Auður Jónsdóttir’s critically acclaimed Quake is a novel of a woman in fragments. Recovering from an amnesia-inducing seizure, Saga is made to walk through her life based on hints, illusions, and the capricious words of others. Translated into a haunting, lyrical English by Meg Matich, Quake traverses and trespasses across the demarcations of a single life to mark the entrancing dialogues between the self and other, fact and fiction, and a woman and her selves. In the following interview, Barbara Halla speaks to Matich about the trauma within the text, Icelandic women writers, and the interrogations of motherhood.
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Barbara Halla (BH): Before we do a deep dive on the actual themes of the book and the story, I like to get a sense of how translators work and how they find their projects. How did you get interested in Iceland, in Icelandic, and how did you come across the book? And perhaps, why did you choose to translate it?
Meg Matich (MM): I had gotten a fellowship from Columbia to go to Slovakia for a tandem translation and along the way, I had to stop off in Berlin to visit a German poet I had been translating for class. The classmates suggested to me I do a layover in Iceland; flights were inexpensive, the hotels were relatively inexpensive. This was 2012, I believe.
I felt this very strong and immediate pull, especially because I was surrounded by ocean and a cold coast, both things that I like. I found out about Icelandic grammar just by asking about it in bookshops and it fascinated me—I like complex grammars as well. And I like strange things. Icelandic, I still think it sounds like cicadas, so I became very attached to it immediately. And soon I found my voice in someone else’s, which is something I hadn’t felt before— translation had always been a very sort of practical exercise to me, or a way to think about language. And it certainly caused me to write poetry differently than I had previously.
I came across Quake by invitation. Jennifer Baumgardner of Dottir Press had done some research on me, and we just started a relationship from there. I found Auður strange and chaotic and fascinating. And she is spellbinding when she talks. You don’t want to do anything else but listen to her. I guess that’s kind of what happened to the book. I was more engaged with her as a person than with the text at first, but that’s how I understood why it was meandering, and tangential.
BH: You also recently translated Magma by Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir and I find it a fascinating text to compare Quake to. In the English-speaking market, there’s been a push to hear more stories from women; do you find that something similar is happening in Iceland? What would you say the place that women’s writing takes in Icelandic literature?
MM: I can’t make general sweeping statements—that it has always been one way or another. In Icelandic sagas, and they’re always troublemakers, seekers, they cause misfortune. But in recent history, I would say yes, there has been a continued trend that more women’s stories are being told. And I want to pin this to one author: a woman called Ásta Sigurðardóttir.
She was born in 1931 and died in 1971, essentially from severe alcoholism. In 1951, she released a story about being raped in a very horrific way, when she was essentially a teenager, by a much older man. She was twenty at the time of writing. When you are in a community as small as Reykjavik—that time period was also difficult for women in general—this kind of attention causes a great deal of ostracization. She was essentially exiled from the community, into a small group of what are described continually as bohemians. Her life is romanticized quite a lot; she was very fashionable, she smoked, she wore a lot of makeup, she drank heavily. These things are true, but I don’t agree with the depiction. She released the story about her sexual assault in 1951, and after that, she continued to publish stories reflective of her experience, but also of history. One of her stories is about becoming pregnant outside of marriage; the person whom she loved rejected her, offering her no help, and she ended up essentially starving, and still writing about her life. She continued to write about sexism, the way she was hassled in the street when she was drunk and starving and freezing. She worried about poverty, she was periodically unhoused. So, I think that her work marked a turning point in women’s literature in Iceland.
Subsequent to her we have to skip ahead in time, but there is also Thordis Elva. She wrote a book essentially about violence in Iceland in layman’s terms, detailing the laws and how they were biased against women, which is very true. It’s very, very difficult for a case to go to court. And I think this is a safe environment to say that my own case was dropped by the police a year ago, and it was very clear what had happened. So, Elva wrote an entire book about it (though its unavailable in English), and then she wrote a follow-up book—which I have not read—called South of Forgiveness, about her reconciliation with a man who had assaulted her.
BH: Talking about rape and sexual violence is—or has been made—very difficult for women. And it features in Quake too, although Saga’s reaction to learning about her parents is surprising. It’s interesting to me, because I don’t come from a very forgiving culture, but there are activists who work with notions of restorative justice beyond the courts with sexual violence. As a translator, but also as a reader, how did you feel about Saga’s relationship to her father—her desire to forgive him and justify him? Was it difficult to translate those moments?
MM: It was frustrating, though I didn’t feel altogether disturbed by it; I didn’t have a strong emotional response to it. The strongest emotional response I had was when Johánna said that she still remembers hearing something crack. As she watches a movie later, she says, she hears the same sound. And that gave me chills up my spine. It made me feel crazy. And I had to step away from the work at that point. It was similar to Magma, which I also had to give myself a lot of time to work through. Very violent text.
BH: You mentioned the word frustration. And I think I was frustrated a lot during this book—partially because Saga doesn’t remember. But I was also very frustrated with her treatment of her husband, because she knows if they’re separated something has gone wrong. And yet, especially towards the end, it seems to me that she starts accepting the way that he sees her. I found that terribly annoying, as I was thinking of all these men who want their wives to be the young women that they fell in love with, without actually wanting themselves to take responsibility for their households.
MM: He’s a pseudo-intellectual, which is exhausting to begin with. And there’s two points I want to make. Number one, I’m not trained in psychology, so this is in non-scientific terms. Our bodies push us to repeat events, traumatic events, traumatic relationships, because we have not resolved them, but formed new neural pathways instead. Saga was unambiguously neglected by her parents, and I think that in her husband, she found a mirror and repeated those behaviors, playing them out continually against her better instincts. Even as a teenager, she knew he was charming, but he was not giving her what she needed, because their entire life was about him. So I think that she was used to feeling that way.
My other thought on this is that I too am frustrated that she subsumes her identity, that she accepts his narrative of her. And I don’t know that she ever really breaks free of that. She attempts to. We see her heartbroken, but we don’t see a reclamation of identity after that, although I do believe that she has the power to do so. Even though the ending is unclear—did she die, did she have a seizure—I think she wants it to convey the possibility that she had become enlightened. It is my hope and my belief that if she is still, in fact, alive, she will find the strength to stop abusing her body, and stop accepting a male narrative of what a woman should be and what she is. In particular, her husband picks someone who’s essentially compliant with everything, right? Which is really sad. Like a fan girl, he married someone who was not yet empowered in her life. And he kept her in that position.
BH: You mentioned earlier that Icelandic women often have children very early, and it reminded me of this thing that Toni Morrison said: if women want to have children early, they should, but it’s up to the community to allow them to thrive with their children, and not to be bogged down by pregnancy or motherhood. I think that’s something that we do sort of see in Quake, with Saga’s family coming together at the end of the day.
MM: I think Ásta Sigurðardóttir, writing in the 1950s and 60s, really provides a contrast to the type of thing we see commonly in Icelandic society now. And perhaps she paved the way for it. In my experience, I’ve never seen that level of ostracization. If something like what happened to her happened now, it would be in the newspapers. And it’s part of what’s called the “Nordic paradox,” which is something that’s very important to me. And something that I’m gradually learning more about by working with a lawyer who actually brought a case to the U.N. Human Rights Court against Iceland because of this lack of prosecution. The greater framework seems supportive of young mothers and mothers in general, but at the same time, they’re not all together. They subsidize children as well. I think regardless of your socioeconomic status, you’re given a certain amount of money for every child on a monthly basis for the first couple of years of their lives first year.
BH: Still, in a sense, there can be incentives to help women and mothers, but depending on the context, that might not be enough to ensure freedom and ensure that women live their lives to their best potential.
MM: I agree. I try to be accepting of motherhood. I think it’s an interesting sort of vocation, though this kind of thing would never be for me personally. Regarding this book, actually, I was quite cynical, and maybe took the position that motherhood was a burden for a long time—partly because the culture I came out of was extremely conservative. But after I read it, I felt empathetic for the first time, and I was able to really put myself in the shoes of someone who wants to protect their child, who loves their child and who wanted their child, which is something that I really, again, was very cynical about and hadn’t experienced before this, which is what we look for in world literature, right? We continue to read so that we can have those viewpoints and changes in perspective, or encouragement of our own perspective. It’s important to try to read without agenda.
BH: I was wondering whether you could give us a taste of what we can expect from you next, in terms of translation projects, or otherwise.
MM: My next book is a collection of short stories by Ásta Sigurðardóttir, which will be coming out from Nordisk Books. Next on the list is Niviaq Korneliussen, who’s a wonderful Greenlandic writer—I’m translating her from Danish. This work, Flower Valley, is about the suicide epidemic in Greenland, following a young lesbian in the development of her romantic relationship, and her increasing suicidality and fragmentation. But it also has two simultaneous narratives. One is a count down from forty-five, which is the number of suicides in Greenland in 2019 when she was writing it. Forty-five people out of fifty thousand is huge, and it sends ripples through the community; there are things called “suicide cascades.” And so that’s my next book, and probably the closest to my heart.
After that is Haukur Ingvarsson. He wrote a really inspiring and grounding book of poetry about climate change. He’s observed it from Iceland, and he really concretizes what’s going to happen—not in terms of the sea level simply rising, but that rising drowning everything in your basement and destroying your memories. He was named the one of the most exciting emerging writers of the year by Words Without Borders.
And the very last one is one of my best friends in the entire world: Elias Knörr. He’s a queer Galician who writes in Icelandic, and he uses the strangest Icelandic I’ve seen in my entire life. He invents words and is a polyglot as well. So, he knows all about topologies, and is always throwing in Old Norse words. It’s fantastic and bizarre and, and at times, very, very sad, very sexual, but in an indirect way, like there’s a lot of sea foam and botanists and light bulbs. That one for which I don’t have a publisher yet, but it is my mission to find a good publisher for him.
Meg Matich is a poet and translator in Reykjavik. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University and has received support for her work from the Banff Centre, PEN America, and the Fulbright Commission, and she is a frequent collaborator with Reykjavik UNESCO. Among other projects, Meg has collaborated with poet Magnús Sigurðsson on an anthology of Icelandic poetry, translated a book of essays in honor of former President Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and translated the 2021 novel Magma. Meg is one of a few immigrants in the Icelandic Writers’ Union and considers that membership quintessential to her life in Iceland.
Barbara Halla is the criticism editor for Asymptote, where she has covered Albanian and French literature and the Booker International Prize. She works as a translator and independent researcher, focusing in particular on discovering and promoting the works of contemporary and classic Albanian women writers. Barbara holds a B.A. in history from Harvard and has lived in Cambridge, Paris, and Tirana.
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