Davíð Stefánsson’s ‘Delirium’ (1919): A New Translation with Introduction

Abstract

Davíð Stefánsson was an Icelandic poet born in 1895 in Fagriskógur, a farm in the North of Iceland.[i] He was an ambitious and esteemed poet, whose work occupied a central place in the Icelandic literary canon and borrowed from many traditions including folklore, Romanticism, Symbolism, the Gothic, and, in the poem translated into English here, decadence. Given that Davíð was writing from a remote island in the North Atlantic Ocean, a place with more sheep than people, it is not obvious how or why he started exploring decadent themes, which traditionally tend to reflect preoccupations with plenitude, artifice, and urban cityscapes. It is the pervasive nature of decadence itself, however, and its parasitic relationship with other major movements and tendencies like Romanticism, Realism, and Symbolism, that ensured that decadent aesthetics found their way into the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers like Davíð.