Gunnar Randversson chose Mozart over cod

Poet Gunnar Randversson says music has always been close to his poetry. In an interview with mbl.is, he discusses growing up in the small town of Ólafsfjörður and recently publishing his seventh poetry collection, Neðansjávarbásúnan.

“Music is never far away in my poems, since my life has revolved around it ever since I started learning guitar at the age of 13,” he says. He recalls being teased somewhat for his “eccentricity” in Ólafsfjörður, though he says it was, for the most part, a good place to grow up.

A turning point came when a guitar teacher arrived in town. “I saw straight away that this was for me and found my footing in life,” Randversson says. Many people were surprised when he announced that he wanted to become a music teacher. When he was 15, his mother bought him a piano.

He says it was not easy to step outside the mould set for children in the town. People seemed to ask him: “Who do you think you are?” or “Are you going to swim against the current?”

He reflects on that experience in his poem “I Was Called Mozart”:

Once I was just a boy travelling through
the wondrous world of words and tones
reading belles-lettres and playing music by ear

My heroes were Hemingway and Heinesen
Mendelssohn and Mozart

I was thought an odd character in a small town
where everything revolved around cod and
the thousand-krona note

Life was salted fish, but seafaring
never appealed to me

The full interview with Randversson appears in Morgunblaðið’s Sunday edition.