Free The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness Page B

on his deathbed, it was said: “Yes, he’s packing his bags now, poor fellow.” Of a mortally ill youngster it was said that it did not look as if he would ever have grey hairs to comb. When a married couple separated, one used the phrase: “Yes, there’s something wrong there, I believe.” At Brekkukot every word was precious, even the little words.
    My grandmother had a habit of answering people with sayings and proverbs. Often there was good-natured humour in the reply, but almost absent-minded, somehow, or as if she were talking out of an open window to someone standing behind her: the rather tuneless drawling chant she used carried a hint of compassion, almost of resignation, but never bitterness. But it was not just proverbs that she had at her command; she knew a couplet or a scrap of verse, some sort of mixture of adage and nursery rhyme, for every occasion, or else she would quote a bit of a psalm or rigmarole or folk-ballad or some other obscure old poetry. She was such a well of knowledge, in her own quiet way, that if one pressed her and tried to find out just how much she knew, one never reached the bottom. She knew whole ballads offby heart from beginning to end. For the benefit of those who no longer know what Icelandic ballads
(rímur)
are, I shall interpolate here that they are a form of poetry about heroes of olden times and mighty deeds from the days of the epic; this poetry is composed of intricately rhymed quatrains, sometimes so intricate that each strophe is a rhyme-riddle. A medium-sized ballad, that is to say one ballad-cycle, can be thirty poems, each one of them consisting of at least a hundred quatrains. There are hundreds of
rímur
in Iceland, some say thousands. My grandmother also knew whole books of psalmody. She sometimes mumbled this stuff to herself while she was knitting, but not for anyone who was listening, and really not for herself either, for she was often quite obviously thinking about other matters. If there was something in the psalm which prompted my curiosity, such as for instance what kind of dripping one put on the Bread of Heaven, and I started to ask questions, it was as if I had roused her from a dream, and she would say that she did not really know what she had been reciting; and then she could not pick up the thread again.
    I was never really aware that she preferred any one poem to another, any more than a printer does who sets the type for good and bad books alike. One could undoubtedly have recorded whole volumes from her, if anyone had bothered to write it all down. I do not believe that many universities have at their disposal teachers with any more literature at their fingertips; and yet I have met few people who were further than this woman from being what is sometimes called “literary” and is used as a term of praise for the gentry.
    As is known, the ability to read and write was almost as common in Iceland before the days of printing as it has been since; and actually I think that my grandmother was closer to the people who lived before the days of Caxton. Spelling-books were never used in Iceland. My grandmother said she had learned to recognize the letters of the alphabet from an old man who scratched them for her on the ice when she had to watch over sheep during the winter. She learned writing from an old woman by making letters with a knitting needle on a piece of smoky glass; they used to tinker unobtrusively with this in the evenings sometimes,by moonlight. When she was ninety, my grandmother wrote me a letter when I was abroad; it was fourteen lines long, like a sonnet. I lost this letter a long time ago but it still exists nonetheless; I can remember her handwriting vividly even now. She wrote not only all the more important nouns with an initial capital but all the more significant adjectives as well; and that is the very style used by Fitzgerald in the poem called
The Rubaiyat
which he re-wrote from Omar Khayyam, and which is considered by some