Sæll Pelle!

Just a quick note of thanks for bringing these mistranslations to light. As
a student of ON there are times when I analyse the language into the parts
of speech but still somehow the meaning escapes me. At these times, I turn
to a previous translator's work for help. It may be naive but I think there
is a tendency to believe that if a translation has been published by a
reputable company, it must be good! I will be a lot more careful from now
on. Thank you.

Regarding your comments about translating into one's second language, I
totally agree. I work as a Sign Language interpreter with deaf people and I
believe we are the only group of interpreters who routinely interpret into
our second language [sign language - which, incidentally, is not a visual
version of English]. But that is only done out of necessity. Perhaps the
best compromise might be an English-speaking scholar jointly funded and
working in close co-operation with an Icelandic scholar.

Kveðja,

Sarah.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pelle Erobreren" <hveenegaard@...>
To: <norse_course@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 9:17 AM
Subject: Re: [norse_course] Relative to what?


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 Their failings are more in the realm of outdated scholarship, and dubious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