Gerdur Kristny – författare

I Den poetiska Eddan berättas om hur guden Frej förälskar sig i jättekvinnan Gerður, och sänder sin dräng Skírnis, som med bevekelser och hot förmår henne att lämna sitt hem i Jötunheim och bosätta sig med honom. I Blodhov återdiktar Gerður Kristný berättelsen på en ordknapp vers, som ansluter nära till den fornnordiska förlagans metrik och klang, med Gerður i centrum. Gerður Kristný är född 1970 och bosatt i Reykjavík. Boken Blodhov utkom 2010, och belönades samma år med Isländska litteraturpriset. I svensk översättning och med efterord av John Swedenmark.

Bloodhoof is a compulsively modern recasting of the ancient Eddic poem Skírnimál – a minimalist epic telling of the abduction of Gerður Gymisdóttir from a land of giants and her eventual return from the court of Freyr with her beloved son. The journey is full of iron-hard rocks, ice and serpents, and fields of corn whispering in the breeze.Bloodhoof is a story of "ghosts and long-dead heroes" – a game of thrones that will linger in the memory. Parallel-text verse in Icelandic and English.Gerður Kristný was born in Reykyavik in 1970. She has produced 18 books of fiction and non-fiction, as well as children's books and poetry. Her work recently featured in the anthology Best European Fiction 2012, and in the October 2011 issue of Words Without Borders. She has also been a Featured Poet in Eyewear magazine. Her numerous prizes include the Icelandic Literature Prize in 2010 for Bloodhoof.Rory McTurk is Emeritus Professor of Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds, and the editor of the Blackwell's Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (2007).This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

This is Gerður Kristný's third collection from Arc and the third of the trilogy which already comprises the highly-acclaimed Bloodhoof and Drápa. In all three poetic sequences, the poet employs the archaic form of the saga to conjure up razor-sharp dark and bewildering images of the fates of women in a world where the boundaries between life and death and what lies beyond are unclear. In this particular sequence, Gerður Kristný gives a voice to a woman whose story was one that society was not ready to hear at the time, a woman who was abused as a child but who committed suicide before her own account of what had taken place was published. At its heart is the very notion of articulation, of how our language and culture determine what stories we can tell and what words we can use.

Celebrated Icelandic writer Gerður Kristný’s Drápa is a novel-poem which takes its form from Old Norse shield poetry and its mood from modern Nordic crime. But the poem is no fiction: it is about a real woman's murder in the city of Reykjavik, and, through this lens, about all women’s deaths. This is Viking poetry at its most contemporary.

The narrator of Cow Seal is a woman who lives by Iceland’s northernmost coast, where the struggle for life is hard, winters attack with sea ice and cold. Her husband dies, a child dies, and other calamities follow, but the woman and her children never give up. They endure. The woman helps a seal give birth – the boundaries between man and animal, culture and nature disappear in this magical book. The text is chiselled, the poems traditional in form with alliteration and internal rhyme reminiscent of ancient metres which underscore the timelessness and relevance of the work to the constant struggle for life that is the lot of both humans and animals.