Larissa Kyzer translates from the Icelandic works in a wide range of genres, including novels, short stories, and poetry; microplays and film scripts; picture books, chapter books for young readers, and YA fantasies; essays and nonfiction; daily news, and more. Her recent projects include the Impostor Poets’ Manifesto; “A Radio Operator Goes Hunting,” a stand-alone excerpt from art curator-turned-author Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s first, as-yet-available in English novel; “Bookworm in a Chrysalis,” an essay reflecting on immigration, language-learning, and a lifelong love of books by Natasha S.; and “On the Edge,” a special issue of new and timely writing from Iceland, which she curated for Words Without Borders in 2021. She’s also a writer herself, and has published book reviews (mostly focusing on contemporary Nordic and Icelandic literature), travel writing, personal essays, and articles (most while working as the staff journalist for The Reykjavík Grapevine).
In this interview, I conversed with Larissa about the changing landscape of contemporary literature and literary translation in Iceland, her translation process, and her work to build a more inclusive literary world.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Before the First World War, translations of Icelandic writings were mostly into German, English, and Scandinavian languages. Eventually, the translations expanded to other languages such as Chinese, Georgian, Gaelic, Esperanto, Slovenian, Macedonian, Uzbek, and even French, Dutch, and Japanese. But this was the landscape of literary translation until the mid-70s through the early 90s, according to Cornell University Press’ Bibliography of Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation. What’s the scene of literary translation in Iceland these days like?
Larissa Kyzer (LK): Thanks to Iceland’s fabulous landscapes and nature (not least its volcanic eruptions, which the country has had four of in the last four months), its perennial popularity as a tourist destination, and its status as a small, European island nation of many listacle-able quirks, there is always at least some demand for Icelandic literature in translation, although the scales still tilt towards crime fiction, as they do for most, if not all, of the Nordic countries. Per the Publishers Weekly Translation Database, which covers first-time English translations “distributed through conventional means” in the United States, there have been 93 Icelandic books translated into English since 2008, when the folks at Open Letter Books started collecting this data. 44 of them (that is, nearly half) are crime novels. Consider that in 2019 (the most recent year data was collected), 1,712 books were published in Iceland, whereas in 2008, at the height of the country’s boom years, we saw the publication of 2,125 books—in a single year. For a country with a population currently hovering around just under 400,000, that’s pretty impressive. But we’re only getting a fraction of this wealth in English.
A sidenote, because I think it’s interesting, and also worth highlighting: the figures for Icelandic literature in English translation are still way more heartening than you see for many so-called minority languages, including ones that have far more speakers. For example, there are about 5.4 million speakers of Finnish worldwide; according to the Translation Database, only 88 Finnish books have been published in English translation since 2008. Thirteen million people speak Greek; only 70 Greek books have been published in English in the same time period. Almost 40 million people speak Thai worldwide; only 3 English-language translations of Thai titles are listed in the database. Hindi has over 600 million speakers; only 14 Hindi-language books have been translated into English in the last 16 years. There’s a lot that can be inferred from these numbers—not least that there is obviously a significant Eurocentricity in English-language publishing—but the baseline point is that as English-language readers, we’re only ever getting access to a tiny sliver of the literature that exists in the world.
Although there’s actually a fair amount of Icelandic literature in translation that’s been published individually in various online outlets or in selected ‘special issues’ here and there (Café Review had an Icelandic summer issue in 2018; years and years ago, McSweeney’s published its ‘Icelandic Issue,’ which genuinely changed the course of my life); we don’t really have dedicated outlets for Icelandic literature in the same way that you might find for some languages or countries (i.e. Latin American Literature Today; ArabLit; Monkey: New Writing from Japan, Korean Literature Now, etc). A handful of presses in the United States—such as Open Letter, Deep Vellum, and even AmazonCrossing—have included multiple Icelandic titles in their catalogs; Comma Press in the United Kingdom recently added The Book of Reykjavík to its ‘City in Short Fiction’ series. That collection includes ten short stories by contemporary Icelandic authors, which is particularly great because Iceland has, in my opinion, been undergoing a real short story renaissance for the last decade or so, but short story collections are always difficult to sell in English.
Icelanders have always placed a great value on their literary production and long dedicated resources and support to Icelandic literature and authors. So accordingly, a lot of the best outlets for Icelandic literature in English translation are actually based in Iceland. A few years ago, under the stewardship of then-editor Gréta Sigríður Einarsdóttir, Iceland Review (an English-language magazine that has both a print magazine and a digital subscription) decided to start publishing English-language translations of contemporary short stories in every issue. Editorship has changed hands a few times since then, but so far at least, the magazine is maintaining its fiction section. I wish Iceland Review got more attention for this, because I think they’re publishing work by some of the most exciting writers in the country and honestly, there’s no other outlet I know of that publishes contemporary Icelandic fiction in translation on such a regular basis. I’m biased, admittedly, because I’ve translated almost all of these authors and stories, but the CVs speak for themselves: Kristín Eiríksdóttir has twice been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, including this year; María Elísabet Bragadóttir was nominated for this year’s European Union Prize for Literature; Elísabet Jökulsdóttir is another Nordic Council Literature Prize nominee; Natasha S. was the first immigrant writer to win Iceland’s Tómas Guðmundsson Poetry Prize—and all of them, and many others, have been published in Iceland Review in recent years.
It would be remiss of me not to mention Ós Pressan, a non-profit “designed to support and promote authors and create an inclusive writing community in Iceland.” Not only does Ós put out a multilingual journal once a year, it also supports its members—many of whom are immigrants—in publishing their own books. Venezuelan-born Helen Cova is a great name to mention here; she’s authored a number of children’s books and two of her own poetry collections that she’s published in Icelandic, English, and Spanish. The first titles were self-published with the organizational support of Ós. Now, Helen’s gone on to found her own publishing house, Karíba, which acts as “a literary bridge between South America and Iceland.” Ós is a multinational, multigendered, multilingual collective that has done a huge amount to raise the profile of immigrant writers in Iceland, give them a platform, and help them thrive.
One of Ós’ founders, Ewa Marcinek, and aforementioned poet and author Natasha S., recently co-edited Skáldreki/Writers Adrift, a collection of essays written by authors of foreign origin in Iceland. Both Ewa and Natasha are among the fifteen poets featured in Polyphony of Foreign Origin, a multilingual collection that again, spotlights the rich tapestry of emerging and established foreign-born poets who have made their home in Iceland.
AMMD: Your English translation of Fríða Ísberg’s award-winning debut novel Merking (The Mark) is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in June 2024. What was your experience translating this text?
LK: The Mark is such a special book, and one I’m extremely excited to see come out in English this year. I’ve collaborated with the author, Fríða Ísberg, for many years now—she was the first writer whose work I translated for Iceland Review, as it happens—and she’s got such a unique voice and such a confidence about her writing, which is exciting and inspiring in an author so young.
The Mark opens on a letter between two lifelong friends who are at odds over the ethics of a new “empathy test.” Advocates say the test not only identifies people who have the requisite empathy to live within a civil society, but also those who don’t, making it possible to pinpoint “sick” individuals and treat psychopathy like any other disease or ailment. Those who pass the test are invited to “mark” themselves, that is, publish their results in a public register, and this practice quickly divides society. Unmarked people are suddenly not allowed to live in certain neighborhoods; they can’t apply for home loans; they can’t even buy groceries in certain stores. The book opens on the cusp of a public referendum to decide if Iceland will make the empathy test and marking mandatory, a vote which has sparked debate and divided friends and families across the nation.
The Mark doesn’t give any easy answers, but one of the interesting things about it is the way in which people with vastly different opinions have been able to read their own agendas into it and see it as a defense of their own stances. Perhaps this is because it offers such a rich and timely metaphor, and perhaps it’s a result of the way the story is told. The Mark is polyphonic, with four main narrators and several ancillary voices that pop in to narrate a chapter or two from their own perspective. It is, as you might hope given the subject matter, a deeply empathetic novel and one that allows you to step into the humanity of its various characters and see the world through their eyes, even if their actions are misguided. I think this is a book that has a lot to say in our current world and I can’t wait for it to finally be published in English.
AMMD: For Comma Press’ The Book of Reykjavik (2021), you translated the short stories of Friðgeir Einarsson, Fríða Ísberg, Björn Halldórsson, and Kristín Eiríksdóttir. In other venues, you also rendered, among others, the fiction of Steinunn G. Helgadóttir and Júlía Margrét Einarsdóttir, the poetry of Sigurlín Bjarney Gísladóttir and Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, and the essays and nonfiction of Margrét Bjarnadóttir and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir into English. Does your translation process vary per writer and per genre?
LK: Authorial collaboration has always been a huge part of my process, not least because I’m working into a language that most Icelandic authors I work with speak, and speak well. They have a sense for how they want to sound in English that they probably don’t have when they’re being translated into, for example, Brazilian Portuguese. One of the things I think I really have to offer as a translator, however, is my multifaceted facility in English. I feel like a gymnast in English—I can backflip and handspring, do the splits and triple twists. Which is to say, I feel very comfortable moving between registers and references and creating layers of meaning and nuance and tone by manipulating phrasings and word choice to not only get at what is literally being said, but what is being implied by a certain way of speaking or expressing oneself.
So, the trick is finding a balance: to honor the author’s voice in English and the way they hear and speak the language, while also bringing my own unique skill set and approach to bear on a text. There are a number of authors I work extremely closely with. For instance, I just got back from a two-month residency in Finland with Kári Tulinius, an author and poet I’ve worked with for almost ten years. I have similarly collaborative relationships with Kristín Eiríksdóttir and Fríða Ísberg. Other authors don’t want to be as hands-on during the translation process, but I still always make sure to share the text with them and take their feedback and input onboard while working on a translation. And I always have questions about texts, which means I’m extremely grateful to authors who make themselves available to answer those inquiries and flag questions of their own. These exchanges make my translations stronger.
AMMD: The Russian-born Natasha S. is the first immigrant writer to win Iceland’s Tómas Guðmundsson Poetry Prize with her then-unpublished poetry manuscript “Máltaka á stríðstímum” (“Language Acquisition in War Times”). You translated her essay for Literary Hub—and you also told me you wanted to translate her other works, given time and funding.
LK: As mentioned before, Natasha is on the vanguard of Iceland’s immigrant author scene, one of a handful of talented, exophonic writers who have taken up writing and publishing in Icelandic. There are established traditions of immigrant or second-generation writers in many, if not most of the Nordics, but this is still a relatively new phenomenon in Iceland and it’s such a fantastic thing to see growing and developing.
I’ve spent the last handful of years working at a frankly untenable pace, and so going forward, I’m trying to be a little more deliberate in the projects I take on and champion. Natasha’s poetry collection is one of the projects that I hope to focus on in 2024, and she’s also at work on a novel, I believe, which I’m really looking forward to. Natasha is the most voracious reader I’ve ever met in my life; she reads in at least seven languages and reads more than anyone I know. It will be exciting to see what such a dedicated reader—such a lover of stories and languages—will come up with in her own work going forward.
AMMD: Are there other translation projects you’re currently doing?
LK: As I mentioned earlier, I just got back from a two-month residency in Finland, the Saari Residency, hosted by the Kone Foundation. I went as part of a “working pair,” with my friend and longtime collaborator Kári Tulinius, to complete a translated manuscript of his poetry, which we’re collecting under the working title Vanishing Glaciers. For years, I’ve been translating Kári’s poetry piecemeal in my free time. When I arrived at Saari, that amounted to about twenty-seven poems, translated over the course of eight years. After two months working side by side every day, we’ve now basically doubled that and have a collection of sixty-some poems that are finally ready to find their rightful home in the English-reading world.
There’s such a range in Kári’s work—he writes experimental, form-bound, sound-based poetry; meditative haikus and tankas; prose poems about politics and poetics; elegies for melting glaciers. His poetry is deeply concerned with erosion and decay and loss, but also still finds and celebrates kernels of hope. It’s a body of work that not only taught me so much about translation, but also how to love poetry. So, it’s really exciting to have finally had the space and time to dedicate myself to finishing this project, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.
I always have a handful of pet projects in the works or potential projects of interest, and some of the others I’m particularly excited about right now include Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s absolutely exceptional, Nordic Council/Icelandic Literature Prize-nominated Tól, which is a probing, heartfelt, and occasionally darkly funny novel about addiction, motherhood, art-making, and the right we have (or don’t have) to tell someone else’s story. It is one of the most incisive, bold books I’ve read in a long time, and not only have Kristín and I shaped a stand-alone short story from the novel that we’re looking for a home for, she’s also adapted it as a play. So, I’m hopeful that it will make its way into English, in some form(s), soon.
AMMD: Let’s talk about Jill! A Women+ in Translation Reading Series. One of its recent spotlights has featured writings from Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora—Olivia Elias’ Chaos, Crossing tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid; Huzama Habayeb’s Velvet tr. Kay Heikkinen; Mahmoud Shukair’s Me, My Friend, and the Donkey tr. Anam Zafar; and Sonia Nimr’s Thunderbird tr. Marcia Lynx Qualey. What necessitates a reading series exclusively for women, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming translators and authors?
LK: When I launched Jill!, as an in-person series in 2019 and then as an all-virtual series after the start of the pandemic, there were a couple motivations. For one, I was looking for a way to connect with translators in the United States. I had moved back to the States after living in Iceland for five years and felt really disconnected from the translation community here. Creating a space and a platform like Jill! seemed like a way to connect with the community while also creating something useful for it.
At the time, Women in Translation Month was well-established, but the conversation was expanding, and I wanted to be part of that growth. The major issue at the heart of #WiTMonth—namely, the relative dearth of translated books by women that were translated, reviewed, displayed in bookstores, etc., compared to those written by men—was still just that: an issue. But women authors (and too often when we talk about women, we’re talking about white women) are obviously not the only people marginalized by the publishing scene. I was inspired by Swedish translator Kira Josefsson’s essay “What Does It Mean to Translate Women?” and her call for translators to “be careful to avoid essentialism and seek to read work with difference.” I was taken with the motto of the journal Tupelo Quarterly, which states: “We hold the gate open.” I was enlivened by the growing body of work by authors who identified as nonbinary and gender-nonconforming, and translators (such as Victoria Caudle and Gnaomi Siemens) who were seeking new ways to embody queerness in their work. I eventually rewrote the tagline of the series to explicitly include trans authors and translators because I wanted to show solidarity with trans women and men who are all too often shut out of gender-restricted spaces. And finally, I wanted to leave the door open to cis men as well, either as authors whose work is exciting to women, nonbinary, or trans translators or as translators of women, nonbinary, or trans authors. There’s room for cis men to participate in this space—they just aren’t the focus of it.
That’s the point of the + in our name: Women+ in Translation. We are making space for people who too often are unseen and uncelebrated in their fields and broader communities, but we are—to borrow again from Tupelo Quarterly’s excellent motto—“holding the door open.” We curate special series in order to train a light on writers or translators or struggles close to our heart, as small, but hopefully potent acts of solidarity: an ongoing spotlight celebrating trans and nonbinary translators and authors (who for so long were shut out of Women in Translation conversations); on writing from Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora, as you link to above; on Writing from Ukraine to mark the second anniversary of Russia’s most recent invasion; to celebrate #WorldKidLitMonth every September. Outside of these series, we try to be as flexible as possible. We let translators (within reason) read whatever they want—published or unpublished, in progress, in whatever genre. We invite guest-curated series because it expands our networks and our subjects and our community. To this end, we’ve had a number of fantastic guest-curated series that have really enriched our offerings: Translations from the Global African Diaspora (curated by Marissa Davis); Spotlight on the Third Coast Translators Collective (curated by Susanna Lange); Translators and Authors Emerging Together (curated by Michelle Mirabella); Mexican Women Essay the Body (curated by Dorothy Potter Snyder).
We want to know what work inspires translators and we want to create space for them to share it.
It’s a low-fi affair, but it’s been a relatively long-lived one, and I’m proud to say that since its inception, Jill! has featured over 102 translators working in 30 languages. I hope that we can continue that momentum well into the future.
AMMD: When we speak of the scholarship surrounding Icelandic Literature, who are the Northern European, Scandinavian, or Icelandic scholars, writers, and thinkers whose works shaped your philosophy, writings (both critical and creative), and ethos? In what ways have they been influential to you?
LK: Hmm, this is a big question, and an interesting one. I think as a writer, my work and style have been heavily influenced by the writers I translate. I find, particularly when I’m working on a novel or long-form work, that I start to absorb aspects of an author’s writing style into my own and those traces tend to morph and linger.
I’ve also learned so much from other translators, teachers, and mentors I’ve had over the years. Gauti Kristmansson, who runs the translation studies program at the University of Iceland, introduced me to some very useful practical theories that I still refer to today, foremost among them German linguist and translation scholar Katharina Reiss’ theory of text types and the skopos theory she helped develop with fellow scholar Hans Vermeer. (If you want to nerd out on this, Translation Criticism — Its Potentials and Limitations, translated by Erroll F. Rhodes, is a book I still think back to and teach today. The gist is basically that before you start translating, you have to identify what kind of text you’re working with, and once you know that, you know what aspects of that text you need to prioritize, and can make all your decisions from there.) But beyond theory, which I’ve never been huge on, Gauti’s pragmatic and open minded approach to language-learning and one’s use of it as a second-language speaker was immensely empowering to me. I had an almost paralyzing embarrassment around speaking Icelandic at the time, and my grammar was horrible and I was worried that these were insurmountable barriers to my becoming a successful translator. But he—a multilingual scholar who’d learned his third (or fourth? or fifth? I’m not sure) language around the same age I was learning Icelandic (late twenties; early thirties)—emphasized that it was the target language that one really had to be strong in. That is, that as a person who wanted to translate into English, the language I had to be the best at, the most comfortable in, the most flexible in my use of, was English, not Icelandic. He opened my eyes to all the other, nonlinguistic elements that go into translating and translating well—the cultural fluencies that are just as important as the linguistic ones. He told me once that my grammar mistakes were my right. All of this was huge for me.
Likewise, another mentor I had at the time, a poet and translator named Magnea J. Matthíasdóttir, was also hugely inspirational in my thinking about my craft. She stressed the importance of creativity in translation, and even in my early days—when I was still making a lot of pretty basic mistakes of understanding in my work—she was really encouraging about the creative and stylistic choices I was making. She recommended me for a few jobs, such as translating samples for a local publisher and translating a book of horror stories written for and by kids aged six to nine (English title The Stuff of Nightmares, ed. Markús Már Efraím), both of which helped me get my footing as an emerging translator. And she, like Gauti, talked a lot in our workshops about all the questions you need to ask yourself about a project even before you sit down to actually translate the words. What kind of text is it? Who is the audience? What do they already know about this topic or milieu? What don’t they know? Where will it be published? And, maybe most important of all: What don’t you, the translator, know that you need to know to translate this piece? To this day, I think that knowing what you don’t know is the most important thing you have to figure out while translating, and it’s something I never would have thought about if it hadn’t been for Magnea.
Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic to English literary translator. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. The same year, she was one of Princeton University’s Translators in Residence. In 2021, she guest edited “On the Periphery,” a spotlight on new Icelandic writing for Words Without Borders. Her translation of Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir’s The Fires was released in 2023 and will be followed by Fríða Ísberg’s The Mark and Snæbjörn Arngrímsson’s One True Word in 2024. Larissa has received grant funding and support from the Fulbright Commission, the Icelandic Ministry of Education and Culture, the Icelandic Literature Center, and Finland’s Kone Foundation. She is an at-large board member of the American Literary Translators Association and runs the virtual women+ in translation reading series Jill!.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: forthcoming), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, France to Australia, and translated into Chinese and Swedish, they’ve appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize. (Website: https://linktr.ee/samdapanas)
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Towards Empathy: Meg Matich on Translating Auður Jónsdóttir’s Quake
- Translation Tuesday: “The Viola Couple” by Gyrðir Elíasson
- The Voice of Interiority: Lytton Smith on Translating Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s History. A Mess.