by Vidar Hreinsson

Stephan G. Stephansson (1853-1927) is considered foremost among the immigrant poets who wrote in Icelandic in North America. Stephansson settled in Markerville in Alberta, having initially emigrated to the US. His poetry reveals the intellectual potentials of Icelandic literary culture. But as Mikhail M. Bakhtin notes, "A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures" (Bakhtin 7). After his encounter with new cultural currents and ideas Stephansson gradually developed his own view of life and the world, his poetry reflecting the dialogue between cultures, the encounter between different meanings, which enabled him to discover Canadian landscape and soil, and establish his own semantic universe in a new world. In Iceland poetry was the traditional discursive means to capture reality in words, make sense of it and bring about change. Stephansson drew upon these traditional aspects, enhanced by new influences, in his encounter with the immigrant experience, recording the new environment in poetic measures, establishing a broader sense of man in relation to nature, and acknowledgeing the value of the settlers' labour as a worthwhile contribution to Canadian history.

Stephansson grew up firmly rooted in the literary culture of Iceland, characterized by unquenchable thirst for knowledge and various literary activities in prose and poetry. The traditions of popular poetry were practiced by the Icelandic aldyudskald, lay poets who were mostly educated at home, by members of the family and by occasional private tutoring, in the customary fashion of rural Iceland. The most popular genres were the rimur and occasional verse. The rimur were narrative poems, varying in length (50-5000 stanzas) and stanzaic forms, divided into chapters. Their subject was usually derived from the Sagas, historical or contemporary events, but most commonly romance. Rimur were composed in a highly figurative language and played a substantial role in preserving the Icelandic language through the centuries.

The composition of occasional verse was widely practiced. It served the function of popular entertainment and was used to commemorate an event or a person, as well as to capture aspects of everyday reality, be it weather, nature, livestock (mainly horses), news, fashion, knowledge, courtship and sexuality, alcoholic drinks and songs. The most popular verse was the lausavisa - a single verse, usually in quatrains - often composed spontaneously in jest, to get the upper hand in a debate, devastate the opponent in an invective, or simply to seize and capture the moment. Lively debates or exchanges of opinion in verse could arise at social gatherings or circulate within a community and letters in verse were popular. The different compositions of the aldyudskald were mostly preserved, copied and passed around in manuscript as well as orally; many of them are highly intricate in form. Popular poetry, versifying, was thus traditionally a vital part of daily life and exchange between people who belived that the best way to record reality was to bind it in meter and rhyme.

These popular traditions were particularly vibrant in the Skagafjordur region where Stephansson grew up. By the time when he was born, Icelandic literature was alive and open to foreign influence. It had been envigorated, first by the Enlightenment but more significantly by Romanticism, whereby "literature and politics became enmeshed with each other" in Iceland's battle for independence from Denmark (Neijmann 50). The level of literacy was high in Iceland, fueled by a thirst for knowledge and new ideas. Many self-educated farmers engaged themselves in reading and even translating literature and social or political debate, no less than the intellectuals. In Dingeyjarsysla, where Stephansson lived from 1870 until he emigrated to North America in 1873, an active and well organised movement emerged after the middle of the century, with progressive societies and new organisations in trade and politics. The farmers' reading-societies bought books from abroad, in the Scandinavian languages, as well as in English and German.

In his autobiographical fragments, Stephansson recalls reading extensively as a child, his father also widely read although a poor farmer (1948: 83-4; 1988: 14-37). Stephansson read sermons, sagas, tales and poetry in manuscripts, and borrowed books and journals from well-to-do neighbours who bought all that was brought out in print.

However, one winter he read the Bible three times because he lacked other books to read. This literary heritage enabled him already as a teenager to establish his own critical standpoint. He began composing poetry at the age of eleven, his juvenalia revealing a hungry mind, eager to learn as well as to express itself. In his teens he translated poetry from the Danish and composed a poem on the Polish struggle for independence.

Upon his departure from Iceland, Stephansson was intellectually mature, skilled in poetry and prose, open minded yet critical in his outlook. A thirst for learning, stimulated by the literary culture, encouraged him to extend his horizons in America by reading literature and philosophy, not least within the liberal and critical freethinker tradition that developed in the wake of Channing, Emerson and Whitman. This contributed to his own intellectual emancipation from church-based religion and its traditional outlook. The intellectual emancipation from the puritan frame of mind, which played a vital role in creating American identity or self-reliance, seems to have affected Stephansson in a similar manner. Influenced also by a second generation of freethinkers, such as Col. Robert Ingersoll and Felix Adler, he increasingly challenged the fundamentalist and conservative leaders of the Icelandic Synod. Eventually he became atheist and his ideas later evolved in the direction of socialism.

Through the encounter with a new world and new ideas, the immigrant experience transformed the literary legacy in which Stephansson was entrenched, gradually enabling him to achieve an intellectual distance, to observe himself and his world as a part of a greater context. This intellectual development is noticeable during his stay in Dakota in the 1880s, where he took part in establishing a cultural society modeled on Adler's Ethical Society, but flourished in his poetry soon after his arrival in Alberta in 1889. His self-conscious and balanced identity was that of the farmer and versifier, spiced with ironic modesty. Stephansson developed a deeply humanist view on life, based on the values of labour and nature. Watson Kirkconnell has noted that "No other Canadian poet in any language presents a comparable picture of Western Canada" (1936: 272). As Kristjana Gunnars points out, Stephansson "used the environment extensively, such as a local event or landscape, a funeral or a birthday of a friend, to begin a poem or an essay, but he would end with a sweeping universality that lifted the locality of his source and gave it universal significance" (ix).

In the 1890s, Stephansson wrote a number of poems on the nature and landscape of Alberta under the heading Uti a vidavangi [Out in the Open Air]. The first poem to win him a reputation as a superior poet is "Klettafjoll" [Rocky Mountains], written in 1889 and published in Heimskringla on January 23, 1890. In explanatory notes on the poem, he describes how he was lying down on a hillside at Bow River near Calgary in May, shortly after his arrival, and seeing the Rockies for the first time, after a spring of inclement weather (Andvokur [Insomnia] IV: 361). The poem is a powerful description of the mountains as they appear in changing weather throughout the day. He extends his description with figures and ideas from the Old-Norse mythology (Andvokur I: 307-10).

Stephansson composed most of these nature-poems while travelling from Markerville to Calgary by oxen-drawn wagon, but some poems were composed while he worked as a surveyor in Alberta. All the poems have in common the strong urge to sense and perceive the landscape, to define and personify in a rather romantic as well as critical manner the dynamic powers and challenge of nature. In "Lettara loft" [Lighter Air] he describes the "language" of the landscape, bringing forth the double meaning of Icelandic words which refer to features of land as well as parts of the human body: "liver hofdi til min talar, / og tungu a serhver hals" [every headland speaks to me, / and every hill has a tongue] (Andvokur I: 313). He constructs an image of the land as a sensible being, "hofdi" being a kind of head in the landscape, the word "hals" referring to neck or throat as well as hill, and "tunga" sharing the dual meaning of the English word tongue as well as describing the stretch descending from a hill. The poem concludes with a comment on the unpredictable elements of the natural forces, which are "Einn dattur ur deirra veru - / Dvi Dau eru ei laerd a kver" [An intrinsic part of their being - / not learnt about in books]. While capturing the landscape in words, drawing upon his poetic inheritance which had a strong tendency to personify landscape, Stephansson makes the land speak with speech organs, expressing an uncontrollable essence.

He had composed poetry on nature and landscape since his childhood in Iceland and a number of lausavisur-quatrains on nature in Wisconsin. But especially after 1889, he tapped into the creative potentials of the tradition in order to convey his vision of man's or the immigrant's situation in relation to society. Repeatedly he indicates affinities with the natural forces in the wilderness that surrounds him, defining himself as an outsider or opponent even to the social forces of his day.

"Flodid" [The Flood] (1893) is among the poems from Stephansson's trips to Calgary. The speaker describes the threatening and destructive river-flood. His mother and his beloved both urge him to stay, but he runs for his life farther ahead, into the wilderness. In the last stanza, however, he describes the flight as urged by desire for progress, not as agony of fear:

Thirst for advance, not fearful panic,
spurs this onward flight -
the spirit's giant grip
shall break each bridge behind,
never to return
to my land doomed to destruction.

(Andvokur 1: 3131)

The poem transcends the initial image of the flood, stating an attitude to life that embraces danger and the will to move forward on his path of life. The speaker's announcement that he will break rather than bum his bridges, using spiritual strength, forcefully declares that he intends to fight the challenges ahead, accepting what is to come instead of revering what lies behind.

In this spirit Stephan often personifies nature in order to convey universal significance. Natural forces become metaphors for the individual and society. The poem "Laekurinn" [The Brook] (Andvokur I: 346-9), in fact composed while Stephansson was still living in the Dakota Territories, describes a brook during spring-thaw, its cleansing effect a metaphor for the revolutionary forces of society. The same counts for the poem "Slettueldur" [Prairie Fire], which concludes with those three stanzas:

Praise to the flame! Praise those who dare lighten it, like
poetry prodding the people. The flames must reach high, and fast,
to burn the stubble, night, and rime of autumn.

Our age, afraid of fire, burnt out;
where is your craziness, toil and quarrels:
when spring nurtures hill and field,
and each leaf of grass buds with life!

Let fires blaze the withered grass
on the mind's moors, ignite spiritual waste!
Our generation's mission is to light
flames for coming spring.

(Andvokur I: 316)

Stephansson suggests that the burning of withered grass is comparable to stubble burning, erazing the old and worn-out traditions which hinder new growth.

The magnificent "Vid vatnid [By the Lake] describes a beautiful lake in the forest. In the first part of the poem the lake is observed in calm weather, frost and rain, but the last line depicts the lake's reaction to the first gusts of wind, when the lake wrinkles its brows. The second part draws powerful pictures of the storm on the lake, mixed with images of tears, fear, terror and death. The last two stanzas complete the personification by turning the lake into a symbol of human life, tension, suffering and oppression:

Yes there is danger yet life in this game!
As if each tiny drop swells and boils
and your every weak nerve, muscles and blood,
are braced with steel's power, proud sea-goddess, Rán.
And the duty and core of life is to suffer
the pains of the storms of our own times.
I sit here a prisoner, sleep escaped,
feeling like night has called me witness:
how the mind's oceans break against the spirit of the times,
until temples wreck and chains of states shatter,
hearing the screams and moans of many hearts
through the sound of the breakers in the twilight of time.

(Andvokur I: 324)

Another poem on fire, "Svidumork" [Burned Forest], dwells upon the destructive forces of a forest-fire during summer, and concludes by turning to poetry:

Summer mourns a mountain flower
destroyed by fire:
"There the embers have wasted
my best poems."

The forest is quiet and it grieves
me to see no growth!
Thus goes the life of peoples
whose poems die.

Treading through the wasteland
I alliterate Icelandic words to myself -
alone I recite the requiem
of an earth bereft of poetry.

(Andvokur I: 355-6)

Icelandic poems composed in the wilderness provide a stronghold against the threat of destruction; poetry keeps the world from falling apart.

Stephansson lived and fanned in close contact with the vital forces of nature. His environment evoked simultaneously a tension and a harmony in relation to his ideas and life. Stephansson captures the inherent forces of nature into Icelandic rhythm, alliteration and metre, partly in the manner of the various Icelandic folk poets and romantics. Thereby he "colonizes" the land mentally, in the sense of finding himself at ease in a new environment. But, significantly, his capturing of nature in verse is not his means to tame or fetter; he expresses his sense of nature as a rebellious, uncontrollable force. The semantic world of these poems provokes revolt, which is at the same time a threat and a challenge. This perception of nature was no doubt stimulated by the emancipating insights he gained from the American freethinkers.

But there is also a different, even opposing, theme that Stephansson develops in his poetry, on the settling of the land. Stephansson composed a number of memorial poems about the labour of the pioneer farmers, men and women. Their labour acquires a deep significance in poems such as "Landnamskonan" [The Settler-Woman] (Andvokiir I: 161-64) which opens with a nature description, stating that before its settlement, Alberta was an empty space in world history. Then the poem focuses on the Icelandic settlers, who developed solidarity and cultivated the land, and one another, with their labour, their witticisms, stories and poems. Then the poet asserts that these are the people who enriched the land with their labour, while the great heroes of history were sleeping. And he asks whether the praised deeds of great heroes were not in fact harmful, while people's labour left behind constructive work and thoughts. Stephansson urges future historians to consider the struggle of those who dedicated their life, their work to the cultivation of the land and the education of the people as being historically significant, or else it will all be in vain.

In a memorial poem to his aunt, Sigurbjorg Stefansdottir, who also was his mother-in-law, he said:

And sister, I envision our family line
meandering through the ages,
settling this world from east to west,
with our cradles and our graves.

Our kin's will to work was not buried,
nor its rake and scythe, in each grave -
although there are gaps in our group,
the future does not suffer.
All that is ours of worldly concern
is quick and above ground.

(Andvokiir I: 160)

Stephan reiterates that the cultivating labour of the settlers is no less important than the deeds of the heroes of history. The labouring people had created their own history by the time they were buried. Although someone died, others could take over. Stephansson unites or even sanctifies the life-cycle of birth, labour and death, in a profound metaphor.

This metaphor of settlement and labour is completed by the role of poetry in Stephansson's memorial poem for poet Sigurbjorn Johannesson, a self-educated poet and thus a representative of the Icelandic literary traditions. He was the father of the poet Jakobina Johnson:

And you carved alliteration on field and oak,
with the countenance of our life and earth,
and your poetry hailed gatherings and games,
and you sang at the settler's grave.

(Andvokur I: 158)

In his poetry, Stephansson has created two opposing metaphors of settlement. The first is of nature and wilderness as the personification of the unruly forces of human life, but the second being the sanctified unity of birth, labour, cultivation and death.

However, the idea of actual and poetic settlement achieves an ironic counterpart in the long narrative poem, "A ferd og flugi" [En Route] (written in 1900). It deals with the tragic aspects of the immigrant experience. In glimpses, it gives a profound account of the tragic fate of an Icelandic woman, mingled with powerful descriptions of nature and society in the New World. The sullen prairie river and the organised flatness of the farming areas are metaphors for a dull mentality. City-life is mocked and an image of mine-workers ascending from the bowels of the earth underlines their inhumane situation. The main story concerns Ragnheidur, a cheerful country girl who moves to town and turns into Sally, the wife of the Irishman O'Hara. She earns him money by prostitution, "being kind to travellers," as it says in the poem. Eventually she runs away from him, despised by everyone. In a train crash, she heroically saves a child at the cost of her own life. A hypocritical Icelandic minister hesitates to bury her because of her reputation, but agrees to do so when he hears about her heroic deed, not to mention that the child's mother will pay for the funeral. The Icelandic Ragnheidur is buried as Sally.

In the final section of the poem the speaker of the poem visits her grave. The poem concludes with reflections on the tender solidarity he feels toward his fellow expatriates, as the soil they get buried in is related to him:

To strands held by strangers I come with a love
That streams in the tenderest tones,
Yet green are far hillocks that grip at my heart
The graves of my ancestors' bones.
I know why that homeland has held me so close;
For hued with mem'ries of yore
Each vista of earth bears a voice from the past,
By valley and mountain and shore;
And out of those voices comes strength for the strife,
The strain that man's living requires;
Even so is the sanction that that every land gives
Long sacred to mothers and sires.

(Andvokur II; Kirkconnell 1935: 22)

But I did find the grave,
so grandly marked,
the epitaph however wrong;
"Sally О'Нага" read the first line,
the next line noting which day
she died in December, what year.
Below it said "Daisy" so all would know
which "publisher" footed the bill.

(Andvokur II)

Although Stephansson could create his own identity and settle the new land by means of his poetry, he was aware of the tragic aspects of immigration: the exploitation, the religious hypocrisy, and the loss of identity. But as the soil begins to cover the bones of Icelanders, it acquires emotional value. This is the same idea as in his development in the memorial poems of the cycle of birth, labour, cultivation and death.

The literary traditions of Iceland, and the impulses of the new world, equipped Stephansson with a powerful, thundering voice, which still is almost unheard in Canada. The nature poems can be interpreted as the metaphors of a rebirth in a new environment, the poet drawing upon its imagery to reflects his own struggles between anarchic revolt and harmony. A different kind of harmony is created in the memorial poems; history is established by settling and cultivating the land and by being buried in its soil. But history is ambivalent; the losers have no history, as in the case of Sally alias Ragnheidur. The poetic world of these dissonant settlement poems, with nature and culture as their subjects, involves construction of meaning, a semantic universe which embraces opposing forces of life without attempts to reconcile them.

Stephansson's poetry draws upon the affinities between everyday realities and poetry which characterize the Icelandic literary tradition in his encounter with the wilderness as well as the fertile soil of his new homeland, and records the settlers' contribution to its history. He demonstrates the capacity of the old traditions to capture reality in words, settle in a new and sometimes strange world, and turns Canada into the motherland of those who were growing up there, without forgetting the negative aspects of the immigrant experience. The emancipating impulses from the New World re-vitalised the qualities of his poetic inheritance in a deeply dialogic manner. The thirst for knowledge and the urge to understand the meaning of the world compelled Stephansson to construct a significant poetic universe, without violating the opposing forces of life. Ironically, because of the Icelandic language his poetry is largely inaccessible to a Canadian readership.

- Rediscovering Canadian Diference, The Nordic Association for Canadian Studies Text Series, Volume 17.

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