Guest speaker: Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón

Sjón, former president of the Basque-Icelandic society, is the author of From the Mouth of the Whale, a novel about a 17th century writer and naturalist, Jón the Wise, who was a friend of the Basque captains and pilots of the whaling vessels. In the novel, Sjón talks about Jón the Wise’s involvement with Basque whalers in 1615, and his defence of the Basques against his own countrymen. Wise’s writings on the Basque Massacre of 1615 led to his imprisonment, and life-long indigence and exile from his country first and from his native West Fjords for the rest of his life. Sponsored by the Barandiaran Chair of Basque Studies, the Argyropoulos Endowment in Hellenic Studies, the Center for Complex and Nonlinear Science, the Comparative Literature Program, the Dept. English, the Dept. of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese, the Translation Studies Emphasis, and the IHC.