Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“I remember this,” she says, but she doesn’t have anything more to add except to suggest that Sturla must eventually have gotten hold of the folder, and one can’t ignore the fact — as she puts it — that in order for him to obtain it, his cousin and contemporary had had to off himself.

Sturla acts as if he hasn’t heard her. But he wonders if lying behind her observation is the phrase “one person’s death is another’s life” (is he trying to be as tasteless in his choice of words as she was?), and he thinks of the mother in the poem, the one living in the darkness of shadows — as he interprets that shadow. She’ll stand by the window when he goes out the gate to the sidewalk, for sure, and she’ll wave to him as he heads past. He gives her his cell phone number (explaining why it starts with the number eight, since she’s never seen that sort of number before) and they say goodbye in the doorway, somewhat brusquely. Fanný says she can’t stand outside in this cold, that she isn’t suited to living in this cold, damp country; in fact, she ought to go overseas with Sturla to the sun and warmth.

As Sturla had predicted, his mother stands inside the window, behind the nylon screen, but the way she moves her hand when he goes past the window feels wrong, as though it doesn’t belong to her. It’s too fast: it reminds him of a duck beating its wings to get out of the way of a car on the road. He waves back and begins walking faster; he wants to hurry home to Skúlagata to read over his article for the magazine. While his mother’s monologue about the past had been going on and on he’d been remembering the newly-written text, and he is beginning to get the feeling — perhaps influenced by the wine he’s drunk — that the article is not only very well executed, but also marks the start of a new period in his life as an author: his settling of accounts with poetry (which, he thinks, will get a final farewell at the end of his visit to Lithuania) and the seeds of what lies ahead. That said, he will need the limited time he has left to touch up the text before he sends it to Jónatan Jóhannsson. There is nothing else he needs to do before going abroad the next morning except what he’d put off doing the day before: calling his children, who all happened to be with their mother at Egilsstaðir at the moment, which was unusual; tidying up the apartment a little so that it will be cozy to return to; packing; and. . he suddenly thinks, now that it is too late, of course, that he’d meant to pick up the VCR so he could return the Iranian movie to his father.

“The trip scheduled from Vilnius to Druskininkai takes just two hours. The Czech poet Nezval wrote about the five minutes distance from the town but here we are dealing with a longer distance. From Vilnius to Druskininkai, it is a two-hour trip by coach.

Vilnius? Why talk about Vilnius? And what in heaven’s name is Druskininkai? What does the unintelligible name Druskininkai signify?

Well, I have been invited to an international poetry festival in a little village in Lithuania called Druskininkai, which is southwest of the capital city Vilnius and directly south of the ancient capital city, Kaunas, where the Dalai Lama once went when he visited Vilnius. No other Icelanders have been invited to the festival in Druskininkai; I’ll be traveling alone and I am supposed to show up in this country in mid-October.

It is certainly tempting to state the obvious and say that Druskininkai is an absurd name for a village, even taking into account that the village is in Lithuania, a country where anything goes when it comes to giving names.

But such temptation is too obvious for a poet to give in to it. And no less so when we are discussing a poet who has reached the stage in his art where he believes he has nothing more to accomplish as a poet.

Druskininkai means the same thing as Salzburg in Austria. Although Salzburg isn’t considered a very happening place at the moment, still, it is hardly possible to say that nothing good has come from there.

“I am called Dainius Navakas and I come from Druskininkai.” This doesn’t sound convincing though there is evidence of an individual with the name Dainius Navakas who lives in Druskininkai.

After I received an invitation to the poetry festival, I looked up information about Druskininkai on the Internet and found, among other things, the name Dainius Navakas. From what I understood from the homepage of the town of Druskininkai, this Dainius Navakas works as some kind of information official.

But now to the poetry festival. The last thing I want to do is seem ungrateful towards the people who organized it, but at the same time I have to mention that I was astonished when I saw the first event would be a recital by three American poets.

I discovered this information in the documents about the festival that were sent to me by e-mail. Actually, the three women poets are supposed to read in Vilnius itself, in the cultural center at the American Embassy, and although that will take place before the festival formally starts, I notice on one page of the documents which were sent to me that their reading will signal that the festival has begun.

All this is a reason for even more amazement, when I think about how the international poetry festival in Druskininkai is originally Nordic, certainly not American or Anglo-Saxon.

If I’ve learned anything from my past experiences of poetry festivals of the sort we’re discussing here, then I know that nothing will prevent these three American poets from reading at the opening of the festival. Neither a bomb attack on their embassy in the city, nor unforeseen deaths back home, be that in Wyoming or Nebraska, will prevent them from being at the podium at the designated time.

No doubt it will surprise people that I react to the matter like this, by declaring my opinion that nothing will prevent the American trio from doing what they’re supposed to, yet in reality the plans of the people who devise the program for a festival of this caliber seldom go wrong. I speak from experience in this matter.

For example, I don’t foresee that, instead of these three American women, three male poets from Finland who no-one is expecting to be in Druskininkai in October will suddenly jump up from nowhere. Three very fat and dead drunk Fins with everything showing, in all senses of the phrase.

No. Nuh-uh, as people say out in the country, people who have no idea that a gathering like the Druskininkai gathering exists anywhere in the world, and who wouldn’t give a hoot if they did.

If something unpredictable were to happen at a poetry festival like this, it would be along these lines: a few minutes before a reading, somebody would notice that the texts from one of the foreign participants, which have been translated into Lithuanian like everybody’s else’s poems, are not actually his own poems, but some entirely different pieces which are totally unconnected to poetry.

An obituary about a deceased relative? A letter to a newspaper which the party in question wrote to protest the planned organizational changes to the city center in the town where he lives?

The poet accidentally e-mailed the wrong document overseas, and the translator, who had naturally never read anything by the poet, and so had no sense from reading the article how it ought to sound, hadn’t noticed anything wrong, and so translated the whole caboodle without hesitation, trusting that the continuous and somewhat lumbering text is just one long and rather detailed prose poem.

Lithuanian is a very old language. The oldest in Europe, if Icelandic is not counted. I’ve read works in Lithuanian and heard it spoken on board a ferry to Norway, and I really think it would be exaggerating to describe the language as beautiful in either texture or sound.