#kristín svava tómasdóttir

[whilereadingandwalking]

Herostories by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, translated from the Icelandic by K.B. Thors, is a novel-in-verse of found poetry, drawn from a history of midwives in Iceland, traversing frigid, brutal climates to help people deliver their babies, both lauded and isolated, both integral to society and outside of it, transgressing the boundaries of gender. It's interesting, and has the Icelandic beside the English as well as an interview and note from the author and translator that is really interesting and enlightening.

[anotherwaytosay]

Join us on Friday, September 27th at 8 PM at Molasses Books for the Fall edition of the series -- an all-alumni event featuring Nicholas Glastonbury debuting his translation of Summerhouse by Yiğit Karaahmet (Soho Press), a gay thriller, "...dishy, suspenseful, boiling over with black humor," "The Birdcage as done by Highsmith," Marine Cornuet with the first English translation of French-Algerian poet Anna Gréki's Algeria, capital: Algiers (forthcoming Pinsapo Press), written in prison after Gréki was arrested for participating in the Algerian liberation movement against French rule, and K. B. Thors with a collection translated from Icelandic: Herostories by poet-historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, and an essay by the same author about a queer turn-of-the-century midwife.

***  

Nicholas Glastonbury is a writer, translator, and editor from the Florida backwaters. His translations of Turkish and Kurdish fiction and poetry have appeared with or are forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, Comma Press, Soho Press, Sandorf Passage, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and lives in Crown Heights.

Marine Cornuet is a Brooklyn-based translator, poet, and editor. Algeria, capital: Algiers, her translation of French-Algerian poet Anna Gréki’s collection, is forthcoming with Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative in the fall of 2024. Recent translations include Cloche Pèlerine (Le Castor Astral, 2024), a French translation of Kaveh Akbar's collection Pilgrim Bell. She is the presse manager and a member of the editorial collective at Ugly Duckling Presse.

K.B. Thors is author of Vulgar Mechanics (Coach House Books) and the forthcoming Berserk Her, as well as the translator of five books including poetry, fiction, and art text. Her translation of Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s Stormwarning won the American Scandinavian Foundation’s Leif & Inger Sjöberg Prize and was nominated for the 2019 PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation. Her translation of Tómasdóttir’s Herostories was published by Deep Vellum in 2023.

[attrociteas]

⛵!!!

send ⛵ for quotes / poetry that remind me of your muse

A bit long so have them below the cut. I tried to find Icelandic ones because I know you like learning about Iceland + are learning Icelandic, so maybe if you like these you can look at the originals! Hope you like them ❤️

A flood of thoughts has washed me ashore.

Out of earshot.

Beneath a new sky.

And now I plant

in an untouched field.

Watershed, Magnús Sigurðsson [tr. Meg Matich]

Iceland is a land in constant formation

they take material from Lambafell they drive the Lambafell material away to set it down someplace else

gradually Lambafell disappears but someplace else a new land will be made where before was sea and beach

Stormwarning, Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir [tr. K.T. Billey]

today I will rebuild this time no quick fixes / no steel cables or wooden planks no rust  /   no rot no nails necessary but rather the slow growth of twisted roots from ancient trees the way across a path made of grandfather grandmother stones I will become a self-sustaining structure gain strength over time a living root bridge that lasts five hundred years

Reconciliation, Jónína Kirton

[altshiftformore]

Gather clouds, for the recent release of Stormwarning ("Slim yet ambitious, Stormwarning traces the tension between economic interests and environmental damage with dreadful realism." - the Harvard Review) by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, translated by K.B. Thors and Astroecology by Johannes Heldén ("Heldén describes nature and the world around us, but there’s something sinister lurking in these pages." - Emma Ramadan for Three Percent), translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel and Kirkwood Adams (!!!) Featuring!     K.B. Thors poems have appeared in publications across the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Her debut poetry collection Vulgar Mechanics will be published by Coach House Books in 2019. An Icelandic-Ukrainian Canadian from Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, her translations from Icelandic and Spanish have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Scandinavian Review, Circumference, and Palabras Errantes. Her translation of Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else by Soledad Marambio is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Alberta and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she became a Teaching Fellow in Poetry. She is also a performance artist and educator who before teaching writing worked in a sex-positive, woman-positive, and body-positive sex shop. Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir (b. 1985 in Reykjavík, Iceland) has been active on the Icelandic poetry scene since her teenage years. Her poems have been translated into English, Danish, German, Finnish, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Arabic, and published in various magazines and anthologies. She is herself a translator and her translations of Valerie Solanas´s feminist manifesto SCUM and Cuban author Virgilio Piñera´s poem “La isla en peso” have been published in Icelandic. Tómasdóttir holds an MA degree in history from the University of Iceland. Her most recent work is a book on the history of pornography in Iceland. Elizabeth Clark Wessel is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, a founding editor at Argos Book, and the translator of numerous novels from the Swedish, including The Believer by Joakim Zander & What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde. She is the co-translator, along with Kirkwood Adams and the book's author Johannes Heldén, of Astroecology, which was recently longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Originally from rural Nebraska, she spent many years living in New York and Connecticut, and these days calls Stockholm, Sweden home. Kirkwood Adams is a teacher and writer in New York City. Free! Beer, wine and coffee at Molasses!

[anotherwaytosay]

Gather clouds, for the recent release of Stormwarning ("Slim yet ambitious, Stormwarning traces the tension between economic interests and environmental damage with dreadful realism." - the Harvard Review) by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, translated by K.B. Thors and Astroecology by Johannes Heldén ("Heldén describes nature and the world around us, but there’s something sinister lurking in these pages." - Emma Ramadan for Three Percent), translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel and Kirkwood Adams (!!!) Featuring!     K.B. Thors poems have appeared in publications across the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Her debut poetry collection Vulgar Mechanics will be published by Coach House Books in 2019. An Icelandic-Ukrainian Canadian from Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, her translations from Icelandic and Spanish have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Scandinavian Review, Circumference, and Palabras Errantes. Her translation of Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else by Soledad Marambio is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Alberta and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she became a Teaching Fellow in Poetry. She is also a performance artist and educator who before teaching writing worked in a sex-positive, woman-positive, and body-positive sex shop. Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir (b. 1985 in Reykjavík, Iceland) has been active on the Icelandic poetry scene since her teenage years. Her poems have been translated into English, Danish, German, Finnish, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Arabic, and published in various magazines and anthologies. She is herself a translator and her translations of Valerie Solanas´s feminist manifesto SCUM and Cuban author Virgilio Piñera´s poem “La isla en peso” have been published in Icelandic. Tómasdóttir holds an MA degree in history from the University of Iceland. Her most recent work is a book on the history of pornography in Iceland. Elizabeth Clark Wessel is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, a founding editor at Argos Book, and the translator of numerous novels from the Swedish, including The Believer by Joakim Zander & What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde. She is the co-translator, along with Kirkwood Adams and the book's author Johannes Heldén, of Astroecology, which was recently longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Originally from rural Nebraska, she spent many years living in New York and Connecticut, and these days calls Stockholm, Sweden home. Kirkwood Adams is a teacher and writer in New York City. Free! Beer, wine and coffee at Molasses!