Heill Pelle,

Pelle Erobreren wrote:

> >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 Völuspá. 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 Their failings are more in the realm of outdated scholarship, and dubious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.
>

Fair enough. I suppose I had been fooled by her literality and plain English. I
guess my skill in the language has a fair way to go to spot these things...

>
> >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.
>

Indeed, and I suspect this is the frustration I've had with many other
translations, especially Bellows, Bray and Hollander. Too often this bad poetry
tends to make it unreadable from the perspective of either language.

>
> 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.
>

Indeed, I would pay good money for such a 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.

Good point, although I suspect there are more Icelanders with better skill in
English than English speakers with skillful Icelandic. I'm sure there would be
plenty of demand for the sort of translation you suggest, let's hope we don't
have to wait too long for it. I guess in the meantime I'll just have to keep an
eye out for Dronke's Hávamál...

I'm sorry if I've offended you, I meant no disrespect. I suppose my frustration
was more with losing what I had thought was a good, commonly available primary
source text.

Ver þú heill ok sæll!
--
Daniel Bray
dbray@...
School of Studies in Religion A20
University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)