Hey everyone!
My good friend Sofia, who connected me with the blog on her university website which enabled me to write my article on the current political situation in the United States back in December, has recently written a few brilliant blog posts on our time in Iceland on that same site.
I will be sharing them with you all, starting with one today on studying the language and the history of Núpur, the school where we studied. The articles are all in Italian, which is why I will be translating them to English for anyone interested who cannot read Italian, but I will also link to the original articles for their beautiful photography.
Here we go!
"In Iceland: Learning a new language, or better said, becoming children again"
Af hverju vilt þú að læra íslensku? This question is suddenly asked of me after I've lain a little dictionary and notebook on my desk. Af því að... íslenska er gamalt tungumál. I stutter slightly, intimidated by the stares of the people around me. "Why do you want to learn Icelandic?" "Because it's an ancient language..." Unfortunately in my mother tongue this motivation sounds improbable and uncoordinated.
Icelandic is an Indo-European language from the Germanic language group, according to Wikipedia. Among the Scandinavian languages, it's the one that has remained the most unchanged through the centuries, due to the obvious isolation of this island of glaciers. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish have all lost a great deal of their originally complex grammatical structures and have at the same time absorbed a great deal of vocabulary from Romance languages. The Icelandic language has remained so unchanged that it is said those who speak it can read the Nordic sagas with a bit of effort - though it's good to quantify that bit. Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of the stories told in these sagas. Halldór Laxness, winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize, wrote in Icelandic, but I haven't read any of his books. Sigur Rós sometimes sings in Icelandic when they don't invent their lyrics. As I observe the snow on the mountains beyond the bus window, the usual, chatwinian question follows me: what am I doing here? The response is even more unusual: I want to study this language.
I'm at Núpur, this lost locality on Dýrafjörður, in the Westfjords of Iceland. Here there are only three white buildings and a little church between the mountains and the sea. A few kilometers before, a there is a farm and a botanical garden; a few kilometers beyond, the road turns to dirt and is lost to the sun on the horizon. In 1907 one Sigtryggur Guðlaugsson, a Protestant pastor, founded a school here for the children of the farmers who labored on this cold and hostile land. For decades the school symbolized the national education system and, in spite of its distance from the capital, hosted dozens of students every year. I walk through the long corridors that divide the classrooms and I feel as though their faces in their class photos are observing me, like a deja vu from the movie Dead Poets Society. Their changing haircuts, which reach their maximum length in the seventies, mark the differences between the decades. The numbers of students begin to thin beginning in the eighties. The school was in fact closed in the nineties, and has since become a hotel. Except, that is, for Háskólasetur Vestfjarða, the University Center of the Westfjords, which organizes an annual language course here for university students here. And it is so that I find myself among thirty or so young people from all around the globe, on the edge of the known world, each of us armed with an Icelandic-to-something-else dictionary and a different motivation. I want to learn my grandparent's native language, says an American girl, a granddaughter of local fishermen who emigrated to the luckier Atlantic coast. I want to be able to read the Norse sagas, says a guy who clearly recognizes their literary worth. I want to study geology here, says a Croatian physics major. Everyone has their own reasons, and with a bit of effort, everyone attempts to answer the same question: af hverju viltu læra íslensku?
Studying a language is like becoming children again. One's expressive capabilities are reset, and so it is necessary to slowly reconstruct basic vocabulary to say: Mér líður vel í dag (I feel well today), or (more importantly) það er skítaveður í dag (the weather is so shitty today!). Familiar sayings or cognates with English or Italian are no longer easily accessible. Not even the words of vaguely Greco-Latin origins in whose comfortable intelligibility we usually shelter ourselves can provide any help. Icelandic has (almost) no linguistic borrowings. "Telephone" is "sími," "computer is "tölva," and an idea is "hugmynd" (which, literally translated, means "mind-picture"). Electricity is "rafmagn" (from 'raf,' amber, giving it the same the same etymology of the Greek word 'elektron'). Philosophy is 'heimspeki,' the wisdom of the world. We falter, trip, and stutter before these words and their dry, syncopated pronunciations. Studying Icelandic is like going back to high school: everything is declined and there are the usual three genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter. And so that we discover that the word fjord is declined "fjörður, fjörð, firði, fjarða," and the correct case changes based on the verb or the preposition that precedes it. Twice a week a bus brings us from Núpur to Ísafjörður, a tiny village of 2,600 souls that is the de facto capital of this area, in which less than 2% of the island's population resides. Only after studying the declensions do I understand why the name of the town isn't always the same. "Við förum til Ísafjarða," we go to Ísafjörður, because til requires the genitive; þegar við vorum á Ísafirði," while we were in Ísafjörður, (because location requires the dative) - this is how Icelanders talk, even declining their own names, and so it is no longer possible to understand anything. "Ég tala við Sofiu," the professor says in class as an example. You have to be precise, otherwise the meaning crumbles in your teeth while you try to pronounce the letters of an alphabet that no longer exists, namely eth (ð) and thorn (þ). It is necessary to remember several rules of pronunciation: the dry sound that transforms ll into "tl" and fn into "pn". It is by no means a coincidence that the name of the famous volcano Eyjafjallajökull became a known tongue-twister, and that the Icelanders laughed at all the journalists announcing its eruption in 2010.
To improve our pronunciation, we sing folk songs as a choir every week, and continuously watch comedy videos by Jón Gnarr, ex-mayor of Reykjavik and Núpsskóli alumnus. To better understand the solitude of these valleys, where everyone knows each other's secrets and the winters are long, we watch lots of movies (kvikmyndir - fast images), many of which were even filmed in these quiet villages. To better understand the intricate story of the Gísli Saga, which took place in this very fjord more than a thousand years ago, we trace the hero's family tree on paper, and so understand this Norse story that does not differ greatly from classical Greek tragedies: family, revenge, destiny. Slowly, with greater and greater ease, we decipher this place where we're staying and the questions asked of us. We're able to explain ourselves in greater detail, gradually resembling children less and less. We slowly find the Ariadne's thread that connects sounds and words and gives them a precise meaning. My greatest satisfaction is asking an old lady passing by for directions on the street and understanding her response, understanding a few conversations on the bus ride back to Reykjavik, or the headlines in the morning paper.
Icelandic is spoken by barely three and a half thousand people in the whole world, fewer people than Bolognese, the dialect of my hometown in Italy. Before getting on the plane to Keflavik, many people asked me: Why not a more useful language? Why not French or German? Maybe they were right. I won't have many chances to speak Icelandic in Italy (even though I bought many books by Laxnes and Stefánsson, and a copy of the Gísli Saga, some poetry books, and even the local version of The Little Prince. And now I can understand when Sigur Rós's lead singer Jónsi sings in his native language, as opposed to wordless laments in falsetto). But I got on that plane anyway, and discovered, more than anything else, that famed Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges was absolutely right when he wrote:
"Iceland, I have dreamed of you a long time / Since that morning when my father / Gave his child that I have been and has not yet died / A version of the Völsunga Saga / That now is deciphering my gloom / With the help of the slow dictionary. / When the body tires of its man, / when the fire declines and turns to ash, / Well is the resigned learning / Of an infinite undertaking; I have chosen / That of your language, this Latin of the North / That encompassed the steppes and the seas / Of a hemisphere and resounded in Byzantium / And in the virgin borders of America. / I know I won't know, but the eventual gifts of the search / Await me. / Not the fruit wisely unattainable. / Those who inquire will feel the same / The stars or the series of numbers... / Only love, ignorant love, Iceland."
I imagine the old Argentine writer, almost blind and bent over his dictionary, trying to study this Latin of the North, knowing that he will never know it, but knowing that the gifts of his research likely await him. That is how it is for me too, as I don't study languages at my home university. After three weeks I'm missing the tasty espresso of the coffee shop below my house: I know I won't know it, but it doesn't matter, because what does is the unexpected side of the search. What matters is being curious, inquiring as to the reason behind a certain etymology (he who discovers an etymology with pleasure, Borges always wrote), trying to understand a story even without subtitles.
For the first time, I came home from a trip not only with a handful of photos and some souvenirs, but with an entire grammar in my head, which I will continue to study in spite of its near uselessness - because joy is being able to read a poem and understand its meaning, meet people who live in other places on this planet, and learn a language, for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of doing it.
Thank you all for reading. Be back soon!
My good friend Sofia, who connected me with the blog on her university website which enabled me to write my article on the current political situation in the United States back in December, has recently written a few brilliant blog posts on our time in Iceland on that same site.
I will be sharing them with you all, starting with one today on studying the language and the history of Núpur, the school where we studied. The articles are all in Italian, which is why I will be translating them to English for anyone interested who cannot read Italian, but I will also link to the original articles for their beautiful photography.
Here we go!
"In Iceland: Learning a new language, or better said, becoming children again"
Af hverju vilt þú að læra íslensku? This question is suddenly asked of me after I've lain a little dictionary and notebook on my desk. Af því að... íslenska er gamalt tungumál. I stutter slightly, intimidated by the stares of the people around me. "Why do you want to learn Icelandic?" "Because it's an ancient language..." Unfortunately in my mother tongue this motivation sounds improbable and uncoordinated.
Icelandic is an Indo-European language from the Germanic language group, according to Wikipedia. Among the Scandinavian languages, it's the one that has remained the most unchanged through the centuries, due to the obvious isolation of this island of glaciers. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish have all lost a great deal of their originally complex grammatical structures and have at the same time absorbed a great deal of vocabulary from Romance languages. The Icelandic language has remained so unchanged that it is said those who speak it can read the Nordic sagas with a bit of effort - though it's good to quantify that bit. Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of the stories told in these sagas. Halldór Laxness, winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize, wrote in Icelandic, but I haven't read any of his books. Sigur Rós sometimes sings in Icelandic when they don't invent their lyrics. As I observe the snow on the mountains beyond the bus window, the usual, chatwinian question follows me: what am I doing here? The response is even more unusual: I want to study this language.
I'm at Núpur, this lost locality on Dýrafjörður, in the Westfjords of Iceland. Here there are only three white buildings and a little church between the mountains and the sea. A few kilometers before, a there is a farm and a botanical garden; a few kilometers beyond, the road turns to dirt and is lost to the sun on the horizon. In 1907 one Sigtryggur Guðlaugsson, a Protestant pastor, founded a school here for the children of the farmers who labored on this cold and hostile land. For decades the school symbolized the national education system and, in spite of its distance from the capital, hosted dozens of students every year. I walk through the long corridors that divide the classrooms and I feel as though their faces in their class photos are observing me, like a deja vu from the movie Dead Poets Society. Their changing haircuts, which reach their maximum length in the seventies, mark the differences between the decades. The numbers of students begin to thin beginning in the eighties. The school was in fact closed in the nineties, and has since become a hotel. Except, that is, for Háskólasetur Vestfjarða, the University Center of the Westfjords, which organizes an annual language course here for university students here. And it is so that I find myself among thirty or so young people from all around the globe, on the edge of the known world, each of us armed with an Icelandic-to-something-else dictionary and a different motivation. I want to learn my grandparent's native language, says an American girl, a granddaughter of local fishermen who emigrated to the luckier Atlantic coast. I want to be able to read the Norse sagas, says a guy who clearly recognizes their literary worth. I want to study geology here, says a Croatian physics major. Everyone has their own reasons, and with a bit of effort, everyone attempts to answer the same question: af hverju viltu læra íslensku?
Studying a language is like becoming children again. One's expressive capabilities are reset, and so it is necessary to slowly reconstruct basic vocabulary to say: Mér líður vel í dag (I feel well today), or (more importantly) það er skítaveður í dag (the weather is so shitty today!). Familiar sayings or cognates with English or Italian are no longer easily accessible. Not even the words of vaguely Greco-Latin origins in whose comfortable intelligibility we usually shelter ourselves can provide any help. Icelandic has (almost) no linguistic borrowings. "Telephone" is "sími," "computer is "tölva," and an idea is "hugmynd" (which, literally translated, means "mind-picture"). Electricity is "rafmagn" (from 'raf,' amber, giving it the same the same etymology of the Greek word 'elektron'). Philosophy is 'heimspeki,' the wisdom of the world. We falter, trip, and stutter before these words and their dry, syncopated pronunciations. Studying Icelandic is like going back to high school: everything is declined and there are the usual three genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter. And so that we discover that the word fjord is declined "fjörður, fjörð, firði, fjarða," and the correct case changes based on the verb or the preposition that precedes it. Twice a week a bus brings us from Núpur to Ísafjörður, a tiny village of 2,600 souls that is the de facto capital of this area, in which less than 2% of the island's population resides. Only after studying the declensions do I understand why the name of the town isn't always the same. "Við förum til Ísafjarða," we go to Ísafjörður, because til requires the genitive; þegar við vorum á Ísafirði," while we were in Ísafjörður, (because location requires the dative) - this is how Icelanders talk, even declining their own names, and so it is no longer possible to understand anything. "Ég tala við Sofiu," the professor says in class as an example. You have to be precise, otherwise the meaning crumbles in your teeth while you try to pronounce the letters of an alphabet that no longer exists, namely eth (ð) and thorn (þ). It is necessary to remember several rules of pronunciation: the dry sound that transforms ll into "tl" and fn into "pn". It is by no means a coincidence that the name of the famous volcano Eyjafjallajökull became a known tongue-twister, and that the Icelanders laughed at all the journalists announcing its eruption in 2010.
To improve our pronunciation, we sing folk songs as a choir every week, and continuously watch comedy videos by Jón Gnarr, ex-mayor of Reykjavik and Núpsskóli alumnus. To better understand the solitude of these valleys, where everyone knows each other's secrets and the winters are long, we watch lots of movies (kvikmyndir - fast images), many of which were even filmed in these quiet villages. To better understand the intricate story of the Gísli Saga, which took place in this very fjord more than a thousand years ago, we trace the hero's family tree on paper, and so understand this Norse story that does not differ greatly from classical Greek tragedies: family, revenge, destiny. Slowly, with greater and greater ease, we decipher this place where we're staying and the questions asked of us. We're able to explain ourselves in greater detail, gradually resembling children less and less. We slowly find the Ariadne's thread that connects sounds and words and gives them a precise meaning. My greatest satisfaction is asking an old lady passing by for directions on the street and understanding her response, understanding a few conversations on the bus ride back to Reykjavik, or the headlines in the morning paper.
Icelandic is spoken by barely three and a half thousand people in the whole world, fewer people than Bolognese, the dialect of my hometown in Italy. Before getting on the plane to Keflavik, many people asked me: Why not a more useful language? Why not French or German? Maybe they were right. I won't have many chances to speak Icelandic in Italy (even though I bought many books by Laxnes and Stefánsson, and a copy of the Gísli Saga, some poetry books, and even the local version of The Little Prince. And now I can understand when Sigur Rós's lead singer Jónsi sings in his native language, as opposed to wordless laments in falsetto). But I got on that plane anyway, and discovered, more than anything else, that famed Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges was absolutely right when he wrote:
"Iceland, I have dreamed of you a long time / Since that morning when my father / Gave his child that I have been and has not yet died / A version of the Völsunga Saga / That now is deciphering my gloom / With the help of the slow dictionary. / When the body tires of its man, / when the fire declines and turns to ash, / Well is the resigned learning / Of an infinite undertaking; I have chosen / That of your language, this Latin of the North / That encompassed the steppes and the seas / Of a hemisphere and resounded in Byzantium / And in the virgin borders of America. / I know I won't know, but the eventual gifts of the search / Await me. / Not the fruit wisely unattainable. / Those who inquire will feel the same / The stars or the series of numbers... / Only love, ignorant love, Iceland."
I imagine the old Argentine writer, almost blind and bent over his dictionary, trying to study this Latin of the North, knowing that he will never know it, but knowing that the gifts of his research likely await him. That is how it is for me too, as I don't study languages at my home university. After three weeks I'm missing the tasty espresso of the coffee shop below my house: I know I won't know it, but it doesn't matter, because what does is the unexpected side of the search. What matters is being curious, inquiring as to the reason behind a certain etymology (he who discovers an etymology with pleasure, Borges always wrote), trying to understand a story even without subtitles.
For the first time, I came home from a trip not only with a handful of photos and some souvenirs, but with an entire grammar in my head, which I will continue to study in spite of its near uselessness - because joy is being able to read a poem and understand its meaning, meet people who live in other places on this planet, and learn a language, for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of doing it.
Thank you all for reading. Be back soon!
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| A picture of some of the buildings of Núpur - the main building in the middle, and some houses where members of the staff live to the right and left. |
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| A picture of the road beyond Núpur, facing the beach on the shores of Dýrafjörður. |
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| Ísafjörður's city center. |
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