It’s difficult to imagine a more pronounced geographic divide than that between Iceland and Australia; the former a land of glacier and volcano, the latter a semi-arid land with more desert than it knows what to do with. Yet Ásgeirhas struck a chord here on the other side of the world, and his unique brand of enigmatic folk is leading the young musician back to Australia for the second time in a year. It’s quite a change for someone who grew up in a town of just 40 people, and who now finds himself corralled into interview after endless interview.
“It still blows my mind, actually. Whenever I’m interviewed I’m just so crap at making something up on the spot, I always just…” He rather appropriately trails off, laughing. “It gets tiring sometimes; you’re answering the same questions, giving the same answers. Sometimes – and this is a really bad habit to get into in interviews; you know, you never want to seem uninterested – but sometimes I just feel like I’m telling the same uninteresting story over and over again, and I get into the habit of telling the exact same answer. It gets tiring, you know, but that’s also the way it is. There’s no way to really get around it. I need to make it more fun by telling different stories somehow.”
This seems then like an ideal time to rewrite his history, I suggest. Would he like to have been born in a hot air balloon? Or what if he were raised by foxes? “Raised by foxes would certainly get more exposure. That’s… that’s actually not a bad idea.”
Ásgeir’sactual (soon to be rewritten) background certainly doesn’t lack for interest. The lyrics to his debut album, In The Silence, were written by his 74-year-old poet father, Einar Georg Einarsson, and while the songs most audiences are now familiar with are sung in English, the album was originally performed entirely in Icelandic. Even without the music there is already an odd poetry to the album. The pre-translation titles are strange, bewitching things, like ‘Sumargestur’, ‘Þennan dag’ and ‘LeyndarmЗl’, and adapting them into English is not always a simple task.
“Most of the songs are translated directly, so they cannot mean exactly the same thing,” Ásgeirexplains, “but most of the lyrics were translated with that in mind. To get them directly out, to say the same thing that the Icelandic lyrics mean. But there were times we didn’t really get that close to the meaning of the titles, just because it’s difficult to get that directly across. The Icelandic title of the album flows really well in Icelandic,” he laughs. “It sounds good, and is really poetic and interesting. But if we were to translate it directly into English it would be something like Glory In The Dead Of Silence, and that doesn’t flow quite as well, you know?”
The Icelandic title is Dýrð к DauðaþЪgn, which I don’t even attempt to pronounce lest I make Ásgeirburst into tears. But the process of translation is a curious beast, with inevitable compromise on what the original intended and what the adopted tongue conveys. Ásgeir’sfather, however, was fully supportive of the process, and despite how personal many of the lyrics were to his son’s life, the poet was committed to keeping the meaning as unchanged as possible.
“My dad was a translator back in the ’80s, and was kind of familiar with that process of translating lyrics. When I told him we had the idea of translating, [we knew] some of these words might be really personal. For some people it would maybe seem quite unusual and unnatural for a father [to translate], but my dad is a really simple guy, he’s always been there for me, and when I have some kind of idea he’s always been behind me. I came up to him and told him that we were thinking of translating, and for him that was one of the biggest things that has happened – there was no doubt in his mind that he wanted to be involved. He went through the lyrics many times before we recorded, and was on board from the very beginning.”
Had Ásgeir’sfather not been involved in the writing process, however, the English-speaking world may still have seen some rather unusual and intoxicating lyrics emerge. For that matter, Icelanders wouldn’t have fared any different the other way around.
“When I was younger I used to write Icelandic lyrics to some of my songs, and for this album I’d written endless lyrics for multiple songs before we did the recording. ‘On That Day’ I had written in English and then explained to Dad what it was about, what I was feeling when I wrote it, so he got ideas from me before he wrote his lyrics. But most of the other songs I’d written with a nonsense language, because when I’m writing songs I always use made-up words that just come to mind when I’m writing a melody. I got in the habit of writing down nonsense words to songs and recording them, so for all my friends and family that I would show the songs to, they all thought they were actually hearing really good English lyrics because nobody spoke it,” he laughs. “But none of the lyrics actually made any sense at all.”
In The Silence out now through POD/Inertia. See him atConcert Hall, Sydney Opera House onWednesday January 7, tickets online.Also appearing alongside Alt-J, Jamie xx, SBTRKT, Joey Bada$$ and many more at Falls Festival, Lorne, Marion Bay and Byron Bay, Sunday December 28 – Saturday January 3.
