Paradise Reclaimed
Table of Contents
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: - Pronunciation
INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S - Paradise Reclaimed
3 - Romanticism comes to Iceland
6 - The millennial celebrations. Icelanders reap justice
9 - Steinar leaves, with the secret
16 - The authorities, the clergy, and the soul
18 - Visiting the Bishop’s House
20 - Learning to understand bricks
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Pronunciation
This is a revised version of the translation of
Paradise Reclaimed
(
Paradísarheimt
) I made some forty years ago. I gladly accepted the invitation by Vintage Books to revisit it and refresh its style; I have also added notes to give context to the historical setting.
In particular, I have used the original Icelandic orthography of proper names; it is no longer considered either necessary or desirable to anglicise foreign names, as used to be the norm.
The modern Icelandic alphabet has thirty-two letters, compared with twenty-six in modern English. There are two extra consonants (ð and þ), and an additional diphthong (æ). Readers may find a note on the pronunciations of specifically Icelandic letters helpful:
ð (Ð), known as “eth” or “crossed d,” is pronounced like the (voiced)
th
in
breathe
.
þ (Þ), known as “thorn,” is pronounced like the (unvoiced)
th
in
breaths
.
æ is pronounced like the
i
in
life
.
The pronunciation of the vowels is conditioned by the accents:
á like the
ow
in
owl
é like the
ye
in
yet
í like the
ee
in
seen
ó like the
o
in
note
ö like the
eu
in French
fleur
ú like the
oo
in
soon
ý like the
ee
in
seen
au like the
œi
in French
œil
ei, ey, like the
ay
in
tray
Please note asterisks (*) within the text indicate an explanatory note to
be found on pages 301–304.
INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S
Paradise Reclaimed
by Jane Smiley
When Halldór Kiljan Laxness accepted his Nobel Prize in 1955, he spoke of his amazement that “a poor wanderer, a writer from one of the most remote islands in the world” should be so recognized and honored, should find himself in front of “Majesties, ladies, and gentlemen.” Several years later, he came to write
Paradise Reclaimed;
in the novel, Laxness revisited these ideas and explored them through the story of Steinar of Steinahlíðar, who is touched and transformed by the intrusion of the great world into his bare corner of Iceland, and then leaves home upon a strange journey of geographic, philosophical, and spiritual discovery. In one sense, Steinar’s story (based on the story of Eirikur Bruni, a nineteenth-century Icelander) parallels that of his author, who was a great traveler, and in another, larger sense, it parallels those of many Icelanders after the first settlement of Iceland in the ninth century, who left the country on perilous journeys, met kings and famous men, saw great wonders, and then returned to resume the lives they had left behind in a land that was almost unchanged.
When the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Laxness the prize, they cited his revival of the thousand-year-old Icelandic literary tradition and his connection to the ancient saga narratives, but Laxness was far more than a reproducer of medieval modes and ideas like Sigrid Undset. Though his work was imbued with traditional poetry and literature, he was very much a twentieth-century novelist who was thoroughly skilled in social commentary and alive to the issues and questions of his time. His focus was always on Iceland, but his angle of perception was skeptical and ironic; his criticism of his native land was sometimes harsh, and his work was often the subject of controversy and even vilification. In his acceptance speech, he reflected upon his position at home—“Like a sensitive instrument that records every sound, they have reacted with pleasure and displeasure to every word I have written. It is great good fortune for an author to be born into a nation so steeped in centuries of poetry and literary tradition.” Laxness was no less skeptical of the movements and fashions of the larger world—one of the tragic ironies of his great novel,
Independent People,
is that the protagonist, Bjartur, is tempted by the rise of wool prices as a result of the First World War to build himself a real house to replace his traditional Icelandic turf hut.
When the war ends and prices crash, the house is unfinished and must be abandoned. The independent Bjartur, whom we had met at the beginning of the novel as a youngish man, fired with the desire to establish himself as a self-reliant small farmer, loses everything and must start over, stoic to the end and not quite so independent of the world as he had tried always to be. Steinar, too, ends where he had begun, but his story is the counterpoint to Bjartur’s. When
Paradise Reclaimed
opens, Steinar is a small farmer already, who is famous for the meticulous care with which he maintains his tiny farm. Though he is not one of the important men of his district, he is a man of dignity and unusual skill. He has a stroke of fortune—whether good or ill is open to interpretation—when one of his mares gives birth to a remarkably fine foal of almost uncanny beauty and abilities. Though his children love the horse, when Steinar hears that the King of Denmark is coming to Iceland, he decides to present the animal to him. The King of Denmark accepts the horse, though not quite with the respect that the reader feels Steinar deserves.
More importantly, when Steinar leaves his farm, he encounters a man who will change his life—an Icelandic Mormon named Bishop Þjóðrekur, whom Steinar saves from being tethered to a stone outside a church. Thereafter, Steinar’s life grows stranger and stranger. His willingness to be open to experience, to be led from one thing to another, takes him to Denmark, where he meets the king again and gives him another gift, and then to Utah, where he lives among the Mormons for many years, still remembering and loving his family, but unable to hear from them or get in touch with them. In the interim, his family and his farm fall into the careless power of the local sheriff, who ravishes the daughter and whose horse herd destroys the homefield. The sheep are dispersed and everyone in Steinar’s family must go into service until at last Bishop Þjóðrekur appears with a message from Steinar, and takes the family to Utah to join him. The wife dies on the ship, and the daughter is seduced by a stranger, but she is later redeemed by polygamous marriage to Bishop Þjóðrekur.
At the very end, Steinar returns as a Mormon missionary to Iceland. When he finds his small farm, he can barely recognize it, but once he does, he ends as he began, putting stone upon stone, expressing his nature by making order of chaos.
The novel, which has a strange combination of earthy, ironic incident and mythic power, asks us to accept in Steinar a man of radical innocence, who neither ruminates upon nor questions his own decisions, but acts and then accepts the results of his actions. Neither he nor his family doubts that he loves them passionately, even though he abandons them. The narrative chain of causation that is a novel does not become a chain of judgement and blame, but instead deflects those very ideas by disregarding them. A key incident in
Paradise Reclaimed
is the birth of Steinar’s grandchild. Everyone in the parish knows that the sheriff has ravished the daughter and impregnated her—the parish is full of his illegitimate offspring. But the daughter repeatedly states that nothing happened and that she does not know how she came to have a child. She is unashamed and resists persuasion. A virgin birth? Why not? Her ignorance, like Steinar’s, becomes innocence, and redeems the careless cruelties of the sheriff and the other powerful exploiters she meets who, no matter what they do, cannot change her perception of the world as a place of wonders, of pleasures and pains that cannot be understood, but may only be endured.
If Laxness’s major novels are world-class epics by a great writer writing at the top of his form in a sophisticated literary language, this novel is different from them—it is the smaller, more idiosyncratic work of an acute and interesting mind. According to translator Magnus Magnusson, Laxness first became acquainted with the story of Eirikur Bruni as a young man in his twenties, but didn’t know how to use it, or perhaps what to make of it, for some thirty years. When he did come back to it, perhaps it resonated with his own sense of where he had traveled and the wonders he had seen. While it doesn’t seem to have the sweep and general applicability of the larger works, it functions like a parable or a folktale, not operating out of basic verisimilitude but out of material that is not understandable by reason, only through belief. Eirikur’s story was similar to the raw material of the medieval saga writers in that it was a given story, taken from life and known to many. Laxness’s job was to make sense of it and find meaning in it, and the meaning he found was in the exploration of innocence.
Steinar and his family are never redeemed because they never fall. Though they act in ways that the world condemns, they never lose either their innocence or their ability to love not only each other, but those around them. They always seek to do good and to be helpful. To be poor, ignorant Icelanders may seem to be a disadvantage, but in the end, their adventures transform and save them from the narrow-minded lives of their neighbors, who would rather tether a man to a rock than listen to what he had to say, or the frivolity of the European aristocrats whom Steinar meets in Denmark, who haven’t got the patience either to make good use of the horse he has given them or to open the intricate puzzle-cabinet he constructs for them.
It is Laxness’s ironic tone and sly humor that give Steinar and his adventures much of their interest. He is, as always, a master of understatement and juxtaposition. Bishop Þjóðrekur has great regard for his hat—he always wraps it in paper and hides it so that when he is getting beaten up, his hat will remain in good condition. When Steinar decides to go to America, he sends his wife a packet of needles. The packet takes years to find her, but upon receipt, she understands its meaning at once. A woman Steinar meets in Utah (also Icelandic) brings him coffee from time to time. In return he belatedly takes her a load of bricks. The manner in which Laxness portrays these small incidents is very Icelandic—they are full of unexpressed emotions; what is expressed is courtesy, philosophy, acceptance, not exactly wit but something very dry that lies somewhere between stoicism and humor.
Possibly,
Paradise Reclaimed
is not for everyone, but it is a strange and beautiful book, written by one of the twentieth century’s most unusual, skilled, and visionary novelists.