Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

But was it possible that someone had recognized Jónas’s poems in the form in which they were published in Sturla’s book? What other reason was there why, at the dawn of the 21st century, someone would question something as innocent as a newly-published book of poems? Of course, he shouldn’t rule out that some classmate of Jónas — even perhaps some miserable down-and-out who he had started hanging around with in his last days — had read some of the manuscript, perhaps a few poems, even though Sturla had absolutely trusted his cousin’s statement that he would be the first person to read “the whole caboodle.”

No more than ten minutes passes between Sturla ordering the food and it arriving at the table. Sturla orders another beer, and while he waits for this and looks at the meat and potatoes on the plate, he hears the door to the place open; it closes again a moment later, without anyone having come inside. He pushes at the hot dish with his fork, using it to release the various aromas: it is the same kind of food as Count Gediminas’s immigrant, German laborers would have ordered in his time. This, Sturla thinks, is original food.

The waiter who brings him the second beer is different from the one who intercepted him and hung up his overcoat; he is older and more substantial — is he Jokûbas Daugirdas’s brother?

Sturla has no sooner taken his first bite of meat than the telephone rings in his breast pocket. He scrambles to get the telephone as his father’s home phone number shows up on the screen. He puts the fork down, swallows, takes a sip of beer, draws a deep breath, and answers.

“Hi, Sturla.”

Sturla isn’t able to work out what lies beneath his father’s tone of voice.

“Has the newspaper arrived?” he asks, without returning the greeting.

“Where are you?” replies Jón.

“You know where I am.”

“No.”

“I am in Vilnius.”

“Where in Vilnius?”

“Downtown.”

“Somewhere inside?”

“What do you mean? I’m in a restaurant downtown.” He waits for his father to say something and continues: “Is it that serious? Should I hold onto something?”

“Jónatan asked me to give you his regards.”

“So you’re giving me the good news first? But why is Jónatan sending me his regards? Weren’t you telling me this morning that he didn’t want to publish my article?” Sturla prongs a small bite of meat for himself.

“I think I’m going to have to read this to you,” says Jón, and now there is no subtext concealed in his tone of voice. “Although reading it isn’t going to make you happy there, overseas” he continues.

Like a flash, a picture of Henryk the dwarf in the hotel reception immediately pops up in Sturla’s mind. He runs his hand through his hair with a serious expression; his eyes are full of doubt about whether he is up to his job.

Jón clears his throat and rustles the newspaper, giving Sturla a chance to say something before he starts reading the article. “ Poet Charged with Cheap Plagiarism . That’s the headline.” And after that he pauses to let Sturla reply. “The poet Sturla Jón Jónsson, who is well-known for. .”

“Who wrote it?” interrupts Sturla.

Jón gives him an e-mail address that accompanies the article, and Sturla writes it on the napkin beside the plate. And when Jón continues reading, Sturla interrupts to describe his admiration at the splendid chiastic alliteration, poet charged / cheap plagiarism ; considering the way the newspaperman exposed himself completely in his headline, you have a classic example of an unsuccessful poet who has become a journalist and is trying to take down someone who’d succeeded where he failed. Then he takes a long sip of beer and asks his father to read on.

“The poet Sturla Jón Jónsson, who is well-known for his book free from freedom , which came out some years back, published a new book of poems recently, which he called assertions . That an Icelandic poet has published a new book is not, of course, usually considered a story, but. .”

Sturla once again interrupts the reading. “Is there a picture with the story?” he asks. “Please say it’s not a picture of Sturla Jónsson the politician.”

Without doubt, Jón has been avoiding mention of it, for the picture he describes to Sturla was a picture that has been published before, in a photo-story the newspaper had published about a party held at the Writers’ Union of Iceland on the occasion of the establishment of a center for publicizing Icelandic literature — the same center that chose Sturla as the Icelandic representative to the poetry festival in Lithuania. It is a picture that in Sturla’s mind had been completely unforgivable for the newspaper to publish; he doesn’t look at all good in it: drunk to the eyeballs and with a baseball cap on his head which a colleague, an unscrupulous novelist and scholar, had placed on him just before the photographer took the picture. “You look like a corpse that’s washed ashore and been fitted up in a baseball cap and tie,” his father had said when the picture was originally published, and that was exactly the way Sturla had seen himself in the picture: a thrown-together, purposeless character, not someone who was likely to achieve a single thing.

“What do they have against me?” Sturla almost shouts into the phone, and it occurs to him to ask his father to stop reading. “In one newspaper they publish a picture of me as a farmer and rhymer, and in the next paper, which is of course published by the same mob, I’m a drunk in a baseball cap!” Sturla almost makes himself laugh with these words, but the manner in which he barks that his father should continue reading the news suggests he isn’t at all happy. And while Jón reads the journalist’s story to its conclusion, Sturla forces himself to hold off interrupting, other than to ask who the devil Brynjólfur Madsen is; while the reading goes on he quickly drinks his beer and indicates that the waiter should bring him another one, and another shot of the cherry brandy.

“That an Icelandic poet has published a new book is not, of course, usually considered a story. .” Jón takes up the thread where he’d been stopped. “. . but there is more going on when the published volume seems to no small degree to bear the hallmarks of a pickpocket, as appears to be the case with Sturla Jón Jónsson’s aforementioned book. This journalist’s attention was drawn to the theft in question by Brynjólfur Madsen, the District Court Attorney and a schoolfellow of one Jónas Hallmundsson, who appears to be the real author of the poems which Sturla has published under his own name, and who died before his time in 1978, at only twenty-two years old. According to the conversation this journalist had with Brynjólfur Madsen, Brynjólfur was browsing, quite by chance, through the aforementioned book by Sturla Jón in a bookstore downtown. He soon realized that he recognized things in the book, that he’d seen some of the sentences and images before. Then it dawned on him: they came from poems written by his former classmate, the late Jónas, who happened to be Sturla Jón’s cousin, the son of Sturla’s uncle, Hallmundur Margeir Magnússon. It seemed, if he wasn’t mistaken, quite clear that many of the poems, if not most of them, were largely identical to poems Jónas had shown Brynjólfur at his home in the east part of Reykjavík, around the time the friends graduated from Reykjavík Grammar School. Shortly after this Jónas had actually given Brynjólfur some of the poems, typed and signed, in a beautiful chapbook Brynjólfur still owns and was able to produce in support of his claim. Jónas Hallmundsson had thought about publishing his poetry, but he struggled with mental problems, and he hadn’t found sufficient equilibrium to bring his project to fruition. But it is clear that his cousin Sturla Jón came into possession of Jónas’s manuscript and thought it would be okay to publish it under his own name, although he waited almost thirty years to do so. On the other hand, it is also clear that he has carried out a few facelifts on Jónas’s poems, which it is safe to say were very mature poems considering how young the poet was when he wrote the poems. Brynjólfur Madsen compared the poet Sturla Jón’s alterations to his relative’s creative work with the surgical embellishments of a certain pop star who transformed himself from a black man to a pink one. It had never been a secret that in many of his poems Jónas was mocking the poetic posturing of his classmates who published in the school newspaper MR , and now you could say that Sturla Jón has managed to perfect his cousin’s ironic gestures by publishing them under his own name as if they were serious, weighty poems. Brynjólfur said that he was in fact dumbfounded that an Icelandic poet in his fifties, whose books were published by a respected publisher, and who evidently enjoyed grants from the Icelandic State, should be caught engaged in such a prosaic pursuit, and, what’s more, within his own family.” Jón clears his throat. “That’s a terribly written article.”