The Wedding is a short story about a man travelling alone to his son’s wedding, taken from my debut book Ikke rart det kommer kråker (No Wonder Crows are Coming, Oslo: Aschehoug). The translation is by John Irons.
Below is Pil Cappelen Smith’s translation of one of my short entries in the fabulous, calf-skin bound Cappelens Forslags Conversational Lexicon, (Oslo: Cappelens forslag), to which I have contributed the entries Asphalt; Glasses; The Climate Problem (Volume I, 2014), and Alphabet; Cosmos; Photosynthesis; Turbulence (Volume II, 2016). To understand the concept, see the Guardian‘s excellent explanation.
Asphalt, 1. The surface in front of you, steaming; as the steamroller passes you realise you’re late, school must have started already. You throw your leg over the crossbar and grip the handlebars harder, stand still for a moment inhaling the smell of tarmac, then kick off and pedal around the corner, lean forward on top of the slope, and you see, in an instant, that the seventh graders are gone, there’s nobody in the school crossing, you see the cars on the road trying to brake for you, soundlessly, like a silent movie, the wind fills your ears and you fly through the crossing; the world is open, it’s spring.
2. Reflector for the orange light observable near streetlights in the rain, for example outside the house with the doorbell you’re no longer allowed to ring yet can´t stay away from. You stand under the maple tree, listening to the children´s voices through the open window as you consider the orange, gnarled, shiny entrails of the sidewalk.
