A Room in a Foreign Language

On Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace, and a Boy Who Came Home to a Foreign Country

I came to Norway in 1970.

I was sixteen years old and had spent my whole life in the United States. Norway was supposed to be my homeland, but it did not feel that way. I knew little Norwegian. The people around me spoke quickly. The words came and went before I had time to hold on to them.

And there I sat.

At a secondary school in Norway.

No friends. An unfamiliar classroom. Unfamiliar voices. Outside was a landscape I had not yet learned to read.

And in front of me lay a book.

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas.

In Nynorsk.

I no longer remember how the teacher introduced it. Perhaps he or she told us about Vesaas. Perhaps we talked about the story and its characters. That is gone.

But the book is not gone.

I began to read.

And quite soon, something happened that I still cannot fully explain.

I went in.

Into the Ice

There were Siss and Unn.

Two girls. A meeting. A secret almost spoken. Something that stops at the edge of words.

Then the ice.

The cold.

Water that has stopped and yet has not stopped. Walls and passageways. Light breaking through. A palace that exists and does not exist.

I had never seen anything like it.

And yet I knew the place.

Not because I had experienced what Unn experienced. That needs to be said. Her story held a darkness and a gravity that were not mine.

But I recognised something else.

Being on the outside.

Watching the others and knowing that they belong to something you do not yet belong to.

Wanting to enter.

Not having the words.

At school around me there were groups and friendships and familiarity. The others knew how to talk. They knew when to laugh. They knew the codes. They shared a history of which I was not a part.

I had come from somewhere else.

I carried another language in my body.

Perhaps that was why I did not simply read about Siss and Unn.

I walked with them.

The Language

The strange thing is the language.

I knew little Norwegian. And now I was expected to read Nynorsk.

It should have created an even greater distance.

It did not.

Vesaas reached me.

I understood the book.

Not everything in the way a literary scholar might understand a book. I knew nothing about symbolism or narrative technique. I knew nothing of hermeneutics. Gadamer lay many years ahead of me.

But I understood.

I understood with the experience I had as that sixteen-year-old boy.

Many years later, in the 1990s, my mentor Lundstøl said something to me that I have never forgotten:

“Philosophy lies between the sentences.”

Perhaps that was precisely where I had read Vesaas.

Not only in the words I had not yet fully mastered, but in what lay between them. In the silence. In what was almost said. In the gaze, the cold, the distance.

I lacked the words.

But I did not lack understanding.

Perhaps there are books we first understand in just this way.

Not by standing outside them and looking in, but because they open a door and we enter.

And when the door closes behind us, we are no longer quite the same.

The Stranger

I can still see him.

He is sitting at his desk.

It is strange to write “he,” because he is me.

But fifty-six years lie between us.

I would like to sit down beside him.

Not to explain the book.

He does not need that.

Nor to tell him what his life will become. He should be spared that.

I would simply sit there for a while.

Perhaps look out of the window with him.

He does not know that many years later he will spend much of his life trying to understand other people.

Nor does he know how easily understanding can harden into judgement.

He will learn that later.

For now, he is simply sitting in an unfamiliar school with a Nynorsk book in front of him.

And something in this book concerns him.

That is enough.

To Be Recognised

We say that we recognise ourselves in books.

I am not sure that is the best way to put it.

Sometimes it is the book that recognises us.

It finds something we have not yet learned to say.

Nor does it necessarily put that something into words. Perhaps that is precisely why it can reach so deeply.

Vesaas did not explain the boy at the school desk to himself.

He gave him no theory of being an outsider.

He let the ice remain.

He let the silence remain silence.

And so I, too, was allowed to be myself.

The Ice Palace

I have carried the book with me ever since.

Not as a book I have constantly gone around thinking about. Life filled with other books, people, work, love, loss, children, grandchildren, teaching, research and journeys on foot.

And yet The Ice Palace has remained.

Somewhere within the landscape.

I can still see the ice.

I can still feel the cold.

And I can see the sixteen-year-old boy sitting in a Norwegian school, reading a language that is not yet entirely his.

Perhaps it was already becoming his.

For a language does not become ours simply because we learn its words.

It becomes ours when something that concerns us can be said within it.

Vesaas made Norwegian something more than a foreign language for me back then.

He opened a room within it.

And I went in.

Fifty-Six Years Later

Now I stand outside the ice palace again.

Or perhaps I do not.

Perhaps I never quite came out.

It is no longer the same boy looking through the ice. I have lived a long life since that winter. I have found words for much of what, back then, I could only sense.

But words do not explain everything.

I am glad of that.

For if I could explain why The Ice Palace took hold of me in 1970 and has never let me go, perhaps something of the book would disappear.

Some things should be allowed to remain.

Like the ice.

Transparent and impenetrable at the same time.

I can look in.

I can remember the boy at the desk.

I can almost reach him.

But I do not need to bring him out.

He sits there with the book in front of him.

He reads.