>From: Daniel Bray <dbray@...>

>With all due respect, it is easy for native speakers to pull just >about
>any translation apart - I'm sure you could give the same >treatment to all
>the translations I have seen (Bellows, Cottle, Bray (no relation), Thorpe,
>etc.).

Not at all. You seem to have utterly misunderstood the point I'm trying to
make with my treatment of Larrington. I suspect you may not even have
bothered to read it, because you seem to think that my criticisms are
trivial enough to be ignored as the musings of native speaker who would be
just as cruel to all other translators anyway! This is not the case
at all. For example, I can find very little fault with Dronke's translation
of V�lusp�. As a matter of fact I've used her translation as a contrastive
model throughout my listing of Larrington's failings. Cottle, of course,
isn't even worth thinking about, as he translated
from the Latin! As for Bellows and Bray, yes, and Thorpe, I would much
rather recommend these than Larrington. They all seem to have rather a good
grasp of the syntax and grammar of the language they were translating from.
Their failings are more in the realm of outdated scholarship, and dubious
interpretations of certain obscure words. Larrington's errors are, on the
whole, of a totally different quality. She consistently reveals an
incredible ignorance of basic grammatical rules, and a failure to understand
normal syntax, and common words. All too frequently it seems as if she is
unable to differentiate between singular/plural, present/past, and the four
cases of nouns and adjectives. None of the other translators comes close. It
is easy for
you to write off my criticisms as an Icelander's arrogance, but this
means you simply haven't been reading my words. Neither of Larrington's
critics in Saga-book is an Icelander. And since you obviously have a
regard for David Evans as a scholar, I might mention that Saga-book
also published HIS criticism of Larrington's "other" book, A Store of Common
Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom
Poetry, which is basically her Oxford doctoral thesis, and also
published by Oxford University Press. Here is a quote from his review:

"I now turn to what I regret must be called the most striking feature
of this book: its quite extraordinary inaccuracy. Misprints, false
references, misquotations, misspellings and mistranslations from
seven languages abound."

Makes you think, or what? Why is it so difficult to admit that
Larrington is simply not qualified to translate the Poetic Edda?
Her translation is quite possibly the worst ever published.

>I, as I imagine you, would love to see a flawless translation of the
> >Poetic Edda on the shelves of every bookstore. Unfortunately, this
> >hasn't happened yet - and may never happen.

It will never happen, as long as the translators insist on putting
the translation into a semblance of poetry. This has been tried often
enough, and the results are usually some very bad poetry based on
the Eddic poems. And the more poetic, the less acurate.

I think it is about time that the non-Icelandic readers of Eddic poetry
realized that an accurate AND poetic translation is an impossibility.
The poetic qualities can only be enjoyed in the original language. The
metrics are impossible to imitate in English, which is a language
particularly unsuitable for the predominantly trochaic quality of
Icelandic poetry. The specific poetic vocabulary employed by the
composers of this type of poetry is impossible to translate - and this
becomes even more obvious when Skaldic poetry is rendered in English.

What I would like to see on the English reader's bookshelf is an
edition with parallel text in Old Icelandic and English, with an
accurate, exact PROSE translation into English, and annotations
covering whatever gets lost, even in a prose translation. Those
who are more interested in the poetry than the content will just
have to learn enough Icelandic to be able to appreciate this in
the original. A poetic translation by Hollander (for example) is
useless, because it doesn't translate the poetic qualities of the
source text. It is simply rather inferior poetry by Hollander. If
the reader is mostly interested in the MEANING of the words of the
source texts and the CONTENT of the poems, rather than their FORM,
he will be best served by an exact PROSE translation.

>One more question: Are there any English translations that have been >done
>by native Icelandic speakers? If not, why not?

I think most Icelanders, even if their English is passable, would
shy away from translating into a language which is not their own.
I don't think this is generally done, or at least frowned upon.
Try looking at it the other way around: I doubt many would take seriously a
translation of Beowulf into Icelandic by an Englishman
who had only learned Icelandic as a second language.

An exact prose translation, such as I mentioned above, would ideally
be a collaboration between a native Icelander and a native English
speaker with a good working knowledge of Old Icelandic.

Regards,
Pelle

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