like the one he was going to in Lithuania, Sturla curtly replies that he’s been both to Belgium and to the Faroe Islands roughly ten years ago.
“But you weren’t impressed by the festivals, correct?” his father asks.
“No, I wouldn’t say I was,” comes the response, and as Jón is asking, in a surly tone, why he expects this festival to be any better than the others, it occurs to him, from somewhere in the depths of his brain, to use the coming trip to Lithuania as material for an article he could write for Jónatan Jóhannsson’s literary magazine, From E to F. Why not expose the things that would take place at the international festival before they took place, and set up the possibility of writing a second article about the same material after the festival ends, in light of what had happened—in other words, what he actually experienced. The idea, which Sturla at once becomes convinced is a fabulous idea, reminds him of that famous story from the world of cultural journalism in Reykjavík, about a music critic at an Icelandic newspaper, a man better known as a composer—indeed, rather well known as one—who published a review of one of his colleagues’ concerts in the paper, a concert which had been postponed at the last minute and didn’t take place until after the review appeared.
But while this critic had so clumsily deceived his readers, people reading Sturla’s article, on the other hand, would be just as aware as its author that it deals with future events, that it presents honest speculation about how things at the poetry festival would turn out. It would really be no different from what you find in the mass media every day, with people predicting what will happen in sports or the stock market. Following from his thoughts about the article and the composer’s advance “review,” it occurs to Sturla to tell his father how he’d been in a clothing store earlier and had heard a story about N. Pietur, the old acquaintance of both Jón and Örn Featherby who, firstly, happens to be the half-brother of the editor Jónatan Jóhannsson and, secondly, is the very composer about whom the premature review was written. But Jón breaks the silence first, asking Sturla whether he is going to read from his new book in Lithuania.
“They are translating some poems from it, yes,” answers Sturla. “But I’ll read mainly from the older books.” He tells his father that in addition to the ten or eleven poems which had been translated from Icelandic into Lithuanian (by a Lithuanian who had lived in Iceland for half his life), one of the poems from the new book, “kennslustund,” has been translated into Lithuanian via Sturla’s own translation from Icelandic into English, “the lesson.” The translator, a Belarusian poet from Minsk who was also participating in the poetry festival, had in turn sent Sturla one of her own poems, translated into English, which he had then hastily translated into Icelandic.
“And the point of this was?” asks Jón.
“To foster some personal interaction, so the festival’s participants know each other a little before they meet up,” Sturla replies, thinking he’s given his father a good answer.
“But you are not your usual self in this new book,” Jón says, almost accusatorially, and when Sturla asks him to explain what he means by this, Jón replies that the tone of some of the poems seemed to him a little out-moded. It wasn’t so much that he felt Sturla was composing in the fashion of the older Icelandic poets, but more that some of the poems sound like they were written by a young poet from thirty or forty years back.
Sturla looks thoughtfully at his father and lights a cigarette. “Do you have any particular poems in mind?” he asks, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
“I don’t know how to answer that. But which do you think I prefer,” asks Jón, looking meaningfully at his son, “pipe smoke or cigarette smoke?”
Sturla lets his father answer his own question:
“Pipe smoke. Örn comes here with his pipe and pipe-cleaner and all the accoutrements of pipe-smoking, and though there is often a revolting odor when he draws the pipe-cleaner out of the cylinder, I’m now more able to enjoy pipe smoke than the acrid cloud which comes from a cigarette.”
Sturla looks off into space, then glances back at his father and smokes.
“There are a few lines in one poem which I put a definite question mark next to,” Jón continues. “And they are, I think, the only lines which rhyme. Or seem like they rhyme, at least.” He reaches out for Sturla’s book on the sideboard and contemplates the image on the front cover for a moment: a rather blurry picture of an old-fashioned document folder lying on a table; a fountain pen lies open on the folder. While Jón searches through the book he mumbles its short title, assertions, and he repeats it twice more until he finds the page he is looking for. He reads aloud: “the mother, the window / the darkness of the shadows.” Glancing up, he asks, “What were you aiming for in those lines? Why not go all the way, if you were going to rhyme? Why didn’t you say, for example, “the mother in the window,” or “the mother at the window, dark in the shadow?”
As Sturla explains to his father how he’d deliberately avoided the rhyme—how he looks upon rhyme in serious poetry as a foreign body (he didn’t, of course, use the word serious)—he suspects the quoted lines were strong and vivid after all; it seemed quite clear they were able to move the reader, given that both author and his father had thought of them on the same day, less than an hour apart.
“Did you find something strange about this half-rhyme?” Sturla asks. “Did you find it stuck out like a sore thumb?”
“Half-rhyme?” asks Jón.
In Sturla’s mind, a positive response to his own question about the half-rhyme hadn’t been totally out of the question. But if he is honest with himself, he has repeatedly found something peculiar about these lines, without being able to put his finger on exactly why, or to convince himself to either cut them or ignore the issue altogether.
“What does it mean?” continues Jón, who hasn’t understood the term “half-rhyme.” “Or does it mean anything?”
“I’m implying that the person at the window, looking out, is the mother,” answers Sturla, “and what are shadows made of, other than darkness?” When he realizes that his father isn’t satisfied by this response, he continues: “I didn’t set out to explain the poems in this book.”
“So it isn’t supposed to mean anything specific?”
“No. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to mean: nothing specific. The reader asks himself what it might mean. I’m not publishing a book of poems in order to force meaning on people.”
“Perhaps then it’s Norman Bates’ Mother, this mother in the window?” asks Jón with a smile. And when Sturla doesn’t say anything, Jón repeats his question: “Well? Is it her? You know I met Anthony Perkins once.”
Sturla lights himself another cigarette.
“I still don’t understand why, all of a sudden, you’ve started rhyming,” continues Jón. “Or half-rhyming, as you put it.”
His father’s smile always reminded him of the American movie actor Robert Duvall. It had some fine, intelligent irony that caught Sturla off-balance: he had not expected his father to show any enthusiasm for his poems—though it was rather ironic to call his observations “enthusiasm”—or to reveal his worry that his son might not be on the right poetic path. Sturla hadn’t yet told Jón that he was done writing poetry, that he was intending to turn to prose, but regardless of that, he found his father’s observations quite unnecessary. He was interrogating him about the significance of a lyrical metaphor, which Sturla had let stand in the book—and, on top of all this, he was questioning lines about the
