Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

“And the point of this was?” asks Jón.

“To foster some personal interaction, so the festival’s participants know each other a little before they meet up,” Sturla replies, thinking he’s given his father a good answer.

“But you are not your usual self in this new book,” Jón says, almost accusatorially, and when Sturla asks him to explain what he means by this, Jón replies that the tone of some of the poems seemed to him a little out-moded. It wasn’t so much that he felt Sturla was composing in the fashion of the older Icelandic poets, but more that some of the poems sound like they were written by a young poet from thirty or forty years back.

Sturla looks thoughtfully at his father and lights a cigarette. “Do you have any particular poems in mind?” he asks, blowing out a cloud of smoke.

“I don’t know how to answer that. But which do you think I prefer,” asks Jón, looking meaningfully at his son, “pipe smoke or cigarette smoke?”

Sturla lets his father answer his own question:

“Pipe smoke. Örn comes here with his pipe and pipe-cleaner and all the accoutrements of pipe-smoking, and though there is often a revolting odor when he draws the pipe-cleaner out of the cylinder, I’m now more able to enjoy pipe smoke than the acrid cloud which comes from a cigarette.”

Sturla looks off into space, then glances back at his father and smokes.

“There are a few lines in one poem which I put a definite question mark next to,” Jón continues. “And they are, I think, the only lines which rhyme. Or seem like they rhyme, at least.” He reaches out for Sturla’s book on the sideboard and contemplates the image on the front cover for a moment: a rather blurry picture of an old-fashioned document folder lying on a table; a fountain pen lies open on the folder. While Jón searches through the book he mumbles its short title, assertions , and he repeats it twice more until he finds the page he is looking for. He reads aloud: “the mother, the window / the darkness of the shadows.” Glancing up, he asks, “What were you aiming for in those lines? Why not go all the way, if you were going to rhyme? Why didn’t you say, for example, “the mother in the window,” or “the mother at the window, dark in the shadow?”

As Sturla explains to his father how he’d deliberately avoided the rhyme — how he looks upon rhyme in serious poetry as a foreign body (he didn’t, of course, use the word serious ) — he suspects the quoted lines were strong and vivid after all; it seemed quite clear they were able to move the reader, given that both author and his father had thought of them on the same day, less than an hour apart.

“Did you find something strange about this half-rhyme?” Sturla asks. “Did you find it stuck out like a sore thumb?”

“ Half-rhyme? ” asks Jón.

In Sturla’s mind, a positive response to his own question about the half-rhyme hadn’t been totally out of the question. But if he is honest with himself, he has repeatedly found something peculiar about these lines, without being able to put his finger on exactly why, or to convince himself to either cut them or ignore the issue altogether.

“What does it mean?” continues Jón, who hasn’t understood the term “half-rhyme.” “Or does it mean anything?”

“I’m implying that the person at the window, looking out, is the mother,” answers Sturla, “and what are shadows made of, other than darkness?” When he realizes that his father isn’t satisfied by this response, he continues: “I didn’t set out to explain the poems in this book.”

“So it isn’t supposed to mean anything specific?”

“No. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to mean: nothing specific. The reader asks himself what it might mean. I’m not publishing a book of poems in order to force meaning on people.”

“Perhaps then it’s Norman Bates’ Mother, this mother in the window?” asks Jón with a smile. And when Sturla doesn’t say anything, Jón repeats his question: “Well? Is it her? You know I met Anthony Perkins once.”

Sturla lights himself another cigarette.

“I still don’t understand why, all of a sudden, you’ve started rhyming,” continues Jón. “Or half-rhyming, as you put it.”

His father’s smile always reminded him of the American movie actor Robert Duvall. It had some fine, intelligent irony that caught Sturla off-balance: he had not expected his father to show any enthusiasm for his poems — though it was rather ironic to call his observations “enthusiasm”—or to reveal his worry that his son might not be on the right poetic path. Sturla hadn’t yet told Jón that he was done writing poetry, that he was intending to turn to prose, but regardless of that, he found his father’s observations quite unnecessary. He was interrogating him about the significance of a lyrical metaphor, which Sturla had let stand in the book — and, on top of all this, he was questioning lines about the mother which weren’t really his , they were someone else’s . And at the same time Sturla is reminding himself that these lines are someone else’s , his father quotes the very poet who had, after his death, built his reputation in large part on assertions that he was actually someone else .

“One must be modern,” Jón says, and once again the shape of his mouth makes him look like Robert Duvall. “So says your father, and so said the foremost poet of the poetic renaissance of the nineteenth century.”

Sturla places his cigarette down amidst the unsmoked pipe tobacco that is in the ashtray, and looks at his father who comments, seeming very pleased with himself, that he can make out the aroma of Prince Albert tobacco.

Jón Magnússon is only sixteen years older than his son Sturla Jón Jónsson. Jón was in his second year at the Grammar School in Reykjavík when Sturla Jón came into the world, but he definitely wasn’t going to let that interrupt his studies, as Sturla remembered his father advising him when he himself started Grammar School. Jón and Fanný Alexson, Sturla’s mother, still lived at that time with their parents, but shortly after the birth of their son they moved into a little apartment on the east side of town which Fanný’s father, Benedikt Alexson, at that time a politician and later an ambassador in Oslo and Stockholm, rented for them. When Sturla was born Fanný had completed one year at the Business School of Iceland. She’d intended to continue her studies, but she wasn’t able to fulfill her ambition: Fanný and Jón acquired another boy, Darri Örn, two years after Sturla was born; Darri was born the day Jón graduated from Grammar School. When he was one month old Benedikt bought a little apartment on Mánagata for Jón and his daughter, an apartment they lived in throughout their cohabitation, twenty years in all, and which they sublet during the three years they spent in Prague while Jón was studying film.

As Fanný had told Sturla, something in Jón Magnússon’s character had touched a sensitive nerve in her shortly after they had met; she had begun to sense a kind of mental imbalance, a malaise, which among other things made her almost pathologically dependent on Jón. It led her to develop a great impatience about all kinds of minor details in her relationships with other people, especially Jón. She had never before displayed such neuroses, and they began to swell inside her like a malignant tumor, having a growing influence on her behavior towards others, no matter whether they were close relatives or complete strangers at the supermarket checkout. That “devilish condition” of hers, as Jón described it long afterwards to Sturla, increased dramatically following the birth of Darri Örn, and in their last months in Czechoslovakia Fanný and Jón’s relationship unraveled because of these notions hidden inside her, feelings someone who shared a roof with two young kids shouldn’t entertain. Jón had for his part already withdrawn from Fanný and the boys, moving deeper and deeper into a private world he was creating with his graduate project — a rather strange story, to say the least, about an individual who is faced with eleven doors — but fortunately Jón and Fanný were wise enough to make an agreement to separate for a time; that was their way of saving the relationship, a relationship which became marriage a year after Jón came back from Prague, and lasted, at least on paper, until 1977, the year Sturla Jón graduated from Grammar School, two years later than his peers.