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Introduction: All Things

  • Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (author)
Chapter of: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects(pp. 1–8)

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Metadata
TitleIntroduction
SubtitleAll Things
ContributorJeffrey Jerome Cohen (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0006.1.02
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/animal-vegetable-mineral-ethics-and-objects/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightCohen, Jeffrey Jerome
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-05-07
Long abstractThough superseded by a newer translation, Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson’s version of Grettir’s Sagais a text to which I feel a considerable attachment.1 Its rendering of the Old Norse narrative is crisp and lucid, capturing the austere yet wry style of the original prose. Even more than its artistry, though, what compels me about the Fox and Pálsson translation is the series of photographs with which the book begins. Between the introduction and the story’s instigation have been inserted twelve poorly reproduced black and white pictures depicting locales mentioned in the saga. Unattributed and unpaginated, this interlude of images captures the multiplicity of histories, real and imagined, that animate the Icelandic narrative and its English reworking: a seeming timelessness in which the landscape is ever as it has been; the ninth through eleventh centuries, when Grettir and his ancestors were supposed to have journeyed these frigid expanses; the early fourteenth century, when the saga’s unknown author dreamt a past that never was and placed its unfolding action at familiar fjords, glaciers, and vales; and the 1970s, when Fox and Pálsson published their English translation of Grettir’s Saga, the first in sixty years. The initial photograph, for example, is labeled “Bjarg in Midfjord, site of Grettir’s birth.” The image depicts an undulation of grass, a lone rock, and a distant mountain—presumably Kaldbak, the chilly ridge that Grettir’s great-grandfather Onund darkly spoke of having traded his Norwegian grain fields to possess. Yet the picture also contains a farmhouse that if not exactly modern is in no way medieval, with its bright paint, three expansive levels, and chimney. The telephone poles and curve of road quietly argue against placing a young Grettir within that home. Yet the story radiates such a keen sense of domestic vitality that it is difficult to resist thinking of this boy destined for a life no farm could contain, creating his particular brand of chaos within that pastoral space. Every time I look at the photo I expect to see geese and a horse, futilely fleeing his juvenile rage; or his beleaguered dad, storming out of the farmhouse after telling a young Grettir one more time that he has made a very bad choice.
Page rangepp. 1–8
Print length8 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)