Well, since Sarah has jumped in early with comments, I
guess we might as well go ahead! BUT those who are still working on a
translation, can still post it whenever they are ready to. There's no
"end" date!
Sarah wrote:
at sá maðr kom - I suppose strictly speaking this
reads "that that man
came..." but that just sounds clumsy in English, perhaps
"that this man
came..." would be closer than ...That a man came -
or is this such a fine point that it really doesn´t matter?
Well, it is a fine point, but here is what I found in
Gordon under "sá" in the glossary : "sá er , he who". What makes
this tricky is that sá and er can be separated by quite a distance, as it is in
this sentence. The er clause comes way at the end. Since the subject
is maðr (not "he"), and English would keep the "who" clause next to the subject,
I translated it as : that a man, who......, brought
And that brings up another fine point: again from
Gordon: koma (6) w. dat. make to come, bring, send. Since
skipi is dative, I translated this as "brought his ship..." Welsh does
exactly the same thing with the verbs come and go. "Dod" is "to come" in
Welsh, but "dod â" = "to bring" and it is a very common error to try and
translate it as "come with." Literally it's correct, but it sounds awkward
in English that way.
Laurel