The Lightning Room with Matthew Landrum

 

–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

 

This month [PANK] published a translation of Faroese writer Sólrún Michelsen’s The Rat. Here we talk to the piece’s translator, Matthew Landrum, about reading“Michelsen through Landrum-colored glasses.”

 

1. You mentioned in an email that you’ve just arrived in the Faroe Islands. What’s your relationship to that place? How did you encounter Faroese writer Sólrún Michelsen’s work and decide to translate it?

I found about the islands by accident while reading Shetlandic poetry in a dialect influenced by the Norn language, a dead kissing cousin of Faroese. Fróðskaparsetur Føroya, the university here, has a summer program in Faroese. I came for that and it was love at first sight.

It’s a special place here – grass covered basaltic mountains eroding into the North Atlantic, a language and culture, persistent and triumphant in the face of years of foreign domination, and an arts and literature scene disproportionally strong and large for a population of 50,000. All that has kept coming back and, over the last years, I’ve worked with several poets and writers in translating their work. An organization promoting Faroese literature hired me last fall to translate a few fiction pieces including Sólrún Michelsen’s work, my first dip into prose since some abortive novellas in college. 2. I loved the turns of phrase that hinted at domestication (and marriage) being a kind of prison—”Alma shows good behavior”—and of course the cage. That desire to own and control what we most love. How do you relate to that, as a writer or translator?

It’s hard to let the things we love be free to be themselves because it means they might not do what we want them to do or be what we’d like them to be. But freedom is the necessary state for love, it can’t live in captivity. With this, as with many things, writing and life mirror one another.

When I’m trying to write well, I write poorly because I sit down with ideas of what the poem should be – a clever idea or an imitation of past success. For me, real writing happens when I jot down a stream of consciousness or language riff. Without expectations or demands, I can listen to what a poem is becoming rather than trying to make it be.

It’s like Sting said: if you love somebody, set them free.

3. The violence and sorrow in The Rat—”he goes out and puts his hand on the place where his heart lies,” the bite that draws blood—occurs in a mundane setting, and the unnamed narrator is alone except for his rat. So much of writing requires solitude. What about sorrow, violence?

Two lines of Ecclesiastes come to mind: of making many books there is no end and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. Writing means facing one’s self in the clearest mirror. It’s impossible to do that and not feel a weary sorrow at mixed condition of beauty and pain we live under.

And there’s a violence to writing too. My image for this comes from A. E. Housman’s violent and sorrowful A Shropshire Lad: out of a stem that scored the hand. / I wrung it in a weary land. Our writing costs something of ourselves and honesty is always violent, to ourselves and too often to those around us.

4. There’s something compelling about the repetitious, simple sentence constructions in The Rat—”Time passes…”, “She sniffs…,” “He has managed…”—and the underlying complexity of emotion. It’s making me think about language as a shield, as defense. Especially between languages, does that resonate for you?

In my view, the simplicity of the language comes from the main character. It’s as complicated as what he allows himself to feel and think. Though the situation he’s in is complex, his views on things are simple to a major fault. He has boiled life down to picking at wax and adding numbers (which are all the same once you pass nine). When he thinks he’s ready to reconnect to love, it’s not with a human being or even an animal most would view as social. The language of this story is his shield from the pain he’s experienced and is experiencing. It’s all he can handle.

5. I realize I’m a little nervous to ask you about word choices and turns of phrase because I can’t know which parts are “your” choice and which Michelsen’s. Can you talk a bit about the nuances of ownership and perception by readers?

Michelsen’s words mean what they mean but in many ways Faroese works differently than English. In translating The Rat, I bent the idiom into English and worked to make the tone consistent. The language needed to create the main character since he doesn’t say much for himself. It needed to reflect his control punctuated by high emotions.

With translations, my fidelity is to English. The most accurate version of the Faroese isn’t that worthwhile if it doesn’t live on its own in its new language. I’ve tried not to insert too much of myself. I’m sure I’ve failed at that in places. And no matter how faithful I am, the reader gets my interpretation, writing style, and vocabulary: Michelsen through Landrum-colored glasses.

6. You’re also a poet. How does interacting with the works of others and bringing them into the language in which you write inform your own writing and thinking?

One great thing about translation is that it’s a chance to encounter great literature that’s otherwise inaccessible and to do a very close reading. When I do that, there’s a tradeoff. Some of me ends up in the piece and some of the piece sticks with me. With The Rat, one line in particular (and its surrounding context) has haunted me, and I’ll end here with it: It’s so nice to hear someone rustle in the dark and to have someone to say goodnight to.