Diagnosis:
maladaptio.
(National Hospital, Psychiatric Ward,
Children’s Hospital Trust, 09/06/1972)
It’s like something’s not right. Why can’t I be like everyone else? What’s up with me? I’m no good at anything, not school, not sports, not social activities. I don’t even have good taste in music. What others find easy and natural, I find complicated and alien. Everything I try to do fails or breaks. And there’s no one else to blame. There’s something wrong with me but I do not know what it is. I’m abnormal. I’ve nothing in common with anyone. I’m ugly, stupid, and annoying. Maybe I’ve been cursed. Everyone else has normal hands. My hands are always dirty, the nails bitten down past the tips. I’m embarrassed that I bite my nails, but I cannot stop.
The future scares me. Everyone’s headed somewhere together and I’m not invited. I’ll go alone, somewhere else. I don’t know where. I never know anything; I’m unable to do anything. No one cares about me at all. I’m all alone in the world.
I’m an Indian.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
I am translating The Indian, revisiting my childhood as the book’s young narrator eagerly reads something his mother has bought for him — just the way I was as a kid. Mér finnst gaman að Andrési. My literal translation — what translators call a trot — would read Me feels/finds good/fun in Andrew/Andrés. Something like “I enjoy Andrew a lot.”
I’m at a loss. “Andrési” is not an Icelandic name. And, several lines down, I find “Onkel Joakim” and the “Björnebanden.” Uncle Joachim? The “Bear-band” or “Confederacy of bears?” The context tells me this is a child’s comic strip, but my knowledge of 1970s Icelandic comics — limited, I confess — is being severely tested.
It takes an internet search to realize, via the Danish Bjørne-banden, that these last characters are the Beagle Boys, the hapless dog-like criminals I laughed at in the Duck Tales of my youth. Uncle Joachim? Scrooge McDuck. Andrés, or Andrés Önd, is not Andrew Duck, but Donald Duck, his name changed to preserve alliteration in translation.
Comics were when I first noticed translation, reading my way through Goscinny and Uderzo’s Astérix series, about a small, unconquerable Gaul and his corpulent, near-invincible menhir-delivering sidekick, Obelix. And not to forget Obelix’s indomitable terrier companion, Dogmatix! The dogmatic dog — a wonderful pun.
Yet in the original French, Dogmatix is not dogmatic, or not quite: he is Idéfix, a play on idée fixe, or single-minded. The potion-brewing druid called Getafix? Actually Panoramix, the character with the panoramic view, wise and all-seeing. In English, there’s an added pun about finding one’s next high — a pun that went over my head at the time, of course. The French reveals a second meaning to the English: to “get a fix” on something might be to get a read on it, to come to see it clearly.
What exists originally cannot remain, and yet there is a delight to knowing both the translation and the source. I winced a little having to turn poor Andrés back into Donald: he is, of course, Donald, but only after having been Andrés. To read Jón Gnarr in translation means to be unaware of Donald Duck’s Danish-Icelandic detour. At best, there’s a degree of surprise in an Icelandic child in the ’70s reading a 1950s U.S. comic, but to American ears Duck Tales will sound expected. I find myself half-tempted to replace Duck Tales with a 1970s Icelandic comic instead. The situations aren’t parallel, though: an American child reading an Icelandic comic would seem precocious. Besides, Icelandic comics didn’t much exist in the 1970s; they’ve only really come into their own over the past 15 years.
The reason a translation can feel like a loss or a betrayal is that translation exists more purely between source and target language: where Andrés Önd meets Donald Duck and is perhaps both and neither character at once. I sometimes wish we could see the process of translation, not the product of it; even facing-page doesn’t quite get that, leaving us with two texts to read, not the prolonged hesitation between them.
The Indian is a singular tale of growing up and finding you don’t fit in. Yet, while there are universal experiences and ideas here — my version of setting fire to my bedroom was “washing” all my stuffed animals by flushing them around the toilet — none of us have quite these experiences, experiences which are Icelandic but not shared by all Icelanders, experiences which are shaped by the world beyond Iceland.
Indeed, the most difficult phrase of all to translate was the novel’s final one: Ég er indjáni. I am Indian. I am an Indian. I am Native American. Transposed into American English, Ég er indjáni registers moments of colonization and cultural erasure. And, muted by the English, it is the wishful exuberance of a boy growing up on a cold, dark island, eating unspeakably horrific-smelling pickled cuisine, and wishing he were elsewhere, to escape, and so falling into some Hollywood-inflected romantic version of “the Indian.” Falling into an impossibility, and not knowing it.
Perhaps, though, what the English brings to that sentence, the Icelandic already knows; the child Jón knows, the adult Jón, narrating, knows. I fight the temptation to insert a negative, hoping the reader can hear one anyway, in both languages. “I’m an Indian,” I type. An Icelandic Indian, which means an American Indian, which means some Lone Ranger-esque version of the Native American.
What exactly that means lies somewhere between Jón’s words and my reworking of them. This is an Icelandic story told in English: an American English estranged from itself by these atypical place-names and cultural references. No longer Icelandic, not quite English, and certainly not Indian. And that, after all, is what Gnarr’s The Indian is ultimately about: being estranged, not fitting in: the boy who is told he is unruly, incompetent, and worthless, but who knows, despite everyone telling him otherwise, how much he has to offer.
Lytton Smith
Geneseo, NY
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JÓN GNARR
Jón Gnarr was born in 1967 in Reykjavík with the traditional Icelandic name Jón Gunnar Kristinsson, which he legally changed in 2005 to reflect his mother’s pronunciation of his name from his childhood and to drop his father’s patronymic.
As a child, Gnarr was diagnosed with severe mental retardation due to dyslexia, learning difficulties, and ADHD. He nevertheless overcame his hardships and went on to become one of Iceland’s most well-known actors and comedians. His acting work includes the movies The Icelandic Dream and A Man Like Me and the television series The Night Shift, which aired on BBC4. Gnarr published the first two volumes in his fictionalized autobiographical trilogy in 2006, The Indian, and 2009, The Pirate (the third volume, The Outlaw will be published in Iceland in fall 2015–Deep Vellum will publish the trilogy in full in 2015–2016).
In 2009 in the wake of the global economic crisis that devastated Iceland’s economy, Gnarr formed the joke Best Party with a number of friends with no background in politics. The Best Party, which was a satirical political party that parodied Icelandic politics and aimed to make the life of the citizens more fun, managed a plurality win in the 2010 municipal elections in Reykjavík, and Gnarr became Mayor of Reykjavík.