Phase Shift
I love my children and the children my children
Love and the children who love my children.
They stamp their winter boots through the ice when the
Pond freezes over. They love to use force.
Break shards from the ice sheet and hold them up to their
Faces. I see them through the window, the salt-licked
Eye of the house. They see me through clear glass.
A blush of pale yellow and then dark. In this way, time is
Cut into slices, white and black, the portions
Unequal, like everything else.
The frost hardens the division between worlds
And transforms lies into truth. Forms a footbridge across the
So-called surface of the pond. If false bottoms hide
Poison or treasure, what does a false surface hide?
The children, not I, trust the porous membrane
Between this world and the next, where respiration runs in
Reverse. After all, it wasn’t so long ago they came
Through, circular breathing as they sucked
Sugar from a sweet teat. They bite the bullet,
Crunch crystal treats, proud of their own strength.
Baby teeth lack the nerves that throb with the cold.
An artichoke flowers in the kitchen window.
No one loves winter like my children.
translated from the Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer
Babushkas
The latest research in cosmology
sponsored by the institute
I direct
has concluded
that time began
in 1981
and again thirty years later
A Big Bang
I remember it well
a mythic era
when giants walked
and yellow colostrum flowed
Long before dinosaurs
lined up on shelves
elements eked
through our bloodstreams
yours and mine
indistinct forms
filled your eyes
you were your mouth
later your memory
Your mother
beyond the world
and around it
translated from the Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer
Windbeast
So I learn to go about the house feed the woman under dreams
and make gold from garbage as I’m instructed
pleat doubt and despair counterclockwise
like a monk
who’s his lost faith
but neither his eyes nor his hands
as my friend said
the day her hair fell from her head and slipped between the floorboards
I sit hopeless in a torso that doesn’t lay eggs
but gives birth in a burst and a gush of fertile fluids
forced to make room in these bones these dense, heavy bones
the flesh veers off course and sings as it sails
but the spirit travels steadily as the crow flies
after a day, it lands golden-tailed
stalks me to shore, boulders baked in sun and nickers
nickers and laughs
translated from the Icelandic by Meg Matich
Three Poems
Thórdís Helgadóttir
Read the original in Icelandic
Listen to "Phase Shift" read in the original Icelandic by the author:
On “Phase Shift” and “Babushkas”
A few years back, I was asked to translate an anthology of twenty-five of the best poems to be published in Iceland that year. The file of poems I received contained no names, but there was one poem whose author I would have bet money on being able to correctly guess: Thórdís Helgadóttir. (I would have won that bet.)
All authors have a personal style, a battery of words and phrasings that sing to them and pepper their work, a point of view that reveals itself across their writings. This is as true for Thórdís as it is for anyone else, but perhaps more acutely, and enigmatically so. Her authorial voice is superlative in its confident spareness, its alternately fractured and flowing rhythms, its lyrical repetitions and tongue-teasing alliteration, its imagery that is somehow so familiar as to feel entirely foreign and new again. Fleeting moments in Thórdís’s writing become whole worlds, and I often find that I’m having a powerful intuitive response to certain images well before I’ve taken in the full panorama.
Cultivating an author’s voice in English is a big part of what I focus on in my translations and I find that generally speaking, I achieve this by layering aspects of my voice on top of the writer’s, as though icing a cake. This process feels different for me with Thórdís, more like dipping lady fingers in coffee when making a tiramisu. It’s as though I’m steeping myself in her words and phrasings until I’m fully saturated and enveloped by her poetry.
On “Windbeast”
At the time I translated Windbeast in July 2021, I was one month shy of my four-year anniversary of moving to Iceland, and I had so many lessons left to learn about Icelandic language and culture. 2020 was also the year before the publication of Thordís’s first full-length collection of poetry, Tanntaka (Teething), a moment of major change for an Icelandic poet coming into her season.
It’s strange to revisit a translation after so many years—peering backwards from 2024. Four years of improving my language skills, four years of illness and love and learning and reading. Four years in Iceland.
Even now, the sound of sense that rivers through this text dazzles me. It has staying power: Sound is a constant thread, tying one stanza to the next, a ribbon running through the poem’s many rooms like a woman ambulating in the night. Hair slipping, falling, hands weaving: These are the motions of Windbeast’s fluid, folkloric world. The poem moves freely in the manner of unconscious writing, “pleating” its associations “counterclockwise” like a monk in quiet meditation.
Seeing this text from the distance of years hasn’t made a vast difference in how I would approach it—maybe a few tweaks here and there—much of which I attribute to my work with the poet. And I do not want to change it, in any case: What is a translator if not a conservator? This poem is a capsule of my personal history as much as it is a preserved moment in the “pocket-universe” of the poet’s timeline and trajectory.
I am proud to be a part of this poem’s long, elongating lifespan.
—Meg Matich
A few years back, I was asked to translate an anthology of twenty-five of the best poems to be published in Iceland that year. The file of poems I received contained no names, but there was one poem whose author I would have bet money on being able to correctly guess: Thórdís Helgadóttir. (I would have won that bet.)
All authors have a personal style, a battery of words and phrasings that sing to them and pepper their work, a point of view that reveals itself across their writings. This is as true for Thórdís as it is for anyone else, but perhaps more acutely, and enigmatically so. Her authorial voice is superlative in its confident spareness, its alternately fractured and flowing rhythms, its lyrical repetitions and tongue-teasing alliteration, its imagery that is somehow so familiar as to feel entirely foreign and new again. Fleeting moments in Thórdís’s writing become whole worlds, and I often find that I’m having a powerful intuitive response to certain images well before I’ve taken in the full panorama.
Cultivating an author’s voice in English is a big part of what I focus on in my translations and I find that generally speaking, I achieve this by layering aspects of my voice on top of the writer’s, as though icing a cake. This process feels different for me with Thórdís, more like dipping lady fingers in coffee when making a tiramisu. It’s as though I’m steeping myself in her words and phrasings until I’m fully saturated and enveloped by her poetry.
—Larissa Kyzer
On “Windbeast”
At the time I translated Windbeast in July 2021, I was one month shy of my four-year anniversary of moving to Iceland, and I had so many lessons left to learn about Icelandic language and culture. 2020 was also the year before the publication of Thordís’s first full-length collection of poetry, Tanntaka (Teething), a moment of major change for an Icelandic poet coming into her season.
It’s strange to revisit a translation after so many years—peering backwards from 2024. Four years of improving my language skills, four years of illness and love and learning and reading. Four years in Iceland.
Even now, the sound of sense that rivers through this text dazzles me. It has staying power: Sound is a constant thread, tying one stanza to the next, a ribbon running through the poem’s many rooms like a woman ambulating in the night. Hair slipping, falling, hands weaving: These are the motions of Windbeast’s fluid, folkloric world. The poem moves freely in the manner of unconscious writing, “pleating” its associations “counterclockwise” like a monk in quiet meditation.
Seeing this text from the distance of years hasn’t made a vast difference in how I would approach it—maybe a few tweaks here and there—much of which I attribute to my work with the poet. And I do not want to change it, in any case: What is a translator if not a conservator? This poem is a capsule of my personal history as much as it is a preserved moment in the “pocket-universe” of the poet’s timeline and trajectory.
I am proud to be a part of this poem’s long, elongating lifespan.
—Meg Matich
Thórdís Helgadóttir is an Icelandic writer. Her debut short story collection Keisaramörgæsir (Emperor Penguins; Bjartur, 2018) received high critical acclaim, as did her debut poetry collection Tanntaka (Teething; Forlagið, 2021), which earned numerous nominations and awards. Her theatrical work has been staged at the City Theatre of Reykjavík, where she was the 2019–2020 Resident Playwright.
Thórdís’s first solo novel Armeló (Armelo; Forlagið, 2023) became a resounding critical and commercial success in Iceland. Previously, Olía (Oil; Forlagið, 2021), a novel written jointly with the writers’ collective Svikaskáld (Impostor Poets), earned a nomination for the Icelandic Literary Prize, the highest honour in Icelandic literature. The collective has also published four books of poetry.
Thórdís is the co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine Stelkur. She holds a BA in philosophy and an MFA in creative writing and teaches creative writing at the University of Iceland Institute of Continuing Education.
Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic to English literary translator. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart (AmazonCrossing, 2019) won the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. That 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, which included her translation of Thórdís Helgadóttir’s short story “The Sea Gives Us Children.” Larissa’s recent full-length translations include Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir’s The Fires (AmazonCrossing, 2023) and Fríða Ísberg’s The Mark (Faber/Text, 2024). She has received grant funding and support from the European Union Prize for Literature, 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! For more, visit her website.
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.
