Steinn Steinarr

His farm laborer parents in northwest Iceland (sveitabæ) were so poor that the local authorities divided up the family.

Steinn wasn't an ordinary child, but a rebellious, undisciplined loner who loved to ponder and read but detested physical work.

His second lucky break came in the person of a widely beloved Icelandic poet, Stefán frá Hvítadal, who happened to live in his county.

It was there that a new generation of well-known left wing writers, including Halldór Laxness and Þórbergur Þórðarson, met and discussed the fate of their nation and the world.

Despite the two-month suspended jail sentence, his comrades used this opportunity to oust Steinn from the Communist Party.

When his second book, Poems (Ljóð), came out three years later his former comrades were quick to point out that the red flame of revolution had given way to the white smoke of self-doubt.

At that very moment in time one of the nation's most powerful politician, Jónas frá Hriflu, was put in charge of government funding of the arts.

The timing could not have been more unfortunate for Steinarr, since Jónsson was a cultural reactionary who considered all forms of modern art "degenerate", and anyone who opposed him a “Communist”.

Meanwhile, thanks to the war, avant-garde artists from around the world were returning home in droves full of new and revolutionary ideas, dying to turn this cultural backwater upside down.

Among the newcomers were two young and attractive abstract painters, Louisa Matthíasdóttir and Nína Tryggvadóttir, fresh from their studies in Paris.

The same year Steinn's third book of poems, Footprints in Sand (Fótspor í sandi) came out and was well received.

Just as his fourth and most successful book of poetry to date, Journey without Destination (Ferð án fyrirheits), hit the stores in December 1942.

In 1943 Steinn's brilliant satire about Hitler and the Nazis, The Tin Soldiers (Tindátarnir), superbly illustrated by Nína, came out.

The same year his masterpiece, Time and Water, was finally published securing his reputation as Iceland's foremost modern poet.

One reason may be that his favorite theme, the struggle of the eternal loner/outsider against the entrenched tyranny of corrupt power, rings at least as true now as it did back in the 1930s and '40s.

Here is a well known stanza from one of his works (VI 1): Lífs um angurs víðan vang víst ég ganginn herði, eikin spanga, í þitt fang oft mig langa gerði.

This is not only a perfect imitation of the style of the rímur, with the sometimes inherent repetitiveness of syntax and the circumlocutions known as kenningar (the word for "lady" in the original is a traditional kenning component literally denoting an oak tree, though the skaldic device of the heiti happens to be absent here), but it has just that little bit of its author's own invention to make it art in its own right too.

Also, whereas the translator here has interpreted til hálfs in the third line of the stanza as indicating that the narrator has painted half the picture, it is commonly used as an idiom to mean "imperfectly" or "inadequately".

The title is a reference to the greatest work of legendary Icelandic poet Hallgrímur Pétursson (d. 1674), Passíusálmar (Passion Psalms), 50 in all.