Paradise Reclaimed
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: - Pronunciation
INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S - Paradise Reclaimed
1 - The wonder pony
2 - Great men covet the pony
3 - Romanticism comes to Iceland
4 - The pony and fate
5 - The sacred lava violated
6 - The millennial celebrations. Icelanders reap justice
7 - Church-going
8 - Secret in mahogany
9 - Steinar leaves, with the secret
10 - Concerning horse-copers
11 - Money on the window-sill
12 - The sweetheart
13 - Of emperors and kings
14 - Business matters
15 - A baby in spring
16 - The authorities, the clergy, and the soul
17 - Water in Denmark
18 - Visiting the Bishop’s House
19 - God’s City of Zion
20 - Learning to understand bricks
21 - Good coffee
22 - Good and bad doctrines
23 - Delivering a packet of needles
24 - The girl
25 - Travel episode
26 - Clementine
27 - One minute
28 - Good broth
29 - Polygamy or death
30 - Ending
Notes
About the Author
ALSO BY Halldór Laxness
Copyright Page
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Pronunciation
This is a revised version of the translation of Paradise Reclaimed (Paradísarheimt) I made some forty years ago. I gladly accepted the invitation by Vintage Books to revisit it and refresh its style; I have also added notes to give context to the historical setting.
In particular, I have used the original Icelandic orthography of proper names; it is no longer considered either necessary or desirable to anglicise foreign names, as used to be the norm.
The modern Icelandic alphabet has thirty-two letters, compared with twenty-six in modern English. There are two extra consonants (ð and þ), and an additional diphthong (æ). Readers may find a note on the pronunciations of specifically Icelandic letters helpful:
ð (Ð), known as “eth” or “crossed d,” is pronounced like the (voiced) th in breathe.
þ (Þ), known as “thorn,” is pronounced like the (unvoiced) th in breaths.
æ is pronounced like the i in life.
The pronunciation of the vowels is conditioned by the accents:
á like the ow in owl
é like the ye in yet
í like the ee in seen
ó like the o in note
ö like the eu in French fleur
ú like the oo in soon
ý like the ee in seen
au like the œi in French œil
ei, ey, like the ay in tray
Please note asterisks (*) within the text indicate an explanatory note to be found on pages 301–304.
INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S
Paradise Reclaimed
by Jane Smiley
When Halldór Kiljan Laxness accepted his Nobel Prize in 1955, he spoke of his amazement that “a poor wanderer, a writer from one of the most remote islands in the world” should be so recognized and honored, should find himself in front of “Majesties, ladies, and gentlemen.” Several years later, he came to write Paradise Reclaimed; in the novel, Laxness revisited these ideas and explored them through the story of Steinar of Steinahlíðar, who is touched and transformed by the intrusion of the great world into his bare corner of Iceland, and then leaves home upon a strange journey of geographic, philosophical, and spiritual discovery. In one sense, Steinar’s story (based on the story of Eirikur Bruni, a nineteenth-century Icelander) parallels that of his author, who was a great traveler, and in another, larger sense, it parallels those of many Icelanders after the first settlement of Iceland in the ninth century, who left the country on perilous journeys, met kings and famous men, saw great wonders, and then returned to resume the lives they had left behind in a land that was almost unchanged.
When the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Laxness the prize, they cited his revival of the thousand-year-old Icelandic literary tradition and his connection to the ancient saga narratives, but Laxness was far more than a reproducer of medieval modes and ideas like Sigrid Undset. Though his work was imbued with traditional poetry and literature, he was very much a twentieth-century novelist who was thoroughly skilled in social commentary and alive to the issues and questions of his time. His focus was always on Iceland, but his angle of perception was skeptical and ironic; his criticism of his native land was sometimes harsh, and his work was often the subject of controversy and even vilification. In his acceptance speech, he reflected upon his position at home—“Like a sensitive instrument that records every sound, they have reacted with pleasure and displeasure to every word I have written. It is great good fortune for an author to be born into a nation so steeped in centuries of poetry and literary tradition.” Laxness was no less skeptical of the movements and fashions of the larger world—one of the tragic ironies of his great novel, Independent People, is that the protagonist, Bjartur, is tempted by the rise of wool prices as a result of the First World War to build himself a real house to replace his traditional Icelandic turf hut.
When the war ends and prices crash, the house is unfinished and must be abandoned. The independent Bjartur, whom we had met at the beginning of the novel as a youngish man, fired with the desire to establish himself as a self-reliant small farmer, loses everything and must start over, stoic to the end and not quite so independent of the world as he had tried always to be. Steinar, too, ends where he had begun, but his story is the counterpoint to Bjartur’s. When Paradise Reclaimed opens, Steinar is a small farmer already, who is famous for the meticulous care with which he maintains his tiny farm. Though he is not one of the important men of his district, he is a man of dignity and unusual skill. He has a stroke of fortune—whether good or ill is open to interpretation—when one of his mares gives birth to a remarkably fine foal of almost uncanny beauty and abilities. Though his children love the horse, when Steinar hears that the King of Denmark is coming to Iceland, he decides to present the animal to him. The King of Denmark accepts the horse, though not quite with the respect that the reader feels Steinar deserves.
More importantly, when Steinar leaves his farm, he encounters a man who will change his life—an Icelandic Mormon named Bishop Þjóðrekur, whom Steinar saves from being tethered to a stone outside a church. Thereafter, Steinar’s life grows stranger and stranger. His willingness to be open to experience, to be led from one thing to another, takes him to Denmark, where he meets the king again and gives him another gift, and then to Utah, where he lives among the Mormons for many years, still remembering and loving his family, but unable to hear from them or get in touch with them. In the interim, his family and his farm fall into the careless power of the local sheriff, who ravishes the daughter and whose horse herd destroys the homefield. The sheep are dispersed and everyone in Steinar’s family must go into service until at last Bishop Þjóðrekur appears with a message from Steinar, and takes the family to Utah to join him. The wife dies on the ship, and the daughter is seduced by a stranger, but she is later redeemed by polygamous marriage to Bishop Þjóðrekur.
At the very end, Steinar returns as a Mormon missionary to Iceland. When he finds his small farm, he can barely recognize it, but once he does, he ends as he began, putting stone upon stone, expressing his nature by making order of chaos.
The novel, which has a strange combination of earthy, ironic incident and mythic power, asks us to accept in Steinar
a man of radical innocence, who neither ruminates upon nor questions his own decisions, but acts and then accepts the results of his actions. Neither he nor his family doubts that he loves them passionately, even though he abandons them. The narrative chain of causation that is a novel does not become a chain of judgement and blame, but instead deflects those very ideas by disregarding them. A key incident in Paradise Reclaimed is the birth of Steinar’s grandchild. Everyone in the parish knows that the sheriff has ravished the daughter and impregnated her—the parish is full of his illegitimate offspring. But the daughter repeatedly states that nothing happened and that she does not know how she came to have a child. She is unashamed and resists persuasion. A virgin birth? Why not? Her ignorance, like Steinar’s, becomes innocence, and redeems the careless cruelties of the sheriff and the other powerful exploiters she meets who, no matter what they do, cannot change her perception of the world as a place of wonders, of pleasures and pains that cannot be understood, but may only be endured.
If Laxness’s major novels are world-class epics by a great writer writing at the top of his form in a sophisticated literary language, this novel is different from them—it is the smaller, more idiosyncratic work of an acute and interesting mind. According to translator Magnus Magnusson, Laxness first became acquainted with the story of Eirikur Bruni as a young man in his twenties, but didn’t know how to use it, or perhaps what to make of it, for some thirty years. When he did come back to it, perhaps it resonated with his own sense of where he had traveled and the wonders he had seen. While it doesn’t seem to have the sweep and general applicability of the larger works, it functions like a parable or a folktale, not operating out of basic verisimilitude but out of material that is not understandable by reason, only through belief. Eirikur’s story was similar to the raw material of the medieval saga writers in that it was a given story, taken from life and known to many. Laxness’s job was to make sense of it and find meaning in it, and the meaning he found was in the exploration of innocence.
Steinar and his family are never redeemed because they never fall. Though they act in ways that the world condemns, they never lose either their innocence or their ability to love not only each other, but those around them. They always seek to do good and to be helpful. To be poor, ignorant Icelanders may seem to be a disadvantage, but in the end, their adventures transform and save them from the narrow-minded lives of their neighbors, who would rather tether a man to a rock than listen to what he had to say, or the frivolity of the European aristocrats whom Steinar meets in Denmark, who haven’t got the patience either to make good use of the horse he has given them or to open the intricate puzzle-cabinet he constructs for them.
It is Laxness’s ironic tone and sly humor that give Steinar and his adventures much of their interest. He is, as always, a master of understatement and juxtaposition. Bishop Þjóðrekur has great regard for his hat—he always wraps it in paper and hides it so that when he is getting beaten up, his hat will remain in good condition. When Steinar decides to go to America, he sends his wife a packet of needles. The packet takes years to find her, but upon receipt, she understands its meaning at once. A woman Steinar meets in Utah (also Icelandic) brings him coffee from time to time. In return he belatedly takes her a load of bricks. The manner in which Laxness portrays these small incidents is very Icelandic—they are full of unexpressed emotions; what is expressed is courtesy, philosophy, acceptance, not exactly wit but something very dry that lies somewhere between stoicism and humor.
Possibly, Paradise Reclaimed is not for everyone, but it is a strange and beautiful book, written by one of the twentieth century’s most unusual, skilled, and visionary novelists.
1
The wonder pony
In the early days of Kristian Wilhelmsson, who was the third last foreign king to wield power here in Iceland,* a farmer named Steinar lived at Hlíðar in the district known as Steinahlíðar. He had been so named by his father after the rubble of stones that cascaded down off the mountain in the spring when he was born. Steinar was a married man by the time this story opens, and had two young children, a daughter and a son; he had inherited the farm of Hlíðar from his father.
At this time, Icelanders were said to be the poorest people in Europe, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been, all the way back to the earliest settlers; but they believed that many long centuries ago there had been a Golden Age in Iceland, when Icelanders had not been mere farmers and fishermen as they were now, but royal-born heroes and poets who owned weapons, gold, and ships. Like other boys in Iceland, Steinar’s son soon learned to be a viking and king’sman, and whittled axes and swords for himself out of pieces of wood.
Hlíðar was built in the same way as the average farmhouse in Iceland had been from time immemorial—a floored living-room and entrance, and a small timber-lined spare room with a bed for visitors. A row of wooden gables faced on to the yard in the normal order of farm-buildings of that period, with an outhouse, store-shed, byre, stable, sheep-hut and finally a small workshed. Behind the buildings the haystacks reared up every autumn and dwindled down to nothing by the spring.
Farms of this kind, turf-roofed and grass-grown, were to be found huddling under the mountain-slopes in a thousand places in Iceland in those days; what distinguished the farm we are now to visit for a while was the loving and artistic care with which the owner made up for what it lacked in grandeur. So scrupulous was his attention to his property, by day or night, that he would never see damage or deterioration of any kind, indoors or out, without making haste to repair it. Steinar was a master-craftsman, equally skilled with wood and metal. It had long been the custom in the district to point out the dry-stone dykes and walls of Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar as an example for aspiring young farmers to follow in life; there were no other works of art in those parts to compare with these carefully built walls of stone. The farms in Steinahlíðar stand on a plain under cliffs which had been the seaboard twenty thousand years before. Pockets of soil keep forming in crevices up in the rock-face and various plants take root in them, which undermine the fabric of the rock. In the heavy rains of spring and autumn the soil is washed away from the fissures, and pieces of rock bounce down on to the farms below. On some farms these stones would cause great damage every year to the meadows and home-field, sometimes even to the buildings themselves. Steinar of Hlíðar often had his hands full in the spring, clearing the boulders from his home-field and meadows—the more so since he was more meticulous than most. Many were the times he had to bend double and straighten up with a heavy boulder in his arms, for no other reward than the joy of seeing a destructive stone fitted with dedicated care into a wall.
It is said that Steinar of Hlíðar had a white pony which was considered the finest animal in the south. This horse was the sort of phenomenon that every farm needs. It seemed beyond serious doubt that this was a supernatural beast and had been so ever since he was a foal, when he had unexpectedly appeared on the scene at the side of a rather elderly white mare which had been running with the herd for a long time in the mountains. At the time of the birth she was grazing at Lónsbakkar (Creek-Banks), but she had been stabled over midwinter and no one had had any idea that she was in foal. If there were ever a case of immaculate conception in Iceland, then this was it. The birth took place in a snowstorm nine days before summer; not a flower in sight, not even a dock-leaf crouching by a wall, certainly no sign of the golden plover yet—the fulmar had scarcely started to hurl itself high in the air to see if the mountains were still there; and suddenly a new creature had been brought into the world almost before the spring itself was born. The little foal ran so lightly at the old mare’s side that he could hardly be said to touch the ground with his toes; and yet these tiny hooves were not turned backwards, and this seemed to indicate that he was not a water-kelpie after all—at least not on both sides. But since the mare was unprepared for him, what was this fairy creature to live on? The old mare was brought back to the farm an
d given hay; and the young kelpie was given butter, which was the only thing that would do in place of the mare’s milk that did not exist. And the little kelpie went on being given butter from the churn until he was put to grass.
As he grew he developed handsome lines, a richly arched neck with a full mane, lean flowing hindquarters, long slender legs and well-formed hooves. There was a fine gleam in his keen eyes, and his sense of direction never failed him; he trotted smoothly and well, and at galloping he was quite without equal. He was named Krapi after all the slush and snow there was that spring; and from then on, time was always reckoned in terms of the year of his birth: the spring Krapi was a year old, two years old, three years old, and so on.
Up on the cliffs some ravines had formed here and there which broadened farther up into grassy watercourses. The ponies from the farms nearby often gathered there in a large herd—“up on the Brows,” as people said—or else along the riverbanks or the plains by the sea. But because of all the cosseting and the titbits that Krapi had grown used to accepting from the folk at Hlíðar, he often came trotting alone down the mountain or up from the flats straight into the farmyard, where he would rub himself against the doorpost and whinny into the house. He seldom had to wait very long for a lump of butter if there were any available. It was a pleasure to lay one’s face against his nose, which was softer than any maiden’s cheek; but Krapi never liked being caressed for long. As soon as he had got what he wanted he trotted away along the path and then broke into a sudden gallop as if something had frightened him, and did not pull up until he had rejoined the herd.
The summers in Iceland were long in those days. In the mornings and evenings the meadows were so green that they were red, and during the day the horizon was so blue that it was green. But throughout this remarkable play of colours (which no one paid any attention to or even noticed, for that matter) Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar went on being one of those south-country farms where nothing very eventful ever happened except that the fulmar went on sweeping along the cliffs just as in great-grandfather’s day. On ledges and in crevices in the cliffs grew rose root and fern, angelica, brittle bladderfern and moonwort. The boulders kept on tumbling down as if the heartless cliff-troll were shedding stone tears. A good pony can occur on a farm once in a generation, with luck; but on some farms, never in a thousand years. From the sea, beyond the sands and marshes, for a thousand years, the murmur was always the same. Late in the hay-season, when the eggs were safely hatched, the oyster-catcher would arrive in red stockings and white shirt under a black silk jacket to strut aristocratically through the new-mown meadows, whistle, and depart. For all those centuries, Snati the farm-dog was just as full of his own importance as he trotted at the shepherd’s side behind the milch-ewes every morning, newly fed and with his tongue lolling out. On still summer days the sound of a scythe being hammered sharp would drift over from the neighbouring farm. There was rain on the way if the cows lay down in the meadow, particularly if they were all lying on the same side; but if there were a dry spell on the way they would bellow eleven times in a row at sunset. Always the same story.