Heill Steven,
I have been following your posts on these, though I have not replied to any. I feel that poetry is a whole other thing than translating prose and as such I don’t feel that I have the experience required to offer any insights or ideas but I do find the posts interesting so I hope you’ll continue with them.
best regards,
-Alfta
******
I see no one has
responded to my other two posts on this subject.
Whine...sniffle. ;-(
Here's my latest go at it. I've attempted to collect all the relevant
entries
from Zoëga into a single page which you can find here:
http://www.speakeasy.org/~hattons/norse/havamal-002.html
The following was copied from a usenet post. I'd be interested to know what
others make of it:
2.
Gefendur heilir!
Gestur er inn kominn!
hvar skal sitja sjá?
Mjög er bráður
sá er á bröndum skal
síns um freista frama.
Take a look at the lyrics of this song:
http://www.davemcnally.com/lyrics/TheMoodyBlues/TopRankSuite.asp
Notice how two thoughts are interleaved? One sentence is spoken in
fragments at the end of each verse. This is a technique used in Norse
poetry. I don't understand it well, but this might be the kind of
thing we
have going on here.
The first two lines are fairly clear:
Hail to the Hosts!
A guest is come in!
Now the 'sjá' could be a demonstrative pronoun.
Demonstrative pronoun:
http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/demonstrative-pronoun.html
"This; that; these; those; none and neither are Demonstrative Pronouns
that
substitute nouns when the nouns they replace can be understood from the
context. They also indicate whether they are replacing singular or plural
words and give the location of the object:"
Perhaps this pronoun is precedent to the following verse. If so, we might
read it as
Where shall we seat this person (who...)?
He in much haste
who goes near the brands,
whoes luck shall be tried.
In this I'm suggesting 'á bröndum' belongs with 'um' from the subsequent
line. I guess that would require a phrase such as 'á bröndum um' to be
acceptable Old Norse. It would mean "(go) to the fireside".
I'm also
suggesting that 'skal' goes with 'síns freista frama.' I'm then relying on
Zoëga's "freista síns frama, to try one's luck". I have not
analyzed all
the case agreement, or the likelyhood of the first sentence being
implicitly integral to the next. This is just a suggestion.
This would mean we have two phrases as follows: 'Mjög er bráður sá er
á
bröndum um' and 'skal síns freista frama'. I originally thought the
part
about whoes luck shall be tried aluded to the chance he took on entering in
the first strophe. I'm starting to think it simply means 'Where
should you
seat a guest? One who runs over to the fireplace, who should hope he'll be
lucky (that you can take a hint.)'
--
STH
Hatton's Law: There is only One inviolable Law.