Lögberg-Heimskringla - 18.03.1976, Blaðsíða 2

LÖGBERG-HEIMSKRINGLA. FIMMTUDAGINN 18. MARS 1976
ICELANDIC LITERATURE IN THI
ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
PETER FOOTE
My pleasure at being invited to join the Canada-Iceland Centennial
Conference was soon qualified by disquiet. Understandably — for I was
asked to talk on “Icelandic literature in the English-speaking world” and
told I had 25 minutes to do it in. Doubts of my ability and suitability
mounted in me, but on reflection I decided that my neutral position in this
“inter-ethnic” and “multicultural” world might give me a vantage point
from which to take a long but perhaps not quite a hopeless shot at the vast
target set before me. For I may confidently claim that I have no “ethnic”
connections whatsoever with Icelanders or any other men of the North.
Fourth son of a Dorset mother and Hampshire father, I was born and
brought up on the middle south coast of England, at a small, unremarkable
place called Swanage in Purbeck, one of Dorset’s many pleasant back-
waters. The only Norse or Viking association the settlement there is ever
known to have had is found in the Old English Chronicle, s.a. 877 — in
King Alfred’s time, five years or so after Ingólfur made his home in Reyk-
javík as Iceland’s first settler. There it records that a Danish fleet moving
westward to Exeter was storm-tossed off the Swanage cliffs and lost 120
ships. Now, this laconic, but pleased and presumably accurate, entry in
the Chronicle is something I discovered rather late in life. The version of
the event I was brought up with was the one inscribed on a stone monument
raised by a local worthy, enthusiastic but muddled, in the last century.
That inscription commemorates not storm and wreck but a great victory
won by King Alfred in battle against the Danes in Swanage Bay. And the
authenticity and grandeur of this naval triumph, so much to the credit of
Wessex valour, were sealed by a crown on the monument consisting of
four Russian cannon balls, extracted from the wooden walls of a British
warship returned from the Crimea.
This anachronism will illustrate the kind of blank or bleary mind I
evidently grew up with as far as Norse and Icelandic studies were
concerned. Yet now, in middle age, I am wholly dedicated to the pursuit
of such learning; and I thought I might find a way into the subject set me
by recalling some of the steps I first took towards “Icelandic literature in
the English-speaking world.”
In my innocent Dorset background, then, just before the last war
began, 14 or 15 years old, I began to read English poetry seriously. For
some reason I was especially interested in stanza forms and metrics. I
read with enthusiasm — more enthusiasm than understanding doubtless —
the work of the vivid nineteenth-century experimenter, Gerard Manley
Hopkins. His “sprung rhythm” and the unforgettable kindly interest of a
schoolmaster led me to Old English verse, first to The Battle of Maldon —
and in that poem I met both “kennings” and Vikings. From the simple
kennings of Old English I was naturally led on to the elaborate kennings
of scaldic verse; and from Vikings in Essex in the 990s to the heroes of
the Sagas of Icelanders, translations of which I now met for the first time:
Grettis Saga in the version of G. A. Hight, published in 1914, and Egils
Saga translated by E. R. Edison, published in 1930. Oddly enough, I did
not come on the famous translations by William Morris and Eiríkur
Magnússon until after I had learned to read Icelandic for myself, and I
have subsequently profited more from the Icelandic collaborator’s accuracy
and learning than from the great Englishman’s artistry. The translations
by Hight and Edison were random finds in a junk shop and a library list.
Most people have never heard of them. So I read Grettis Saga bowdlerised
in a sort of late Victorian paraphrase, and Egils Saga in an English full
of excruciating imitations of Icelandic syntax — and, do you know, I don’t
think the style of either translation made the blindest bit of difference to
the fascination I found in the stories, the characters, the historical back-
ground and, in Egils Saga, the poetry. The conclusion I draw from this
youthful experience is that we can leave classical works of literature,
like íslendingasögur and Konungasögur, to look after themselves in the
English-speaking world. Indeed, it is a token of their status as classics that
different generations and different stylists will always be drawn to grapple
with them. Certainly the spate of saga-translations in the past 20 years or
so shows that the present age is responding to their impact. And I think
it is important for us professors and pendants to be patient of many
different approaches to saga-translation and saga-appreciation. As long as
no damage is done to the ultimate dignity of the originals, I can imagine
that stage, film and even musical treatment of them could be successful.
I finally went on to read English at university, taking the Old Icelandic
option that was available, and then as a new graduate I spent the winter
of 1948 in Oslo, where I read Icelandic more systematically. In those years
I had and still today have many associations with scholars in the field of
English literature. Looking back now, it is very clear what importance
eminent men in that field, imaginative writers, poets, historians and critics,
have had for the position of Icelandic literature in the English-speaking
world: men who have taken it for granted that the great Icelandic books
were read and appreciated as a vital part of the world’s literary heritage.
One can go back to Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle and William
Morris and James Bryce and W. P. Ker (four of these were Scots, I hasten
to add, but suffered from no national myopia — they would have subscribed
to ideals of “inter-ethnicity”) — but we can also look closer to our own
time and think of men like Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden. These outstand-
ing and versatile poets and critics have had incalculable significance,
because, in the midst of a literary culture which has tended to be
Mediterranean-centred and southward-looking, they have unhesitatingly
given the sagas their attention and their approval. It is interesting to see
that the great Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges, has provided an
enthusiastic guide to saga-literature for the benefit of the Spanish-speaking
world — which would be important even if the Icelanders never sold
another fish to Spain or South America. One must not forget either the
part which cultivated Icelanders have played in wakening and warming
foreign interest in Icelandic literature. I think above all of Sigurður Nordal
who is remembered by many in the English-speaking world, as I know he
is also remembered in Winnipeg, with deep gratitude, respect and affection.
We should have more of his writings available in English.
Pound, Auden, Borges are imperfect scholars in the Icelandic field,
working with inadequate translations and antiquated commentaries and,
in Auden’s case, erratic academic collaborators. So these great writers
maks some awful mistakes when they talk about Icelandic literature: but
it is far more important that they should splash down their enthusiasm in
bright colours than not publish it at all. The rest of us can try to set it out
in lines meticulously ruled with a bloodless pencil. They have flashes of
insight worth any number of dim monographs.
So they sometimes purvey wrong information and draw wrong con-
clusions, and make the difficult task of professors still more difficult. But
as Árni Magnússon said, “It is the way of the world — some men put
errors into circulation and others try to take them out again — and so both
sorts have something to do.” I have no doubt but that one of the goals, ex-
pressed or implicit, of the heroic efforts made by the Icelandic community
to establish the Department of Icelandic in the University of Manitoba —
heroic efforts crowned with such phenomenal success — was not only to
ensure that sound learning should thrive in private, as it were, as an
Icelandic affair, but that the truth about the Icelanders and their distinctive
inheritance should be made public. One of the tasks of university men is
to remove errors from circulation. Another task which is properly theirs,
in Icelandic as in other studies, is to identify what is specific and valuable
in a given literature or culture. And it is in the nature of their calling that
they are capable of comparisons: they know that the classic does not need
to be explained away or justified in merely local terms; they of all people
should know what in Icelandic literature ought to be available in English,
not because it is quaint and exotic, but because it can be judged and not
found wanting by standards universally acknowledged.
Now, as I said, we can by and large leave the old literature to fend
for itself because it already enjoys so much merited good will in the
Engfish-speaking world. It is a different matter with much of what is most
valuable in later Icelandic literature. The most valuable is often, of course,
the most difficult: for the greater part of the best Icelandic literature is
poetry in lyric forms, complex in diction, intricate in music, from Brother
Eysteinn to Bjarni Thorarensen, from Sigurður Breiðfjörð to Steinn
Steinarr. Here we come to the vexed problem of translation, and are at a
stage where I think we might hamess our academic horses more effectively
than hitherto. The fact is that we cannot prearrange the existence of great
poets and prose-writers, using English as their medium, who appreciate
and favour Icelandic literature. We can, on the other hand, provide the
means — as has been most splendidly done here in Winnipeg — for the
study of that literature. The Canadian-Icelandic community with its
bilingual traditions and the University Department it has created seem
ideally placed to foster and extend the translation of the Icelandic classics
of later centuries for the benefit of the English-speaking world. The North
American tradition in translating modern Icelandic literature, especially
verse, is indeed an honourable one, represented by names as famous as
those of Jakobína Johnson, Dr. Watson Kirkconnell and Dr. Richard Beck,
but literary fashion changes, styles become unacceptable, and new genera-
tions must look for new versions of the best. I can envisage encouragement
of isolated effort in translation but I can also envisage a more systematic
approach.
There are interesting experiments in collaboration to be pursued. The
poet, George Johnston in Ottawa, for example, is just now working on
translations of poems by Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðsson in Iceland and by
Christian Matras and Karsten Höydal in the Faroes. He works as close as
possible with the poets themselves and by correspondence and visits tries
to achieve the precision and delicacy of understanding which his own
poetic sensibility needs to make the transfer into English as pure as
possible. Only his subtle ear is finally responsible for the English but he
generally keeps very close to the original forms. Another poet, John Lucas
of Nottingham in England, has recently tried a different approach, working
with early Icelandic. He has no expert knowledge of the language but he
is prepared to read and to brood on the sense and context of a poem which