This week’s offering by the American poet Bill Holm (1943-2009), a kind of hymn to the Icelandic tongue, takes a sensuous delight in the sound and feel of language that reminds me somewhat of Seamus Heaney, and I love how it evokes the landscape and culture of that barren, lava-black, troll-haunted land.

The Icelandic language is a fascinating one, deeply conservative to the extent that modern speakers can read without much difficulty texts first written down in the 11^th century. This does not work quite the same in the other direction: I can read Old Norse well enough but find modern Icelandic slow going because of the expanded vocabulary. This is despite the fact that much effort has been expended by a body called the ‘language regulator’ in keeping out foreign loanwords and trying to make sure that any new terms necessary are based on older Icelandic words. Which would have gladdened the heart of the English poet William Barnes, who had a passion for an English purified of foreign, post Norman Conquest influences and wanted us to use such terms as ‘welkinfire’ for meteor and ‘wortlore’ for botany.

Bill Holm was himself the grandson of Icelandic immigrants to the US and spent part of every year at his second home in Iceland.

The Icelandic Language

 In this language, no industrial revolution;
 no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
 only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
 The middle class can hardly speak it.

 In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
 through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
 The door groans; the old smell comes
 up from under the earth to meet you.

 But this language believes in ghosts;
 chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
 neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
 at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

 The woman with marble hands whispers
 this language to you in your sleep; faces
 come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
 wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

 In this language, you can’t chit-chat
 holding a highball in your hand, can’t
 even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
 all your grief and failure come clear at last.

 Old inflections move from case to case,
 gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
 vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
 icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

Bill Holm