Okay, guys, I took one for the team and bought
Larrington's book today. :-) I thought I'd check
out how her Hávamál translation measures up.

Sadly, it seems to be no better than her Völuspá.
I'm only through the first half of Gestaþáttr or so
and already I have seen some pretty bad boo-boos.

I've selected three to show you what I'm talking about.
I think these three are particularly illustrative because
you can actually _see_ what Larrington misunderstood and
how she did it.


Strophe 12

Codex Regius: "þviat fora veít er fleira dreccr sins til geds gvmi"

Larrington: "[F]or the more he drinks, the less he knows, about the nature
of men."

The actual meaning of the Old Norse is something like;
"For the more a man drinks the less of his mind he knows."
This is what I would call a lucid strophe.

Now how did Larrington get from this to something about
"the nature of men"? It seems to me that she must have
understood (quite impossibly) 'gvmi' to be plural genitive.
Working from there she's got "nature" from 'geds' (again
out of the question). Understanding 'til' to mean "about"
is a short step in this canyon-jumping exercise.

"til geds gvmi" + CL = "about the nature of men"


Strophe 15

Codex Regius: "glaþr oc reifr scyli gvmna hverr vnnz sinn biþr bana"

Larrington: "[C]heerful and merry every man should be until he waits for
death."

If 'sinn' would have been in genitive ('síns') this would have been
the correct meaning. Since that isn't the case we obviously have the
stock phrase 'bíða bana' meaning, simply, "to die". In this case the
verb 'bíða' should _not_ be understood as "wait". This meaning probably
stems from a lost prefix (Proto-Norse *ga-bíðan). In any case this clear
sentence means "Every man should be happy and cheerful until he dies."



Strophe 19

Codex Regius: "mæli þarft eða þegi"

Larrington: "[I]t's necessary to speak or be silent."

Indeed, but that's not what the Old Norse means. This
would have been the correct meaning for something like
"mæla þarft eða þegja" = "you need to speak or be silent".
But in our actual sentence we don't have the verbs in the
infinitive so 'þarft' can't be a verb. It is, rather,
an adjective meaning "needful". The sentence means
"[He] should speak something needful or be silent."
Like the other two this sentence is completely lucid.


I must stress that these are by no means the only errors in Larrington's
fyrst 20 strophes of the Hávamál - nor are they necessarily the worst
ones. But they all show a translator who is not able to handle
simple grammatical constructs in the language she is translating from.

I'm pretty sure no other translator has misunderstood these three simple
sentences - but let's check.


Hollander
12 "[T]he deeper he drinks the dimmer grows the mind of many a man."
15 "[G]lad and wholesome the hero be till comes his dying day."
19 "[S]ay what is needful, or naught."

Thorpe
12 "[F]or the more he drinks the less control he has of his own mind"
15 "[J]oyous and liberal every one should be until the hour of his death."
19 "[S]peak sensibly or be silent."

Bellows
12 "For the more he drinks the less does man of his mind the mastery hold."
15 "Bravely and gladly a man shall go, till the day of his death is come."
19 "Speak to the point or be still."

Bray
12 "[F]or the more they drink, the less can they think and keep a watch o'er their wits."
15 "Joyous and generous let each man show him until he shall suffer death."
19 "[S]peak needful words or none."


Despite the variety in their translations it is apparant that Hollander,
Thorpe, Bellows and Bray all actually understood the lines they were translating.

- - -

Reading my letter over I see it is somewhat annoyingly hostile.
I didn't intend to overstate the case against Larrington. Of course
there are lots of strophes that she translates correctly. There may
even be strophes (though I haven't seen any) where her translation
is actually the best available.

The reason why her translation is so deeply disappointing is that
it had every reason to be good. She learnt Old Norse from a competent
scholar, she had all the scholarship of the 20th century available to
her - Pelle tells us she even had Dronke's translation in manuscript
- and she still didn't manage to do as well as old Benjamin Thorpe
back in 1866. If Larrington's work was a long-forgotten translation
back in the 19th century none of this would worry anyone. You don't
see vitriolic attacks on Cottle's translation circulating the Internet...

Nor am I saying (to paraphrase Jack T. Chick) "Don't throw your Larrington
books away, burn them!" Of course you should keep every translation you
can get and take some sort of weighted average to try to get at the meaning -
you just shouldn't assign undue weight to Larrington in that calculation...

Kveðja,
Haukur