Imaginary Land
The leaves, now
claret
like plums.
And the sky,
palatial pink.
Outerworld,
I drink you.
I channel you
like a river.
Over the barren fields
of the imaginary land.
Honey
Ursin's Astronomy: Appendix
Imagine
the earth
immersed
in honey.
Its rotation
trailing
honey strands.
Likewise
with time
and space,
in Einstein's
universe.
Forestry
I know
Japanese bonsai trees
sprout
from the poisonous seeds
of other trees.
That their roots
spread,
forming healthy
forests.
The frayed
root systems
of my thoughts,
the offspring
of fertile
and sound
ideas.
—Tangled roots,
thoughts,
experiences: these don't
remain altogether
healthy
in the forest.
from Cold Moons
Magnús Sigurðsson
translated from the Icelandic by Meg Matich
Read the original in Icelandic
Listen to the poems read in the original Icelandic by the author:
In his poetry, Sigurðsson tends to practice the "bonier music of monosyllables," stripping his language bare of all superfluous ornamentation. At the same time, such self-imposed linguistic limitations are transcended through intricate wordplay and attention to minor details in the original language, opening up new ways to appreciate and experience the simplest of words.
In translating these poems, I found myself in a monk's cell, faced with the "echoing silence" peculiar to focused practice. As I dove deeper into the text, I formulated "solutions" in English that seemed overly simplistic and devoid of harmony (sound/sense). Sigurðsson's poetry is comprised of the sounds of whispers, a contrast to my tendency, as a poet, toward crescendo and cacophony. Finding the poems in English has meant not compromise but balance. In order to inhabit this new, third, dissonant space between languages, I have taken a less polar view of translation. Icelandic, as a language of poetry, has remarkable flexibility (something like the love child of German's imaginative verbiage and Russian grammar). These poems don't exist in English, Icelandic—either or both. They exist in a third realm, the hyperborean land of Thule, the space wherein writing recalibrates thought by opening up language to new structures and possibilities of meaning.
In translating these poems, I found myself in a monk's cell, faced with the "echoing silence" peculiar to focused practice. As I dove deeper into the text, I formulated "solutions" in English that seemed overly simplistic and devoid of harmony (sound/sense). Sigurðsson's poetry is comprised of the sounds of whispers, a contrast to my tendency, as a poet, toward crescendo and cacophony. Finding the poems in English has meant not compromise but balance. In order to inhabit this new, third, dissonant space between languages, I have taken a less polar view of translation. Icelandic, as a language of poetry, has remarkable flexibility (something like the love child of German's imaginative verbiage and Russian grammar). These poems don't exist in English, Icelandic—either or both. They exist in a third realm, the hyperborean land of Thule, the space wherein writing recalibrates thought by opening up language to new structures and possibilities of meaning.
Magnús Sigurðsson (b. 1984) is an Icelandic poet and translator. His debut was a translation of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos into Icelandic, published by the University of Iceland Press (2007). The translation was awarded the Student Service Scholarship and the Landsbanki Bank Stipend. Sigurðsson's first book of poems, Fiðrildi, mynta og spörfuglar Lesbíu (2008), received the Tómas Guðmundsson Poetry Prize. In 2013, Sigurðsson received the prestigious Jón úr Vör Poetry Prize for the poem, "Tunglsljós," which later appeared in Sigurðsson's third book, Tími kaldra mána (2013). Sigurðsson's translations include a collection of poems by the Norwegian Tor Ulven, Steingerð vængjapör (2012), and a Spanish translation from the Icelandic, together with Laía Argüelles Folch, of Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir's seminal book of poems, La cabeza de la mujer (2011). Forthcoming is Sigurðsson's selection of poems by Adelaide Crapsey, the unheralded pioneer of modern verse in America. Most recently, Sigurðsson released a fourth book of poems, Krummafótur.
Meg Matich is a poet and translator of Icelandic, German, and Danish who earned her MFA from Columbia University. Her translations have received praise from outlets like The New York Times, Oprah, Electric Lit, and Vulture. She is the translator of six works, including Magnús Sigurðsson’s Cold Moons (Phoneme Media, 2017), Thora Hjörleifsdóttir’s Magma (Black Cat, 2021), and Ásta Sigurðardóttir‘s Nothing to be Rescued (Nordisk Books, 2023), and the author of one original poetry collection. She’s received support for her work from the National Endowment for the Arts, Harvard University, PEN America, the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, and others. Matich is one of few immigrant members of the Writers Union of Iceland, a step she considers quintessential to her life as an immigrant in Iceland. Most recently, she received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, which she will use to co-edit and translate an anthology of Icelandic poet Sjón’s collected works.
