Caught Writing Poetry in Icelandic Class, Sentenced to More Poetry

Hannah Kent had already finished high school in Australia. Her exchange programme sent her back to school anyway, in Sauðárkrókur in northern Iceland, where she did not speak the language.

She was shy, and found herself conspicuous and isolated at the same time. This seems unfair. You would expect one to cancel out the other.

In Icelandic class she began writing a poem in the margin of her notebook. The exercises stayed untouched. Her teacher, Geirlaugur, cleared his throat, which is how a pupil is caught in every language on earth. She apologised in Icelandic, which I propose we count as the exercise.

Later she was called to his desk and expected trouble. Instead he gave her a book of Icelandic nature poetry in English, inscribed to her as a fellow poet. As she remembered it, he then let her carry on writing poetry in class.

An unusual punishment: more of the offence.

I have thought hard about how I would have handled this as a parent, and the honest answer is badly. When the middle one was caught drawing horses in the margin of her French workbook in Madrid, I bought her a second French workbook, without margins, which I believe the trade calls a punishment edition. She drew the horses on the cover.

Kent’s second host family had four children under ten, and they helped her learn Icelandic. After finishing school at home, you go abroad and discover that your most useful language teachers have not finished primary school. Anyone who has moved country with small children knows this. The youngest corrected my Dutch before she could tie her shoes, and has never stopped.

She joined the local theatre company too. In a 2014 interview she remembered the town becoming home for the rest of her exchange.

There remained the question of her accent. Nobody, she said, would tell her whether she sounded Australian. Somebody in Akureyri asked whether she was Swedish.

I know this feeling exactly. After four countries, I have been taken for Dutch in Spain, Spanish in Denmark and, once, at a Brussels bakery, “not from here, but trying”. It is the most accurate thing anyone has said about me in years.

The youngest says I sound like “a nice robot”. She says it in perfect Dutch.