from Fire Coral

I first encountered Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir’s work as an assignment for the 2019 FarLit Conference for Faroese translators in Tórshavn. In the early November dark, Brazilian Portuguese translator Luciano Dutra and I huddled at a table in Café Brell to work out a quick translation for the next day’s poetry seminar. The selection from her book Fire Coral seemed straightforward, with short sentences and simple vocabulary. Then we hit the seaweed.
 
All thirteen translators arrived at The Nordic House the next day with questions about seaweed. We shared our translations, permutations of an urgent narrative of a woman who is lured in by the stark beauty of the sea only to drown and be devoured and colonized by marine life. We spent half our time puzzling out very specific Faroese words for kelp and coral, urchins and coalfish.
 
The Faroese poetic tradition, founded on an ancient balladry, was reimaged and reclaimed during the Romantic era. The movement’s view of nature as a sympathetic mirror for human emotion has persisted as the main mode of poets interacting with landscape. The Faroese national anthem, Símun av Skarði’s Tú Alfagra Land Mítt (“Thou Fairest Land of Mine”), speaks of the islands holding the narrator in a close embrace. The narrator in turn vows to protect and defend the beauty of the islands by using his poetry in service of the national project. Jógvansdóttir shatters this approach in Fire Coral, depicting nature as hostile and implacable. Humans inhabit a thin crust of earth surrounded by a vast and unfriendly sea. The narrator describes how its indifferent creatures “slime their way beneath my ribcage” and “latch onto my bones.”
 
Upending tradition is nothing new for Jógvansdóttir. She is the vanguard of a younger generation, primarily of women, who are changing the face of Faroese literature. Her hybrid text The Queen of Psychosis breaks cultural taboos around discussing mental illness. But more than the importance of her work, the fragile beauty of Fire Coral captured me. When I think of the heart of the book, I think of the thirteen translators on stage at the basement bar Reinsaríið in downtown Tórshavn reading through sequence translations in eight different languages. In the warm, low-lit interior, our voices rose against the November dark. Just a few blocks down the street, waves lapped the basalt shore as the cold and vast salt sea rolled on and on.