Publications in Other Languages

PUBLICATIONS IN OTHER LANGAUGES tq 567 PUBLICATIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES / Watson Kirkconnell The year 1959 has been an annus mirabilis in its harvest of poetry. Some eleven works (four in Ukrainian, two in Polish, two in Magyar, two in Icelandic, and one in English translation from Icelandic) provide an unprecedented maximum ofahnost seventeen hundred pages of verse. The most imposing single work is the Collected Poems of the late Thorsteinn Th. Thorsteinsson (1879-1955) ofWinnipeg, published in two handsome quarter-leather volumes in Akureyri, under the editorship ofGisliJ6nsson ofthat town. His 589 pages are divided into five main divisions: "Iceland and America," "Obituary Poems," "At Sundry Seasons," "There are So Many," and "On Good Days." Thorsteinn was born in Iceland, at Uppsalir in Svarfadardalur, and migrated to Canada in 1901. The first division of his Collected Works is largely given over to nostalgic tributes to the land of his birth. Parts II and V are devoted, like so much Icelandic verse, to poems for funerals and for golden weddings respectively. The most remarkable feature of Part III is its series of invincible tributes to spring and its fine specimens of Christmas poetry. Part IV is perhaps the most interesting section of all, with a great array of work that cannot be so neatly classified. Here, for example, is a notable series of sonnets (pp. 419-36) or a whimsically philosophical poem like "The Minister's Dog" (p. }22). By virtue of this collection, Thorsteinn is duly recorded as one of the half-dozen most important Icelandic-Canadian poets. Also appearing in Akureyri is a volume of lyrics, some 83 in all, by Dr. Richard Beck, long associated in western Canada with the Icelandic National League, and already the author of several volumes of poetry and criticism. Special praise should be given to his ability to catch the mood of a day, or a night, in autumn or winter. His ingenuity of fancy is shown by his lyric "Spring in Mid-Winter," which begins: Yule's ways are Spring, deep Winter to unfetter And wake the scedling-soul beneath the frost, A radiant pen of gold to write a letter In runes ofhope to hearts whose joy is lost. Jakobina Sigurbjornsd6ttir Johnson was reared in the Argyle district of Manitoba and married into a family of poets. On her seventy-fifth birthday, in 1958, the Icelandic community in North America united to honour her, and in 1959 she went to Iceland as the guest of the nation. In Northern Lights, she has now published a fine anthology of her English 568 tq U!ITERS IN CANADA: 1959 translations from three centuries of Icelandic verse, ranging from Stefan Olafsson (16ro-88) down to poets now living. On the whole she has avoided the almost insuperable handicap of retaining the alliterative patterns of her originals. For the translator, their rigours can usually mean no more than dancing in chains. With the work of two first-class poets, Ferenc Fay of Toronto and Kalman Bartha of Hamilton, Hungarian poetry has come back to the Canadian scene for the first time in nearly two decades. Both poets are highly educated refugees from Communist Hungary and both almost inevitably still have their emotional and imaginative roots in the land from which they came. Bartha is the more openly political of the two, with poems on (Justice for Hungary," "Curse of Trianon," "Trianon and Yalta," "A Storm Rose over My Country," and "Black Christmas." His thoughts also turn back nostalgically to his native land in "Evening on the Hortobagy," or "The Old Neighbourhood," or "The Tisza District." Fay has reacted more sensitively to life in a new land. His approach may still be Magyar but he identifies himself much more fully in emotional involvement with the new country. There are several poems in which his little children, in a Canadian setting, engage his poetic ardour. Poverry forces him to sell his typewriter and he pens it a touching and affectionate farewell. He dedicates to the editor of "Hungarian Life" (Toronto) a thoughtful poem on "Exile's Ars poetica." Only in "Tempara mutantur" does he "speak out loud and clear" on the political follies of World War II...