![]() He suggested “Heroica” as fitting the jibe Halldór implies at the venerable story form, but I’ll invent my own coinage for “hero rogue, herogue”, for fun. Halldór’s frequent translator, Magnús Magnússon, complicated this. Swedish critic Peter Hallberg explained Gerpla as derived from garpur, or warrior, and its -la suffix makes this a titular saga. Challenges await readers of Wayward Heroes, if they are unfamiliar with the saga-hoard. Roughton appends a few sparse notes about allusions, but that is all. This review provides some of the background that’s lacking within this new edition. Now, Philip Roughton, arguably the best choice to render the idiosyncratic style of Halldór into our language, tackles what his diligent 2004 biographer Halldór Guðmannson labels “his most difficult novel”. Until two decades ago, most of Halldór’s novels languished out of print in America, or as untranslated. ![]() Yet, Halldór (I follow his homeland’s convention in using given names, as his “surname” is a pen-name derived from his family’s farm “of Laxnes”) as a Communist and a longtime defender of Stalin, earned the censure of J. It helped him win the 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature. That 1933-34 novel won him a Book-of-the-Month selection in the US in its 1946 appearance in English, with the royalties and acclaim that sales of nearly half a million garnered. After the international success of his bitter Icelandic evocation of a stubborn farmer in Independent People, Halldór Laxness (1902-1988) found himself as isolated as his protagonist from sustained success.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |