March 11, 2005
Brad Leithauser Inducted
into Iceland’s Order of the Falcon
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“Sir” Brad
Leithauser (left) with Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, president
of Iceland |
Author
Brad Leithauser, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities,
has been awarded the Order of the Falcon by the president of
Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, for his efforts to make Icelandic
literature available to American readers.
Induction
into the Order of the Falcon is a high honor, one awarded to
just three to five non-Icelanders each year. It is conferred
upon Icelandic and foreign nationals “for achievements
to the benefit of Iceland or in the international arena.”
Grimsson presented Leithauser with the honor in a ceremony on January 31.
"I’d
like to think it’s a sign of good mental health to love
at least one country on the planet unreservedly. And I’d
further like to think it better not be one’s own country,” Leithauser
told the Icelandic president after accepting the honor.
"I’m
an American and I love my country deeply, but much of what it
does distresses or dismays me. Iceland is a different matter.
I love pretty much everything about it. I love the harsh weather,
I love the bleak landscapes, I love the people. I’m sure
if I were an Icelander, I’d see things in the country to
complain about. But as an American writer who visits Iceland
every year, and who finds it the best place in the whole world
to get his work done, I love the place in the same unqualified
way I love my family.”
Leithauser has made no secret of his affection for the North Atlantic island
republic. In receiving the 2004 Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship
at Mount Holyoke, he said, in part: "I’ll close this speech in praise
of ambivalence with one further personal detail. I try to visit Iceland every
year. I prefer to go in January, when winds are chilliest, storms are fiercest,
the arctic darkness is deepest. I tell my students that my goal as a writer
is to induce in myself a feeling of productive self-pity, and one of the reasons
why I love Iceland is how quickly, once I arrive in January, I begin to feel
happily sorry for myself.”
Leithauser and his brother Mark Leithauser most recently produced Lettered
Creatures, a collection of 28 light verse poems by Brad and 29 drawings by
Mark, who is chief of design at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. His
novel-in-verse Darlington’s Fall was chosen as a notable book for 2003
by the New York Times Book Review.
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