1
Time is like water,
and water is as cold and deep
as consciousness.
And time is like a reflection
made partly by water,
partly by me.
Time and water
rush trackless to vanish
inside my consciousness.
2
Sun,
the sun was with me
like a slender woman
in yellow shoes.
Twenty fathoms down
my love and faith slept
like a flowering anemone.
And the sun passed
over the unsuspecting flower
in yellow shoes.
3
On transparent wings
water flies
back through its own wake.
The red-gold cord
running before me
follows no direction.
Beyond the bloodthirsty lips
of that scorching form
death’s flower thrives.
On a perpendicular plane
between circle and cone
death’s white flower grows.
4
A wave breaking
on copper sand.
A breeze rustling
the tall blue grasses.
A flower that died.
I hurled a stone
at a white wall,
and the stone laughed.
5
Water that flows
in the dead of night
out to fathomless sea.
My sable joy carved
its secret initial
on your silence.
And like amber, gold
in your shoals,
my sorrow gleamed.
6
I was a bowed head,
I was a dark-blue eye,
I was a white hand.
And my life stood still
like a small coin
balanced on its edge.
And time disappeared
like tears falling
on a white hand.
7
The sky rains
transparent dice
over the tumbling earth.
Day’s fire, light,
frozen with fear
passing through the swift angel,
like glass.
Blue-winged nights
sleep in the moon’s eaves,
man-stars come,
star-men come,
the slumbering waters come.
Everything comes,
nothing comes,
enveloped in billowing phosphorescence,
like god.
God.
8
The whir of invisible wings
passes over my twilit soul,
like reddening light.
Tonight I will sleep
under a seven-starred sky
at the wide estuary.
While your voice rises
from the reeds of the past
like red light.
9
Net to hunt the wind:
Fleeing rockfish
suffused with the translucent light
of nothingness.
Sun-flamed rings of water
enclose concave mirrors
of four-dimensional dreams.
Tracks lost
under the evening snow
of doubt.
Net to hunt the wind:
Like a sun nearing sleep
casts a mesh of flame
to hunt god.
10
From my consciousness
to your lips
is a trackless sea.
But my dream glimmered
in a hidden swell
while the depths lay still.
And the sorrow I hid
nearly found your own
like a fjord-blue sea.
11
And the vault of my happiness
is made of pale light
from the river’s
distant sorrow.
The moonlight of impermanence
cleaves to my hands,
the viscous membrane
of what is.
And the darkness of my eyes
carries soft laughter
into evening’s
cold fire.
12
Like horses shod to the quick,
the blue mane of my thoughts
disappears through eternity’s back door.
The nameless days fall
like birds newly shot
into my night’s abode.
Like a hand with blue nails,
the negative yes rises
in the closeness of distance.
While my face sleeps
like burnt lime
in the river’s eye.
13
Blue rain
of wing-fanned days
falls upon a burning face.
Night enters
the mind’s void:
a story without name.
The nakedness of what is
loses itself
into nights and days.
14
Sunlight,
storm,
sea.
I have walked on green sand
and the green sand
was all around me,
a sea within the sea.
No.
Like a many-winged bird,
my hand flies to a break
in the mountain.
And my hand sinks
like an explosive
deep into the mountain,
and blows up the mountain.
15
Your likeness lives
in the sun-bleached light
of days of flowing hair.
I see your tears
fall over my sorrow
like alluring blue rain.
And your absence sleeps
for the first time
in my embrace.
16
Below time’s snowless peak,
my silence waited
like ripening grain.
I saw sunlight walking
along a gray-white path,
and my thought reached out to meet the sunlight,
and the sunlight stretched its golden head
over the sea-blue wall.
I saw darkness fly away
like a metallic bird
from my earth-brown hands.
And my silence changed
into emphatic union
with nothing and everything.
While the glistening darkness
soared on golden wings
through the sunlight.
17
The light
of my sorrow falls
white upon your sleeping eyes.
I’ll let my thoughts fly
over the trackless sea
toward your eyes.
That your happiness
bears my sorrow’s
pale light.
18
Two scarlet fish
in deep water.
Dark-blue shadows
on a white wall.
A violet cloud
over the mountain peak.
Across the sleeping earth
I’ve borne this white account.
And my words fell
upon the ice-blue water
like a spring night’s rain.
19
In your untraceable footprints
an imagined brightness fell
on my wool-white dream.
I saw your face reflected
in the crosscurrent waves
of a tidal stream.
Your features eluded me
like an icy shadow
between sleep and dream.
20
Silence flows
like a red sea
over my voice.
Silence drifts
like rusted darkness
across your reality.
Silence flows outward
in a three-fold circle
around silence.
21
Water flowing,
dawn-blue day,
voiceless night.
I’ve come to rest
in the half-closed eye
of eternity.
Far-off worlds
multiply like strange flowers
from my long-sleeping
body.
I feel the darkness revolving
like a metal wheel
around light’s axis.
I feel time’s insistence
sink powerless
through a softness of water.
While eternity watches
my insoluble dream
with its single eye.
Time and Water
Steinn Steinarr
translated from the Icelandic by Christopher Burawa and Cynthia Hogue
Read the original in Icelandic
Listen to the first section of the poem read in the original Icelandic by the poet:
Time and Water, by the modernist Icelandic poet Steinn Steinarr, is an age-old story of lost love told in an enigmatic (almost koan-like) style. In this poem, Steinarr creates a hybrid form by blending elements of French Symbolism with the rich literary history of Icelandic nature poetry and folktales. In an interview a few years before he died, Steinarr expressed doubts that anyone would be able to understand what he was trying to accomplish in the poem, because Icelandic poetry at that time was still dominated by Scandinavian formalism: “I have noticed that Time and Water is very misunderstood or, more accurately, an unfathomable book. Originally, I thought of these poetic stanzas as lyrics to a ballet, if it’s even possible to talk about it in this way, in close relationship with certain legends and folk stories. It seems no one has brought this to light and probably won’t, I think. In reality, I gave up on the process and the published book was different than I had intended.” Steinarr abandoned the idea of the poems as lyrics to a ballet.
Theme and form, the often loose tercets in many of the poems, recall Dante’s Divine Comedy and the poet’s search for the ideal woman. In Steinarr’s poem, the existential descent into hell tethers the poet to a place, an estuary in Iceland facing the vast Atlantic Ocean, which separates the poet (who remains in Iceland) from his true love (who has traveled overseas). The poem is regarded as one of the most influential and beloved poems in Icelandic literature, not only because of Steinarr’s ability to express the pain of separation, but also because the work comprises an homage to traditional Icelandic themes at the same time as it embraces modernist (new) forms of expression. Although Time and Water had no critical reception upon its publication, Steinarr’s reputation as an important Icelandic poet grew among the public and the emerging writers of the 1960s, a trend that continues to this day.
Theme and form, the often loose tercets in many of the poems, recall Dante’s Divine Comedy and the poet’s search for the ideal woman. In Steinarr’s poem, the existential descent into hell tethers the poet to a place, an estuary in Iceland facing the vast Atlantic Ocean, which separates the poet (who remains in Iceland) from his true love (who has traveled overseas). The poem is regarded as one of the most influential and beloved poems in Icelandic literature, not only because of Steinarr’s ability to express the pain of separation, but also because the work comprises an homage to traditional Icelandic themes at the same time as it embraces modernist (new) forms of expression. Although Time and Water had no critical reception upon its publication, Steinarr’s reputation as an important Icelandic poet grew among the public and the emerging writers of the 1960s, a trend that continues to this day.
Steinn Steinarr is the nom de plume of Aðalsteinn Kristmundsson (1908–1958). He is considered Iceland’s greatest modernist poet. While his earliest poetry was influenced by his brief foray into communism and hailed for its revolutionary politics, his greatest poetry—such as the exemplary later serial poem, Tíminn og vatnið (Time and Water)—brilliantly fuses traditional Icelandic poetics (with its formal alliterative repetition, complex kennings, and symbols) and modernist free verse imagism. Born into extreme poverty in rural Iceland, Steinarr was fostered by a teacher who encouraged his gifts at a young age. At eighteen, after moving to Reykjavík, he found his way in the 1920s into the lively avant-garde circle at Unahús, run by Erlendur Guðmundsson, which included Iceland’s most prominent young writers and artists, such as Halldór Laxness, Þórbergur Þórðarson, and Nína Tryggvadóttir. Steinarr struggled much of his life with poverty, illness, and depression. He published six poetry collections and a satiric play about the Nazis during World War II, Tindátarnir (The Tin Soldiers), before his untimely death in 1958. His seventh volume of poetry, Halla, a collaboration with the abstract painter, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, was published posthumously in 2000, following the painter’s death. The story of their failed romance lies at the heart of Steinarr’s masterpiece, Time and Water, the last collection published during his lifetime and appearing here in a new translation.
Christopher Burawa is a native Icelander, poet, translator, and arts entrepreneur. His debut collection of poetry, The Small Mystery of Lapses, won the 2006 Cleveland State University Press First Book Prize. Among Burawa’s honors are a MacDowell Colony residency, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and an American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Writing Research Fellowship, among others. His chapbook of translations, Of The Same Mind: Poems by Jóhann Hjálmarsson, won the 2005 Toad Press International Chapbook Series prize. Burawa lives with his wife, Christina, and daughter, Eydís, in Red Wing, Minnesota.
Cynthia Hogue has published fourteen books, including nine collections of poetry, most recently In June the Labyrinth (2017), and two co-translated collections of French poetry, most recently Joan Darc, by Nathalie Quintaine (2017). Hogue was a 2015 NEA Translation Fellow. She was the inaugural Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Poetry and Poetics (2003–2017) and now is a professor emerita of English at Arizona State University.
