A woman is askedthe questionWhen are you going backto your place?Never she saysWhere I’m from there is no livingonly survivingThat’s why I’ll never go backcount my blessings to reside herecount my wounds and bruisesto remain hereAnd wait for my childrento have the openingI don’t have anymorenot now with the holes unmendedwith hands clenched around a stranger’s bedsheet around a broomstick around an old handAn opening to throwquestions like this in the wastebinSay:I contain many places my placeis anywhere I please Sjá HeiminnKona færspurninguHvenær ætlarðu að faraaftur heim til þín?Aldrei segir húnÞaðan sem ég kem er ekki hægt að lifabara lifa afÞess vegna sný ég aldrei afterprísa mig sæla að búa hér prísa mig sára og marðaað dúsa hérBíð þess að börnin mínöðlist tómiðsem ég hef ekkiekki núna með götin óstoppuðmeð hendurnar krepptar um sængurföt ókunnugra um kústskaft um gamla höndTóm til að hendasvona spurningum í öskutunnunaSegja:ég á í mér marga heima á heimahvar sem ég kæri mig um
See the World
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“See the World” from A WOMAN LOOKS OVER HER SHOULDER: by Brynja Hjálmsdóttir.
Published by Circumference Books on November 15, 2024.
English Translation Copyright © 2024 by Rachel Britton.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Brynja Hjálmsdóttir is from Reykjavík, Iceland, and is the author of two books of poetry and a novel. Her first book, Okfruman, was awarded Poetry Book of the Year by the Icelandic Booksellers’ Choice Awards and was nominated for the Icelandic Women’s Literary Award. Her second book, Kona lítur við, was nominated for the Maístjarnan Poetry Award and was published in English as A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder (Circumference Books) in 2024. Hjálmsdóttir has received various awards, including the 2022 Ljóðstafur Jóns úr Vör and the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Encouragement Award. Her work has been translated into six languages.
Rachel Britton is a writer and translator from New York, based in Iceland. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the State University of New York at Geneseo and an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Iceland. She has received support from the Fulbright Commission, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, and the Icelandic Literature Center.
In A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, written by contemporary Icelandic poet Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and translated by Rachel Britton, one woman lives in a glass ball that is being shaken by someone else. This book of poems, however, is always shaking itself up, leaping between the extreme and the daily, the gross and the delicious, between being scared and being scary.
"These deeply weird poems have delivered unto me critical knowledge about creatureliness, lust, rejection, dejection, invalidation, i.e. what it is to be of gender or rather to be of an off one. As such, I’m pretty certain I only want to live 'where the whore sitteth' for it is a land of plenty where the 'victuals come down from trees,' flowers brim with 'golden intoxicating juices,' and one is permitted to yammer, and yammer I will!"
—Aditi Machado
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