I find a bird’s skull on the beach.
We never find the skeletons of people.
The eye sockets are black.
We just dump our dead into holes in the ground
outside churches.
It grieves me.
In Paris, I once saw stacks of skulls.
I don’t know the names of the birds here.
When John James Audubon
was 34 years old,
he decided he was going to paint watercolors
of every bird in America.
His Birds of America gradually appeared
between 1827 and 1838.
Audubon painted over 700 birds
that he had shot and killed.
The birds here don’t sing,
they cry out in pain.
I happen across brown slugs
devouring
each other
silently.
Close to the seashore.
Epochs evoked like developing photos.
The Swiss scientist Albrecht von Haller sketched
the decapitated head of a man in 1756.
In Haller’s Physiology, muscle movement
was not the result of mechanics alone.
It was caused by something at work beyond consciousness.
This is how decapitated heads could blink their eyes
and dead animals thrash their limbs about.
G.F.W. Hegel maintained
that true infinity
could not be comprehended,
that the universe is an elementary particle
of a much larger universe.
You are my universe.
I can’t wait to be like that dead bird.
I embrace my insignificant role in everything.
Here with the leaves,
the sea.
This landscape is developing me.
I learn to wait.
The red seat on this bus is still warm
from the last person who sat on it.
A voice on the radio reads the death notices.
We go quiet for a moment.
We’re on our way back to study the photographs
from Oyndarfjørður Church’s confirmation
in the spring of 1954.
Fermented fish and coffee afterward.
Between baby carriages, hearses, and thieving crows
the day slips away.
That afternoon you closed your eyes for the last time,
a Faroese woman ran a marathon in Prague
with a time of 2:50:57.
Anthropologists confirmed that Homo sapiens
and Neanderthals had offspring,
their genes are in us.
Scientists in Geneva got closer to discovering the Higgs
boson in the CERN particle physics research laboratory
even though this could have created a new galaxy
and blown up the earth.
The city buses with red seats are still running on time.
The condensation inside the bus
makes everyone look like impending ghosts.
My apartment is empty, only a white column
holds the ceiling up.
Lightbulbs dangle
down to the floor, like a luminous body
drawn between silence and time,
shedding light on the dark squares
that pictures cast on the wall,
a palimpsest.
Soon someone else will live here,
just like someone else I didn’t know
lived here before me.
One of the lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling flickers,
she’s about to blow.
I take photographs down off the wall.
In one black and white photograph, there you sit
behind the garage at two years old
in green rubber boots, swallowing small stones.
Now I’ve thrown three boxes
of memories away,
the story’s going to start over.
I want to watch continents go by,
but the connection between centuries
isn’t as good
as I thought it would be.
I want to build a wall
of small, iron boxes
in my mind
and make an assemblage of everything
I forgot here.
After the clothes are worn,
the houses are bequeathed to others,
and the streets have been renamed,
all that remains is a mountain of garments,
pictures,
burned-out bulbs.
A collection of heartbeats
between the bygone
millennium
and
this.
For all the island dwellers
who hear the waves tonight
and know
how it is
to be human
for a moment between mountain and sea.
For the international brother and sisterhood
of insomniacs
(most take their lives at 04:48).
For those whose emotions have sense and sensibility
and a heart that reflects.
For all of you who know all too well
that there aren’t any real boundaries
on our planet.
The international republic of world literature
doesn’t correspond to the lines on the map
that govern the rest of the world.
from What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium
Kim Simonsen
translated from the Faroese by Randi Ward
Listen to an excerpt of the original Faroese read by the poet:
I was a graduate student in the Faroe Islands when I first met Seamus Heaney at a reception in Tórshavn. All these years later, my approach to translation is akin to Heaney”s in the way, as Tess Taylor puts it in her “More Than Beowulf” review, he “thought less of carrying over the so-called literal, and more of finding the pitch and resonance that help an audience receive a poem.”
The six poems featured here are from Kim Simonsen’s 2013 collection, Hvat hjálpir einum menniskja at vakna ein morgun hesumegin hetta áratúsundið. In the first half of the book’s rhetorical title, I read “What helps a human to wake up” but understand it as “What good does it do for a person to wake up” in the context of the poems; as the Faroese speaker of the collection works through the vicissitudes implied in the latter, he generates the holistic worldview that enables the former.
I chose “a person” for “einum menniskja” here in the title—rather than “a human,” or “a human being”—because much of the crisis experienced by the Faroese speaker is rooted in the alienation he feels as a person. The speaker experiences this isolation as layer upon layer of increasing uncertainty and loss. He finds solace in contemplating the interconnectedness of his humanity across time, space, and materiality—all the while grappling with his looming mortality and the legacies of Enlightenment-era paradigms.
Simonsen designed What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium’s layout and spent the better part of seven years creating the work. Under the title on the front cover, the Faroese word “SAVN” stands before the author’s name: COLLECTION KIM SIMONSEN. Both are situated above an anatomical illustration of a severed head with a curiously chill expression on its face. This copperplate engraving of Albrecht von Haller’s drawing appears in Icones anatomicae (1756). By the time Icones anatomicae was published, Haller had long been bitterly at odds with Carolus Linnaeus over his Linnaean system of taxonomy. Haller advocated for a system that was not based on strict hierarchies: a system more focused on revealing the many connections among species.
The six poems featured here are from Kim Simonsen’s 2013 collection, Hvat hjálpir einum menniskja at vakna ein morgun hesumegin hetta áratúsundið. In the first half of the book’s rhetorical title, I read “What helps a human to wake up” but understand it as “What good does it do for a person to wake up” in the context of the poems; as the Faroese speaker of the collection works through the vicissitudes implied in the latter, he generates the holistic worldview that enables the former.
I chose “a person” for “einum menniskja” here in the title—rather than “a human,” or “a human being”—because much of the crisis experienced by the Faroese speaker is rooted in the alienation he feels as a person. The speaker experiences this isolation as layer upon layer of increasing uncertainty and loss. He finds solace in contemplating the interconnectedness of his humanity across time, space, and materiality—all the while grappling with his looming mortality and the legacies of Enlightenment-era paradigms.
Simonsen designed What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium’s layout and spent the better part of seven years creating the work. Under the title on the front cover, the Faroese word “SAVN” stands before the author’s name: COLLECTION KIM SIMONSEN. Both are situated above an anatomical illustration of a severed head with a curiously chill expression on its face. This copperplate engraving of Albrecht von Haller’s drawing appears in Icones anatomicae (1756). By the time Icones anatomicae was published, Haller had long been bitterly at odds with Carolus Linnaeus over his Linnaean system of taxonomy. Haller advocated for a system that was not based on strict hierarchies: a system more focused on revealing the many connections among species.
Kim Simonsen (b. 1970) is a Faroese writer and researcher from the island of Eysturoy. He completed his PhD in Nordic literature at the University of Roskilde and has authored seven books as well as numerous essays and academic articles. He is the founder and managing editor of Forlagið Eksil, a Faroese press that has published over twenty titles. In 2014, Simonsen won the M.A. Jacobsen Literature Award for his poetry collection Hvat hjálpir einum menniskja at vakna ein morgun hesumegin hetta áratúsundið (What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium; Mentunargrunnur Studentafelagsins, 2013). This collection is forthcoming in English translation from Deep Vellum Publishing in late 2024. Simonsen’s latest poetry collection, Lívfrøðiliga samansetingin í einum dropa av sjógvi minnir um blóðið í mínum æðrum (The biological composition of a drop of seawater is reminiscent of the blood in my veins; Verksmiðjan, 2023), is currently nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Randi Ward (b. 1982) is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from West Virginia. She earned her MA in cultural studies from the University of the Faroe Islands and has twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Beloit Poetry Journal, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today; her work has also been featured on Folk Radio UK, NPR, and PBS Newshour. She is a recipient of Shepherd University’s Appalachian Photography Award, and Cornell University Library established the Randi Ward Collection in its Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in 2015. For more information, visit randiward.com.
