I Sing You for an Apple: In memoriam Steinbjørn Berghamar Jacobsen September 30, 1937–April 12, 2012

When the phone rang that evening in 1978, I was caught off guard. “How soon can you be here in DC?” the voice was asking. I lived in Los Angeles. “And—you do know Old Icelandic, right?” Old Icelandic, spoken by the Vikings some thousand years ago, was extinct.

As I hung up, I wondered: How had my career come to this?

My Stanford PhD in Germanic Languages had led to my teaching at UCLA and then Pomona College. But in 1973 my position had been eliminated, and I found myself unemployed—and unemployable. Students were demanding “relevant” courses, and the traditional foreign language requirement had been abolished by colleges almost everywhere. Looking back on this today, I see I was ahead of the curve when it came to joblessness.

All I had been trained to do was teach. What other marketable skills might I have? Slowly I began to find work as a freelance translator. My first assignment dealt with German and French cat food. Thomas Mann had been replaced by KATKINS für die Katze and POUSSY pour le chat. The one bright spot was that I had passed the State Department examination for escort-interpreters in both German and Swedish.

The assignments for State were normally one-month stints during the summer; I would accompany foreign dignitaries across the country, always starting out in DC. But when my contact at Language Services called me on this Monday afternoon in July, clearly something was amiss. I figured the earliest I could get there would be Wednesday.

“I guess that will have to do,” Pavel told me. “At this point you’re all we could come up with. But you do know Old Icelandic, right?”

“Well, sort of,” I ventured, wondering why he was asking this. I had passed State’s oral exams in German and Swedish. “Where is this person from?” I asked. Had they stumbled upon a Viking frozen in a block of ice? I didn’t understand why he was being so evasive.

“How’s your Danish?” Pavel continued. “He does speak Danish. Sort of.”

I tried to explain that although I could read Danish, spoken Danish is notoriously problematic. With all its slurred sounds and glottal stops, even the next-door Norwegians—much to their consternation and great annoyance—often can’t understand spoken Danish. Couldn’t they find a native Dane closer to DC?

It was like this: One of their more seasoned escorts had been assigned to this visitor, but the first night he had made “advances” to her. She was discreet in giving the details—other than that he had been quite inebriated—but she had quit on the spot. Stranding him. Stranding them.

There was a silence while I tried to absorb this. But there was more: “Unfortunately, that’s only part of the problem. Steinbjørn”—I was amused that his first name meant “stone bear”—“doesn’t speak Danish. He’s a poet, from the Faeroe Islands. They have their own language.

“He’s supposed to speak Danish,” Pavel quickly continued. “Most natives of the Faeroe Islands do. But apparently he doesn’t. At any rate, not a Danish that the Danes can understand.”

“What makes you think I can understand him, then?”

“We saw on your résumé that you took Old Icelandic at Stanford. Won’t that give you a leg up?”

“We read the sagas in Old Icelandic, but we never spoke it. It’s a dead language.”

“Well, apparently his ‘Danish’ is something of his own invention, so if on your end you can invent some kind of Danish, then the two of you ought to be evenly matched. Anyway, see how soon you can come and we’ll book your flight. Oh, and it’s probably best if you meet him directly at your hotel. Steinbjørn has locked himself in his room and is refusing to come out. No one can talk to him.”

When I called Pavel back the next morning to arrange for my ticket, he...