty times. This poem was composed from those descriptions.
March
A shipless sail at sea
billows in gusty
wind that batters the sky
and smothers the green sea
love sinks
love crumbles
no
love vanishes in clouds
and crumbles
April
Two triangles
one atop or within the other
off-center by an inch or two
two peaks
a line drawn between them
slightly dips in the middle
only in disorder
do forms resolve
the sea is a line that divides
love from love from time
May
One spider nears another
shimmies along unknown threads
toward the center of a web
a lover awaits stock-still
on the horizon
mating fades into gray-blue
sea and sky divided by a circle
that only exists within the eye
June
An arch-backed centipede
crawls along a leaf
led by fumbling feelers
devours all life
trailing ice and lava and void
and love filled with centipedes
waiting to hatch and devour
the world out to the far edge
of what the eye can see
July
A lover parades out
of a slumbering room like uprooted kelp
bobbing far from dry shores
and lifeless cliffs that crumble into surf
before time dislodges the pupil
that sees nothing but the void
of the white of its eye
August
The eyes ears nose mouth of an animal
sleeping feeding with eyes half-closed
its mouth opens and everything
rips apart and reality
is colorless against a blue background
perched on the horizon
like a snow bunting that blanches
when love arrives disguised as nothing
but eyes ears nose mouth
September
An octopus with arms outstretched
floats in blue glass
whether the creature is a reflection
is neither certain nor uncertain
but the octopus is unconcerned
and bends its body backward
casting shadows on pale arms
as they lovingly embrace the glass
October
A flipper rips a window
into the sky as it
bursts through the surface
of the sea and vanishes
the Cupid’s bow of the glacier
flattens to a smile
a tongue licks the clouds
November
Cupid’s bow is aimed
slightly above Reykjavík
one arrow to strike a whole city
the ring of mountains teeth
in a laughing mouth
a thousand tongues and a hundred times
a thousand tongues in one city
that all meet at two points
December
Glowing curvature where the
small of the back becomes rump
a slope in the mind
Cupid slides fast
fast down the mountainside
that vanishes into sky
a shadow on the horizon
that grows bigger and dissolves
a stain on the sky
polished clean
January
Hem of white dress white veil
a crown the cautious declaration
of a beloved in a landscape photo
that slots into the field of vision
behind inside in front of
on the other side of what
the eye can see from Reykjavík
silhouettes send messages
in only one direction
February
The gray behind the landscape
blows away in the wind
a beloved takes photographs of
an embraced landscape
the wind lifts the hem
snatches the veil and carries it
toward the stain on the sky
see a sea yes
see mountains yes
see the glacier vanish
yes yes always yes
from Glacier Line
Kári Tulinius
translated from the Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer
Read the original in Icelandic
Listen to “Upon Seeing Snæfellsjökull Glacier from an Idling Bus“ read in the original Icelandic by the poet:
I’ve known Kári Tulinius for a little over eight years. He was, as it happens, my first real friend in Iceland. He was also the first author to whom I confessed my aspiration to learn and translate Icelandic who didn’t give me the wry, indulgent smile that one might give a child who tells you they want to be an astronaut when they grow up. Instead, he invited me to a literary salon, took me on a trip to a local bookstore to give me a crash course in contemporary Icelandic literature, and encouraged me to hone my fledgling skills as a translator by not only translating his work but by also discussing those translations with him, in great detail.
These early interactions and not always successful attempts at translation laid the foundation for one of the most rewarding, most challenging, most exciting collaborations of my career. They taught me, quite literally, how to think as a translator, how to be cognizant of the ways in which I impart my own subjectivity onto each text that I translate. There is no better reader of my translations of Kári’s work than Kári, and this is definitely not something that can be said of every author–translator relationship. When I’m working with Kári’s writing, every poem and piece of prose I translate goes through a very active, very collaborative editing process. We debate word choice; we discuss the ways in which the syntax of our respective languages creates different shades of meaning and intentionality. We have semi-impassioned arguments about contractions and comma placement. In so doing, I not only learn about the text itself: I learn about the very fabric of the languages I’m working in and between. What greater gift could a translator receive?
As you have likely gathered, Kári is one of the most generous authors I work with, but he is undoubtedly also the most exacting, the most precise. Each of his writings is informed by incredible specificity—a precise memory of a precise conversation; a real place at a real time; a factoid learned that led to a mountain of research that became the kernel of a poem that may only have fifteen lines but contains within it a whole world of backstory and deliberateness and truth. My job is not only to capture what is happening in the moment, but also what happened in the lead-up to that moment. There is no fudging, no best-worst solution. Translating Kári’s work has taught me how to keep picking at a knotty passage or seemingly “untranslatable” wordplay. To keep refining and refining and refining until it’s just right.
Kári is also—and I say this as a very sincere compliment—one of the weirdest authors I work with. (Not as a person, I hasten to add.) His work embraces the odd phrasing, the strange tense shift, the unusual form, and the unexpected—and yes, weird—image. As a translator, I have learned to embrace this weirdness, to resist the urge to smooth out a wording or make a metaphor more predictable. Because nothing you will read in a poem by Kári Tulinius ended up there by chance.
These early interactions and not always successful attempts at translation laid the foundation for one of the most rewarding, most challenging, most exciting collaborations of my career. They taught me, quite literally, how to think as a translator, how to be cognizant of the ways in which I impart my own subjectivity onto each text that I translate. There is no better reader of my translations of Kári’s work than Kári, and this is definitely not something that can be said of every author–translator relationship. When I’m working with Kári’s writing, every poem and piece of prose I translate goes through a very active, very collaborative editing process. We debate word choice; we discuss the ways in which the syntax of our respective languages creates different shades of meaning and intentionality. We have semi-impassioned arguments about contractions and comma placement. In so doing, I not only learn about the text itself: I learn about the very fabric of the languages I’m working in and between. What greater gift could a translator receive?
As you have likely gathered, Kári is one of the most generous authors I work with, but he is undoubtedly also the most exacting, the most precise. Each of his writings is informed by incredible specificity—a precise memory of a precise conversation; a real place at a real time; a factoid learned that led to a mountain of research that became the kernel of a poem that may only have fifteen lines but contains within it a whole world of backstory and deliberateness and truth. My job is not only to capture what is happening in the moment, but also what happened in the lead-up to that moment. There is no fudging, no best-worst solution. Translating Kári’s work has taught me how to keep picking at a knotty passage or seemingly “untranslatable” wordplay. To keep refining and refining and refining until it’s just right.
Kári is also—and I say this as a very sincere compliment—one of the weirdest authors I work with. (Not as a person, I hasten to add.) His work embraces the odd phrasing, the strange tense shift, the unusual form, and the unexpected—and yes, weird—image. As a translator, I have learned to embrace this weirdness, to resist the urge to smooth out a wording or make a metaphor more predictable. Because nothing you will read in a poem by Kári Tulinius ended up there by chance.
Kári Tulinius is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He and his family move back and forth between Reykjavík and Helsinki. If you search for his name online, you will find fiction and poems in translation and even author photos and book covers, if you like that sort of thing.
Larissa Kyzer is a writer, Icelandic-to-English literary translator, and teacher of translation. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart (AmazonCrossing, 2019) was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. The same year, she was one of Princeton University’s Translators in Residence. In 2020, Kyzer and her frequent collaborator Meg Matich cofounded Eth & Thorn, a chapbook press dedicated to Icelandic poetry and short fiction in translation. Kyzer is co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee and runs the virtual Women+ in Translation reading series Jill! Visit her website here.
