Comments on: Ánægður með málsháttinn

By: Hjalti

Hjalti — Mon, 30 May 2005 22:19:41 +0000

sorry for the ridiculously late comment, but I just installed RSS reader – which is bringing my blog reading back in time.

I think you left out a very important point, usually Sæmundur was referred to as Bobby’s close personal friend (einkavinur) in the Icelandic media; which is quite funny, since Sæmundur was only his chauffeur about 20 years ago.

By: Henrik

Henrik — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 13:09:49 +0000

Thank you for the translation. It is a good story:)
And BTW in Estonian we have a similar cucumber expression with the exact same meaning, except we call it “hapurkurgihooaeg” – the dill pickle season, implying that the cucumbers are not even fresh any more.

By: GÞB

GÞB — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:25:13 +0000

Good point!

The reason I wrote this entry in Icelandic is that I am engaging in wordplay and parodying the kind of news coverage that this issue was getting in the Icelandic media at the time. For example, the sentence fragment “milliliðalaust að því er Sæmundur best veit” is taken verbatim from the front page of a large newspaper; it said that the Reykjavík police chief had relayed some little message from Fischer to the media “without intermediaries, to the best of Sæmundur’s knowledge.” In my story, the same police chief was bringing Fischer an easter egg from the manufacturer, “without intermediaries, to the best of Sæmundur’s knowledge.”

The picture of cucumbers is a reference to the Icelandic term “gúrkutíð” (cucumber time), a time in the year when interesting news is scarce and the media spend inordinate amounts of time/space on uninteresting details.

For the benefit of Henrik and any other non-Icelandic speakers who may chance upon this blog entry, I have added a full translation above.

By: Henrik

Henrik — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 10:56:53 +0000

In one of your very first posts to this blog you wrote that you will write in Icelandic about things that are of no interest to non-Icelanders.
I am not an Icelandic speaker and cannot understand most of your post above, so I may very well be off topic here, but Bobby Fischer and Iceland is most definitely a matter of interest for the whole world and not just for Iceland. Most of what’s been going on has been watched quite closely by even the Estonian media, which generally has a tendency not to care about things that have no direct relation to the country. So, just so you know, whatever an Icelander has to say about this matter may be of interest to others as well ;)