On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 10:54:08PM -0000, fjornir <haukurth@...> wrote:
>
> On we go :-)
>
> http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/reader/faerey6.html
I'm sorry I'm so late with this. I was away the weekend it came out, and
after that it was Christmas week, which tends to be chaotic.
I hope your exams went well.
I've done things a little differently this time. My initial translation
is in ordinary text, with comments in (). As usual, I had a lot of trouble
in the first pass, and don't really think I'd have gotten anywhere without
the hints provided by Konrad's vocabulary list. This time, instead of
correcting earlier translation/comments based on that list, I'm putting
revisions in [], so you can see what sort of things I'm struggling with.
> Nú litlu síðar kømr Sigurðr í búðina til bróður síns ok mælti:
>"Tak þú nú silfrit, nú er samit kaupit."
Now a little later Sigurð comes into the booth to his brother and said:
"Take you now the silver, now (it) is the same bargain".
> Hann svarar: "Ek fekk þér silfrit skömmu."
He answered: "I gave you the silver a little while ago."
> "Nei", segir Sigurðr; "ek hefi ekki á því tekit."
"No", says Sigurð, "I have not taken it from that".
(I am so lost with these little adverbial phrases like "á því"...)
[After reading Konrad's vocab list:
"No", says Sigurð, "I have not touched it".
> Nú þræta þeir um þetta.
> Eptir þat segja þeir konungi til.
> Konungr skilr nú ok aðrir menn at þeir eru stolnir fénu.
> Nú leggr konungr farbann svá at engi skip skulu sigla burt svá búit.
> Þetta þótti mörgum manni vanhagr mikill, sem var, at sitja um þat fram er markaðrinn stóð.
Now they argue about it.
Afterwards they say it to their king.
The king explains/decides now and other men to them are ??? (what's stolnir?) ?? (what's fénu?).
[OK, after checking Simon's list, I'm guessing stolnir must be a form of
stela. In that case, this sentence makes more sense:
The king now decides also that other men than they have stolen the money.
Given 'stolnir' as stela and what the king then does, and the fact that Simon
lists fé as the very next word in his list, I presume fénu is fé (dative) +
inu (the, neuter, in dative sing)
Now the king places a travel ban so that no ship shall sail away thus prepared(?)
[Now the king places a travel ban so that no ship shall sail away
as matters stand (while things are in this state).]
This (??) seemed to many men a great disadvantage, as it was, to sit around it on which the man stood (? stóð looks like a past participle of _some_ verb).
[oops ... misread markaðrinn as maðrinn, probably because the line wrapped
around on my screen...
This seemed a great disadvantage to many people, as it was, to sit
around the market in (one) place.
(I'm getting lost in a maze of little words that look like forms of he, she,
it, that, this etc... they don't work at all like english, so my intuition's
all wrong, and looking up individual meanings ... if I can even find them,
since they are mostly declined forms ... doesn't help, because it's the usage
I don't understand. Combine that with verb forms which I don't know solidly,
and I'm feeling like giving up even trying to translate and going back to
memorizing word declensions and conjugations.)
(Either a sentence is lost here, or I completely botched the one
before. It looks like someone's trying to violate the farbann...
Of course I'm also confused as to what happened and why the king
would want to impose one ... he's acting like the money was stolen...
and I don't quite see that from what I think I read.)
[Obviously, this note was written before I found the meaning of stolnir...]
> Þá áttu Norðmenn stefnu sín á milli um ráðagjörðir.
> Þrándr var á þeiri stefnu ok mælti svá:
They had Norwegians in their prow between ??? (what is ráðagjörðir?)
[ráðagjörð seems to be 'plan', but this still doesn't really
translate n... Then (some) Norwegians had in their prow among a plan.
... it seems really likely that the Norwegians had a plan, and were
gathering in their 'stafn' ... which might be prow or stern ...
either to talk or wih intent to fight their way out. But that's
an educated guess, not a translation.]
Þránd went to them in the prow and said thus:
> "Hér eru menn mjök ráðlausir."
"Here are men (who are) very redeless (i.e. lacking good counsel)."
> Þeir spyrja hann:
Then he asked:
> "Kanntu hér ráð til?"
"Would you know here of advice?"
> "Svá er víst", segir hann.
"Thus is certain", he says.
> "Lát fram þá þína ráðagjörð.", sögðu þeir.
"Let forward then your ??(ráðagjörð)", they said.
[Let forward then your plan ... presumably idiom, and
better translated as "Set forth then your advice".]
> "Eigi mun þat kauplaust.", segir hann.
"It will not be without fee", says he.
> Þeir spyrja hvat er hann mælir til. Hann svarar:
They ask what he had to say. He answered:
> "Hverr yðvarr skal fá mér eyri silfrs", segir hann.
"You shall give me an ounce of silver", he says.
> Þeir kváðu þat mikit en þat varð kaup þeira at hverr maðr fekk honum hálfan eyri þá í hönd en annan hálfan ef þetta yrði framgengt.
They said it large (i.e. it was a lot) but it was their bargain to whichever man gave/made him half an ounce then in hand and another half ounce if it was an advance(?)
[This makes much more sense given Konrad's list, in which case it
becomes ... another half ounce if it was successful.]
(I'm really not impressed with my translation here. I'm not sure whether any amount of farther effort would help me fix it, either. I'm having this overwhelming feeling of "time to go back to basics". I'm not sure what I missed, but I'm feeling pretty much lost. I can fix some of it by guessing what the sense must mean, but I'm having enough trouble that this would involve a lot of outrigth guesswork, since my initial attempt doesn't even produce a coherent story. Of course that's without checking Konrad's word list, which I don't normally check until I've done the best I can with just Gordon's glossary and Zoega's dictionary.)
[With Konrad's list, I managed to make it coherent, and perhaps more or less
correct, at least in a loose kind of way. But I'm still very much unimpressed
with my work, and feeling like I need more emphasis on basics of some kind.]
--
Arlie
(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)