Egil’s Saga (36 page)

First, no doubt, there are the stubborn difficulties that stand in the way of all translation. The translator’s problem is to say to us in our own tongue what has been said by someone else in another. If it be a proposition of Euclid, or an engineer’s report on a mine, the difficulties are not serious, provided that the translator knows his two languages. Words are here simply instruments, or tickets denoting certain well-defined ideas: he need but choose his tickets aright, and his work is done.

But how if he have to translate, for example, this little quatrain of Sappho’s:

δέδυκε μἐν ά Σελάννα
καì Πλŋΐαδες, μέσαι δέ
νύκτες, πάρα δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα,
ἔγω δἑ μόνα κατεύδω.

‘The Moon has set, and the Pleiades, and it is middle night. And the hours go by. But I sleep alone.’ Take, not my pedestrian prose, but the best translation you can discover or poet can make you. What is it beside the poetess’s Greek?

This, it may be objected, is an extreme instance. Lyric poetry
of a high order must always be untranslatable. It expresses so intimately some individual moment in the poet’s experience that it must be unique: rhythm, music of vowel and consonant, all the complex under-tones and over-tones of thought and feeling, are so bound up in the very words of the poet that the same thing can never be said again in another language. I had rather steer clear, though, of the too metaphysical, and say that great poetry and, in a lesser degree, all living speech, with all its play of expression, so personal, so elusively charming, is very hard to translate, and that in practice even the finest translations are but shadows of their originals. (It must be remembered that to translate is here taken to mean the saying of
the same thing
in another language: not the saying of something rather like it, as FitzGerald did in his lovely
Omar Khayyám
, or as Longfellow, perhaps, imagined he was doing in his
Saga of King Olaf
)

The cardinal difficulty, then, of all translation is the difficulty of translating the living word. And the particular difficulty of translating the sagas is that, while they present this cardinal difficulty in a high degree, they give no warning to the unwary that any difficulty exists at all. The simplicity of the saga, the restraint of it, its homeliness, its stern objective outlook and ignorance of ornament, together with those likenesses between the languages, create a deceptive impression of ease that tempts the translator to his confusion. Mr Green, for instance, tells us in his preface that, “The prose of the Saga presents few difficulties to a translator. Icelandic prose, as regards order of words, is simple, and runs naturally enough into English. The sentences are mostly short and plain. In Egilssaga the style for Icelandic is pronounced by good authorities to be of the best; the translator can only hope that in its English dress it may not have lost all its attractiveness”. In that hope he proceeds placidly along a path of which the following is perhaps a sufficient glimpse
^*
: “These, when they were aware of the enemy, gathered themselves and advanced to meet them, expecting victory as heretofore. But, on the battle being joined, the Norsemen charged furiously forwards, bearing shields stronger than those of the Kvens; the slaughter turned to be in the Kiriales’
ranks—many fell, some fled. King Faravid and Thorolf took there immense wealth of spoil, and returned to Kvenland, whence afterwards Thorolf and his men came to Finmark, he and Faravid parting in friendship”. The best translation is but a shadow. The worst, as here, traduces and defames the original, as if the ass should posture in the lion’s skin. And that is a pure misfortune; seeing that those who cannot look on the lion’s self, and who make small account of asses, may by such a spectacle be brought to the mistaken opinion that of lions also small account is to be made.

Indeed it is certain that the translation of the Icelandic classics is not a task well suited to the perfunctory efforts of well-meaning persons with a taste for history and archaeology but innocent of any feeling for language or style. A translator who with a more angelic caution approaches these quicksands will escape the grosser errors whereby the Icelandic is made to run so ‘naturally’ not into English but into the jargon of the schoolboy’s crib. If he avails himself to the uttermost of the resemblances between the languages, it is within the bounds of possibility that he may succeed in producing an English version of a saga which shall convey in some degree the style and flavour of the original. If, from whatever motive, he ignores these resemblances, he is like a gardener who, wishing to grow rhododendrons and having a soil of sand and peat, digs up and throws away this suitable soil and at much pains substitutes chalk and clay. His translation will be as dead as the rhododendrons. But even supposing he uses all these advantages and avoids these errors, he will yet be fain to say at last (with Dasent, in the preface to his fine translation of
Njála
), “Even now, after all that has been done to make the rendering faithful, the translator lays it with dread before the public, not because he has any doubt as to the beauty of his original, but because he is in despair, lest any shortcomings of his own should mar the noble features of the masterpiece which it has been his care to copy”.

Two translators of sagas stand above the rest: Sir George Dasent and William Morris. Their virtues and their weaknesses are complementary. Dasent, holding fast by the simple and natural, does not always escape the charge of colloquialism and
prosiness: he has no great sense of the beauty and the living quality of words, and by that defect he loses in his versions some of the dignity and splendour of his originals. Morris, himself a poet, is drawn to an opposite error: his joy in words and their rhythm and music, while it enables him to produce a translation which has the life and freshness of an original composition and which preserves on the whole the very tone and accent of the saga, leads him astray sometimes into too great a smoothness of style and sometimes into a curiosity of archaism that has a sophisticated and literary effect quite alien to the works he is translating.

It would be interesting to compare Morris with Dasent in the same passage; but (fortunately, from other points of view) their work does not overlap. But the living quality of a good translation, which (like Morris’s) is faithful word by word to the original and inspired with its spirit, is easily seen by placing a passage from his
Heimskringla
beside the same passage in the earlier translation by Samuel Laing. This is not to condemn Laing: he worked under difficulties unknown to Morris, many years before Dasent had set the example of bare simplicity or Vigfusson’s monumental Icelandic Dictionary had smoothed the way for English scholars, and with no Icelandic collaborator to help him. Moreover he was interested rather as a historian and a student of institutions than as an artist. In his preface to his translation of the
Heimskringla
, with its long and valuable preliminary dissertation and its appendices and notes, he says, “The adventures, manners, mode of living, characters, and conversations of these sea-kings, are highly dramatic, in Snorro’s work at least; and are told with a racy simplicity and truthfulness of language which the translator cannot flatter himself with having attained or preserved. All he can say for his work is, that any translation is better than none; and others may be stimulated by it to enter into the same course of study, who may do more justice to a branch of literature scarcely known among us”. Laing’s was a noble pioneering work, and it is with a deep respect for him, and in the spirit of his own words, just quoted, that I use his translation as a foil to the more perfect achievement of another Englishman who wrote half a century later.

The passage (
Heimskringla: Saga of Hakon the Good
,
Ch. XVIII
) reads in Morris
^*
as follows:

“In the autumn at winter-nights was there a blood-offering held at Ladir, and the king went thereto. Heretofore he had ever been wont, if he were abiding at any place where was a feast of blood-offering going on, to eat his meat in a little house with but few folk, but now the bonders murmured at it, that he sat not in his own high-seat, where the feast of men was greatest; and the earl said to the king that so he would not do as now. So it was therefore that the king sat in his high-seat. But when the first cup was poured, then spake Earl Sigurd thereover, and signed the cup to Odin, and drank off the horn to the king. Then the king took it and made the sign of the cross thereover; and Kar of Griting spake and said: ‘Why doeth the king thus, will he not do worship?’ Earl Sigurd answers: ‘The king doth as they all do who trow in their own might and main, and he signeth the cup to Thor. For he made the sign of the hammer over it before he drank’. So all was quiet that eve. But on the morrow, when men went to table, the bonders thronged the king, bidding him eat horse-flesh, and in no wise the king would. Then they bade him drink the broth thereof, but this would he none the more. Then would they have him eat of the dripping, but he would not; and it went nigh to their falling on him. Then strove Earl Sigurd to appease them, and bade them lay the storm; but the king he bade gape over a kettle-bow, whereas the reek of seething had gone up from the horse-flesh, so that the kettle-bow was all greasy. Then went the king thereto, and spread a linen cloth over the kettle-bow, and gaped thereover, and then went back to the high-seat; but neither side was well pleased thereat.”

Laing
^†
renders the same passage as follows:

“The harvest thereafter, towards the winter season, there was a festival of sacrifice at Lade, and the king came to it. It had always been his custom before, when he was present at a place where there was sacrifice, to take his meals in a little house by himself,
or with some few of his men; but the bonders grumbled that he did not seat himself on his throne at these the most joyous of the meetings of the people. The earl said that the king should do so this time. The king accordingly sat upon his throne. Now when the first full goblet was filled, Earl Sigurd spoke some words over it, blessed it in Odin’s name, and drank to the king out of the horn; and the king then took it, and made the sign of the cross over it. Then said Kaare of Gryting, ‘What does the king mean by doing so? Will he not sacrifice?’ Earl Sigurd replies, ‘The king is doing what all of you do, who trust to your power and strength. He is blessing the full goblet in the name of Thor, by making the sign of his hammer over it before he drinks it’. On this there was quietness for the evening. The next day, when the people sat down to table, the bonders pressed the king strongly to eat of horse-flesh; and as he would on no account do so, they wanted him to drink of the soup; and as he would not do this, they insisted he should at least taste the gravy; and on his refusal they were going to lay hands on him. Earl Sigurd came and made peace among them, by asking the king to hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle upon which the fat smoke of the boiled horse-flesh had settled itself; and the king first laid a linen cloth over the handle, and then gaped over it, and returned to the throne; but neither party was satisfied with this.”

This passage was chosen haphazard. It is by no means a good example of Morris, (indeed, it shows some of his more serious faults), nor a bad of Laing. To translate 260 words of Icelandic Morris has used 328 English words and Laing 337: there is nothing between them there. The capital difference is that Laing’s version is heavy and lifeless, while Morris’s is, by comparison, living human speech. Morris has the feeling and general effect of the original; he also follows it far more closely word by word. It is true to say that in every particular where he differs from Laing he is closer to the original.

This is not a matter of verbal accuracy or a matter of vocabulary, though both those have their importance. ‘High-seat’ is better than ‘throne’ for
hásœti;
‘first cup was poured’ is better than ‘first full goblet was filled’ for
hit fursta full var skenkt.
‘Signed to Odin’ is a translation of
sígnaði Óðni
while ‘blessed
it in Odin’s name’ is a poor paraphrase; and the same is true of ‘hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle’ for
gína yfir kettilhödduna
, which is, simply and literally, ‘gape over’. The real mischief, the reason why Laing’s translation gives really no idea at all of the style of Snorri Sturlason, may be seen by comparing in the two versions the passage beginning, in Morris, ‘But on the morrow’ and ending ‘nigh to their falling upon him’. The mischief is plain enough, and can be summed up in one word: Latinism.

Participial phrase and relatival and absolute constructions, so deeply rooted in the Latin language and by adoption grown not foreign to our own, are utterly foreign to the classical Icelandic. So repugnant are these constructions to the genius of that language that they kill it out of hand, completely, so that no flavour remains of the original in an English translation that makes free use of these idioms. There may be an Icelandic Gibbon or a Johnson or a Sir Thomas Browne: there is at any rate no whiff of him in the sagas. The point is so important, that it is worth while to give a literal translation of the passage just referred to, so that it may be seen on what a bed of Procrustes Laing has here laid and mutilated his original:

“The day after, when men went to table, then thronged the bonders about the king and bade him eat horseflesh; the king would for no sake do that. Then bade they him drink the broth; that will he surely not. Then bade they him eat the dripping, but the king will not that either (
vill pat ok eigi
). There was then made ready for a setting upon him.”

Laing says they pressed him to eat of horseflesh—

“and
as he would
on no account do so, they wanted him to drink of the soup;
and as he would not
do this, they
insisted
he should
at least
taste the gravy; and
on his refusal
they were going”, etc.

Morris has himself taken unnecessary licence in this passage. But Laing, no doubt quite unwittingly, has gone the whole hog, and lost touch with his original altogether.
^*