Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

One moment Sturla feels there is depth and purpose to his writing but the next — and this is something which has been happening more and more often — he, the poet, starts to think that he can’t see anything in the production of poetry but emptiness and the surface emotions that still lifes offer: more or less beautiful textures, at best, things better suited to being the subject of a watercolor on the wall of a room. In those gloomy moments when the latter feeling grips him — like the moments when he allows himself to delve into the work of his favorite authors for writing inspiration — he looks at and thinks about certain poems which he has loved more than others, poems that one could say left him exposed as a poet and — paradoxical as it sounds — made him greater and lesser at the same time. One of those poets who “opened and shut” Sturla’s creativity in that way was the same poet his father Jón referred to the day before, when he criticized Sturla for verging on old-fashioned forms of poetry by rhyming — or half-rhyming. And yet that reactionary innovation in Sturla’s poetry didn’t originate with him, though these days he isn’t able to look into the eyes of the person from whom it came. The image Sturla’s father had mentioned originally had used perfect rhyme, accompanied by alliteration: “the mother in the window / the murk of the shadow.” To better fit the words to his own style, and also because rhyme was a somewhat fussy custom that irritated him, Sturla altered the lines so they read, “the mother, the window / the darkness of the shadows.” He’d downplayed the subtle symmetry of the lines in favor of the necessary friction that makes the art of poetry something more than just form.

But how long is it possible to fill out the same form? Is the form of poetry infinite? These and other questions bob about in Sturla’s mind as he stands in the stationary elevator. His neighbor, on the other hand, has another question as he holds the elevator doors open:

“What do people do at a book festival?” And he apologizes at once for not having introduced himself; he is called Áslákur, nicknamed Láki — though of course they’d met at a tenants’ meeting. He knows Sturla’s name well, and he too has a cousin with that revered name, a friend who is, in fact, actually called Sturla Snorrason. He also apologizes again for having asked if he, Sturla Jón, would travel down to the laundry room. He just needs to get the laundry and then they can go back up in the elevator. It will only take a moment.

Sturla has nothing against the unexpected digression that is this elevator journey. He is interested in finding out what this so-called Láki wants with the broom — a question he ultimately doesn’t get an answer to because Láki sets it down in the laundry room while he takes things out of the dryer and forgets to take it with him when he gets back in the elevator.

During this stop on their trip to the laundry room, the neighbors have the following conversation:

“So, what do people do at these book festivals?”

Sturla realizes that to some extent he needs to answer this question carefully; it is as though something important rests on it. “What do people do?” He gives himself some time to reflect. “People meet and chat together. And they give readings. That is generally the purpose of such a festival: people read to other people.”

“So that. .” Láki pushes open the door into the laundry room. “It’s a kind of holiday for authors? After they’ve finished writing their books?”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Sturla answers, but as he is setting out to convince this man about the significant energy and organization that goes into the travel of the majority of authors, he is asked another question:

“So you’ve been to this sort of festival before?” Láki puts the broom against the wall, opens the dryer, and looks over at Sturla, who is standing with his back to him and staring out the window.

“I’ve probably been to two or three,” answers Sturla, turning around. And while he recalls the two he’s previously been invited to, in Belgium and the Faroe Islands, he realizes his neighbor isn’t listening while he takes the laundry out of the dryer. And thinking this, he wonders whether he ought perhaps to revise the way he’d described his first trips to poetry festivals in the article he wrote last night, the article that imagines The Season of Poetry, which is the name of the festival in Lithuania. Although it should be very clear to the reader of the article that Sturla is joking in his, as it were, advance review of the festival, he isn’t sure everyone would understand the disparaging remarks he’d made about past festivals, which he’d included mainly to underscore the frustrated tone of the article’s narrator, the character Sturla invented as the voice of the piece. Sturla begins to realize that people like this married man, Áslákur, a father of four children, weren’t likely to comprehend that behind the personality who appears in the text lives another character: the omniscient author who can allow himself to turn everything upside down.

“I’ve recently begun writing a little story myself,” says Áslákur, after a few seconds have passed without Sturla saying anything. “But I’m not sure it counts as literature,” he ploughs on, stuffing the laundry into a red plastic tub.

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s an altogether different thing to be a real artist who carefully puts together well-rhymed and well-alliterated poems,” replies Áslákur and closes the dryer.

At around the same time the day before the salesperson in the clothing store on Bankastræti had contrived to tell him he painted. And though Sturla had found a need to let this stranger, his neighbor, know he was going to a book festival (not to a gathering of supers), generally speaking Sturla didn’t have any reason to let people know out of the blue that he writes poetry. When it seems that Áslákur doesn’t have any more questions about the poetry festival, Sturla starts to suspect Áslákur asked him down to the laundry room because he doesn’t like being there alone. As it turns out, he doesn’t seem to have the interest in Sturla he had so genuinely shown. Sturla offers to help with the laundry baskets but Áslákur declines; his expression changes as though to suggest that he has forgotten why he invited Sturla to the laundry room in the first place. When they get back to the elevator Sturla studies the envelope from Cambridge — partly to see whether the mail will arouse Láki’s interest in the poet — but once they are in the elevator and Áslákur doesn’t say anything, Sturla suspects he’s occupied with the little story he mentioned he is writing. Perhaps he is lamenting his missed opportunity to be a published author, like his fellow traveler in the elevator.

When they part ways, with Áslákur saying goodbye to Sturla somewhat curtly as he launches himself out of the elevator, Sturla is beginning to wonder why this fifty year-old man is home alone in the middle of a weekday. He supposes that his wife and children are at work and school, but what does this curious — and seemingly moody — man do in his apartment when it gets to be two o’clock in the afternoon? Does he start looking for something that he knows doesn’t exist, something which he can’t be sure about, something concrete and intangible at the same time — and is he sorely disappointed when he doesn’t find anything other than what existed in front of his eyes every single day?

The first thing Sturla does, on the other hand, when he enters his place is open the envelope from the Biographical Center. In the upper right corner of the letter is a red logo, a simply sketched image of the earth, and below the logo are the initials of the sender: IBC. A little further down was a drawing of a church building in Cambridge.