Trafika Europe 1 - Northern Idyll

If Eigil had his way, such a man as Napoleon Nolsøe would never appear in Faroese literary history. He simply had no place there. Not that he was against giving authorial villains their due in histories or reference works or even naming streets and ships after them. Not at all. One of his great skaldic heroes was the Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun. And without authors such as the Marquis de Sade, Céline, and Jean Genet, the French literary mouth would loose much of its bite. Sure, he might have contributed to the development of Faroese orthographic rules, but that was about it. Otherwise, the man had recorded songs and ballads, but had not actually composed anything himself, and what he did write down had already been collected and documented by others. All he had done was transcribe transcripts, that was his achievement, and to fill literary history with transcribers would be both unfitting and ridiculous. At an Authors’ Society meeting, Eigil declared that the names that appeared in literary history were just as randomly chosen as the names on the society’s membership roster. One man belonged because he had translated two or three minimalistic children’s books some twenty-five years back. Another had taken part in a short story contest launched by well-meaning pedagogues just as many years But Dr. Napoleon was no Genet, and he had done nothing worthy of literary acclaim.

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