Three Poetesses
Three poetesses
in white bras
sit around a low
round-table.
With books in hand.
A man dressed in a pirate sweater
comes in through the door
from a snowstorm and sits
at the women’s table.
Takes off his sweater.
When he touches
one of them
they are already dead.
And don’t come back to life.
Though they await his kisses.
Then he stands up,
takes hold of the touched one
and carries her out.
The current of air
when the door opens and closes
turns the pages of the books
of all three.
Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Translated by Vala Thorodds
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Kristín Ómarsdóttir is an acclaimed Icelandic novelist, poet, playwright and visual artist. She was born in Reykjavik in 1962, and spent some of her youth in Copenhagen. Waitress in Fall, the first major selection of her poems translated into English, draws from 30 years’ work, as chosen by her translator, Vala Thorodds. I greatly enjoyed hearing this subtle, innovative and extremely accessible new voice. The English sounds so thoroughly natural it’s easy to forget the poems are translations. Three Poetesses was originally published in Ómarsdóttir’s 1993 collection, Waitress in An Old Restaurant.
I hope the term “poetesses” won’t need defending. It’s true that this noun has generally been dropped in English in favour of “female poet” (the gender indicator still present, but on its best contemporary behaviour). “Poetess” does not have to be interpreted as a term of ridicule: why should the suffix be demeaning, unless you already construct femininity as second class? It seems to me an aptly elegant and defiant word choice. This parable necessarily evokes a culture hostile to women, not a context in which superficial attempts at equality have been made. The women’s hard-won dignity and seriousness refresh the word for us.
The speaker tells the women’s story in plain and simple language, paced, nevertheless, to deliver small shocks to our expectations. First, we don’t expect poetesses sitting at a “round-table” to be wearing white bras (perhaps wearing only bras). Nonetheless, they are behaving with perfect decorum. They each hold a book. They are about to give a reading, or perhaps engage in a public discussion. The picture the stanza creates is almost a kind of Déjeuner sur l’herbe, transposed to a contemporary literary festival.
The full stop before the qualifying clause, “With books in hand”, at the end of this opening stanza, introduces an interesting feature of the syntax. Such mini sentences, split off from a longer “parent”, have an appropriately vivid brevity. The technique suggests an oral narrator’s pause for dramatic or comic effect. Throughout the poem, the lineation is designed to give each phrase or word its necessary space and weight.
There’s a touch of visual mischief, perhaps, in lines three and four, in the closely-placed repetition of “around” and “round-table”. The latter, of course, recalls Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, not only King Arthur and his knights. It contributes to the atmosphere of literary professionalism and the claim of the women to its attainment.
The intruder who interrupts their gathering is, at first, something of a cartoon knight, a self-made hero in a pirate sweater he swiftly strips off. The structure of his quatrain indicates confident, fluid action: there are few of the pauses which give the first stanza its decorous and cautious tempo, its sense of the women as an empathetic collective. As in most cartoons, the comedy edges into violence. The man has come in from a snowstorm, and brings with him the breath of deadly cold. The extreme malevolence of his effect on the women is made clear without hyperbole. By now, he seems less a cartoon character than some contemporary Erlking, the malicious spirit made famous by Goethe (and Schubert) but found originally in a Danish ballad. Resistance to his magic, even by these self-possessed and serious poetesses, is clearly impossible.
As in such stories, narrative logic is made strange. The women are described as “already dead” when the man touches one of them, but they still “await his kisses”. Their death is of a different order than simple mortality, then. They have been mesmerised, anaesthetised, petrified. It’s possible, of course, that they were “dead” even before he arrived. The poem implies the pre-existence of a damaging social structure. The man himself may be a victim of this patriarchy.
He chooses “the touched one” and “carries her out”. The translator selects her terms effectively. In the traditional vernacular, someone who is “touched” is a little mad, perhaps after some brush with the supernatural. The verb in apposition, “carry out”, suggests not only the act of taking the woman from the room, but the execution of a piece of work. Possession is complete.
In the delicately sinister last stanza, the cold draught that turns the pages of the women’s books evokes a lingering, pervasive influence. There’s no need for further physical intimidation. The processes of reading and writing have been irreparably altered by the man’s movements, and those of the snowstorm.
Analysis in terms of political message hardly does the poem justice. We know the argument already. The point is that, as a story, it’s new: it’s not a revised fairytale, a feminist version of some ancient legend with a heroine instead of a hero. The three women are not aggrandised, and the man seems as powerless, in his way, as they are. Most unusually, the women are poets – and so it’s emphasised that, as such, they should be in charge of their own script. But they’re not. The poem’s message, or, rather, messages, are simple but the outlines may still, in the current political snowstorm, too easily be lost.
You can read the poem in Icelandic here, together with another English translation.