Friday Poem

Environmental & Science Education, Poetry, Art & Environment, Health, Medicine 

Ed Hessler

[the guideman would want to turn back] is by Kristin Svava Tomasdottir. The poem is written in both English and Icelandic. The link includes a biography of Tomasdottir.

Poetry Daily, 1/22/2023 and Waxwing, Issue XXVIII, Fall 2022.

In my daily copy of Poetry Daily, translator K. B. Thors wrote about the poem.

"The poems in "Herostories" are made entirely of found text from "Íslenskar ljósmæður I-III" ("Icelandic Midwives I-III"), volumes of short biographical articles about midwives who worked around the island from the late 18th to the early 20th century. Published in the 1960s, some Icelandic Midwives entries are memoir by the midwives themselves, some were written by contemporaries or descendants, and some were written by priests gathering the material. 

And from the same issue of Waxwing is information about the accomplished translator.

K.B. Thors is the author of Vulgar Mechanics (Coach House, 2019). Stormwarning, her Icelandic-English translation of Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s Stormviðvörun, 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 Hetjusögur, Herostories, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum.