I’d like to tell the story of the strangest animal I came across in the Icelandic folk stories and it might explain why I was later propelled towards surrealism. There is an animal called the furry trout. The furry trout looks exactly like the normal trout. But it’s got fur. And it swims with the school of trout and when you’re catching it in nets it can get there in between the normal trout. You’ve got to be very careful because if a man eats a furry trout, he’ll fall pregnant. And it’s a very dangerous thing for a male to fall pregnant; we’re not made for it. And the real difficulty arises in the ninth month because then the man has to deliver. So when I was nine years old I read this and it was described quite vividly … You lay the man on the table, you spread his legs, you take the sharpest knife in the house, and you cut open his scrotum and then you go in and fetch the child. And this was quite interesting for a nine-year-old, you know? So right from the beginning, when I started seeing surrealist art, and reading surrealist texts, you know, I got the same thrill. It told me, Yes, strange things can happen, we can talk about this world in strange terms.
Sjón
