Meg Matich
Photo by Heiðar Ludwig Holbergsson
Bio
Meg Matich is a poet and translator of Icelandic, German, and Danish, who earned her MFA from Columbia University. Her translations have received praise from outlets like New York Times, Oprah, and Vulture. She is the translator of six works, including Magnús Sigurðsson’s Cold Moons and Ásta Sigurðardóttir‘s Nothing to be Rescued, and the author of one original poetry collection. She's received support for her work from UNESCO, PEN America, and the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, and others. Matich is one of few immigrant members of the Writers Union of Iceland, a step she considers quintessential to her life as an immigrant in Iceland.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Danish of the novel The Valley of Flowers by Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen. The Valley of Flowers is her second novel, which grapples with trauma, post-colonial indigenous identity, abusive relationships, and Greenland's suicide epidemic. Included throughout the narrative are very brief texts that count down from 45—the number of suicides in Greenland in 2019 out of a population of approximately 50,000.
In her acceptance speech for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, Korneliussen dedicated Blomsterdalen (The Valley of Flowers) to young Greenlanders “who desire to live, but can no longer bear it.” She noted that the “most influential and powerful people simply avert their eyes and hope that [the suicide epidemic] will go away by itself…but there are scores of us, too, who value you and believe in you.” We must act now to preserve “your” lives, she asserted.
The difficult questions that Niviaq Korneliussen poses about control, surviving yourself, and destruction—how these realities are modulated by reverie and identity—profoundly changed me. In affirming the never-so-simple and never-absolute act of living (in the novel, this is both a literal living and a more figurative one), Niviaq draws a continuously unfolding map. She is a cartographer of survival.
Blomsterdalen is the first book that I read in Danish in its entirety. In Blomsterdalen, my gut instinct met happy accident, something that also happened with Cold Moons, a book I began to translate even before I learned Icelandic. The parallels between these two texts astonish me: I found my psychic language in each. They made observations about survival—of children, of adults, of nature—that I understood in my stomach, which some identify as the seat of the soul (translation, to me, is a spiritual practice). And each, perhaps because of a shared understanding of their significance, received important support (the PEN/Heim and the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship) that enabled me to carry out my work, to live my vocation. I believe, without hesitation, that Niviaq and her work will change the world.
I intend to use the proceeds of this grant to immerse myself in Greenlandic culture and to give the most I can give to this text. I thank the NEA for recognizing the urgency of this novel and for supporting its translation.
Compassion is equal parts attention and imagination, and this is no less the case in translation. Translating The Valley of Flowers is my answer to Niviaq’s call to act to preserve lives.
About Niviaq Korneliussen
Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen (b. 1990) has been called one of Greenland’s most significant living authors. Her Nordic Council Literature prize-nominated novel HOMO Sapienne distinguished her as a powerful figure who “heralds a long-awaited generational shift within Greenlandic fiction,” according to poet Mette Moestrup.
Born in Nuuk and raised in the small village of Nanortalik in Southern Greenland, Korneliussen’s writing often revolves around contemporary social problems in Greenland and issues related to identity, gender, race, suicide, and post-colonialism. She has orchestrated writing programs across the country, where there are no creative writing university programs, such as the country's first traveling school for young writers. She has been profiled in outlets such as the New Yorker, Electric Lit, and the Economist, and her work has received considerable international attention.