Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

I, at least, can’t make it work to lyrical ends. It needs some great changes to become a useful tool in the hands of the poet, at least those poets who have developed any feeling for sound and rhythm.

According to the program of the Druskininkai festival, some domestic poets will be showing off. I can already hear the rattle when all the Antanases and Vytautases begin booming loudly into the microphone in the festival hall.

That will be an unbroken hour of torture and we’ll have to listen to it. And then the reading will continue with the translated poems of the participants, with the proud translators rising up from their chairs and reeling off the obituaries for deceased friends and the newspaper articles about planning matters, and then one will deeply wish, just like the young student Rastignac — when he stood before Monsieur and Madame de Restaud, having dropped old Goriot’s name — that the earth will open up and swallow him.

But let us assume everything goes as it should as far as the translation of the foreigners’ poems is concerned. Let us allow the natives the benefit of doubt in this respect.

There is still, on the other hand, the question of whether one will be able to actually read one’s poetry, even though that is the reason for the trip to Druskininkai.

Three or fours years ago, I was invited to take part in a comparable festival in the city of Liège in Belgium, although that festival was perhaps on a considerably greater scale than the one I will be attending in Lithuania.

Despite the fact that I stayed in Liège for four whole days, and though the organizers were good enough to see to everyone’s needs while we were there, it turned out, when it came down to it, that there wasn’t enough time to read my poems.

In the first place, so many poets had been invited to the festival, from every corner of the world, that there were very few poets left in the countries they had come from; it would have caused serious problems if the invited poets hadn’t returned to their native countries. And secondly, the program in which I was included stretched so far in excess of the time limit that, when it was time for me, the time set aside for the reading had already run out.

The festival organizers announced the immediate departure of the coach that was going to deliver the participants from the reading hall back to the hotel.

At that very moment I was beginning to get dry in the mouth, out of nervousness at having to read in front of such esteemed people from so many countries.

There was no way, apparently, to make the coach wait. The driver needed to get home. And the question I asked one Belgian poet, a young man who I had talked with earlier, during one of the many midday breaks, was this: “To his home where? Is his home so far away that the organizers of the festival need to worry about him getting there in good time? In good time for what?”

For my part, I’d come all the way from Iceland to read poems in Belgium, and because this Belgian driver, who had been hired to drive me and the other poets home to a hotel after the recital, needed to get home right now and go to sleep, there wasn’t time for me, the next-to-last poet in the program.

Nor for the South African poet, who was last in the program.

It seems the poetic democracy they have in Belgium is like the freedom of speech in the Parliament of the Communist party in Moscow: the Chief Secretary and his comrades from the Party’s Executive Branch Committee reported, in a speech lasting many hours, all the magnificent qualities of the red power and the Party’s mercy, but the people’s delegate to Parliament was only given three minutes to make his own recommendations.

The difference, of course, is that the black South African and I didn’t get a single second to showcase our excellent abilities.

We could just as well have stayed home; he in his faraway Johannesburg (if that’s where he lived) and I in Skúlagata, in my cozy little Reykjavík.

And so I’ve still never read my poems in Belgium. Even though I was sent there for four days for precisely that purpose.

The only thing I got for my trouble in making that journey to Liège was a daily meal with the other poets in the assembly hall of the conference center where the festival was being held.

And wine. There was certainly unlimited wine with our food, both during the festival and in the evenings.

The food itself was nothing to complain about, although some poets, at least one from Iraq and another from Cyprus, did have some criticisms, particularly about the relative portions of meat, fish, potatoes, and salads on their plates.

This all begs the question, of course, as to whether something similar, that is, in terms of the amount of time for reading, is in the cards for Lithuania.

“In the cards for Lithuania?” That reminds me of the story of a man whom I met by chance in a restaurant in downtown Reykjavík two or three years ago. He had been invited to Lithuania, but unlike me was he on a business trip (although in a certain sense you could say that my dealings with that country are a little business-like in character).

While I earn my living as a superintendent and a poet, this man works on the other hand for a wealthy firm in Reykjavík, and the hotel which he stayed at in Vilnius, located on the main street in the city center, was, according to his account, the best of the many hotels he’d stayed in.

It was comparable to the best hotels in New York and Paris. There was a roomy Jacuzzi, a thirty-inch flatscreen on the wall facing a California King-size bed, a DVD player, and not just a box of assorted chocolates laying on his pillow on the bed, but also a little bottle of champagne and a cloth bag containing orange-flavored chocolate.

I can’t help but suspect I’ll be thinking about the magnificent description of this hotel when I step over the threshold to the dormitory, or hostel, or shelter, which is were I assume I’ll be staying in Druskininkai and Vilnius.

Unbelievably, that is in fact the usual situation for invited guests if you make your living as a poet. Even the Faroe Islands, the one nation out of all nations which ought to comport itself well towards Icelanders, is no less apathetic when it comes to dealing with Icelandic artists and literary folk.

A few years ago I went to a kind of “culture week” in Þórshöfn, where poets, visual artists, and musicians from all the Nordic countries and Greenland come together, and it was not until the small welcoming committee greeted me and the other Icelanders at their poky little airport in Þórshöfn that I found out I wouldn’t have a private room at the hotel. I wouldn’t be based at the hotel at all, but instead in a boarding house at the edge of town.

I ended up sharing a room with a Norwegian who had come over from Norway and spoke the absurd children’s language nýnorska, or New Norwegian, and who was purging himself through some kind of detox, letting nothing pass his lips the whole week except lemon-flavored water.

It was, evidently, incomprehensible that this miserable individual should choose exactly this week for his self-centered cleansing ritual. The smell emanating from his mouth every time he opened it (which wasn’t infrequently) was the sourest halitosis I have ever experienced from anybody.

That we were roommates made other participants at this Faroese poetry farce look at me with compassion for having to share a room with this New-Norwegian phenomenon, but also with ironic glances, which I interpreted as indicating they had formed an opinion that I, the Icelander, deserved to spend the darkest hours of the day in Þórshöfn in an atmosphere transformed by the cocktail of lemon juice, water, Norwegian exhalations, and unused digestive fluids.