Gripla - 01.01.2002, Page 111

ON TRANSLATING SAGAS
109
• Njal’s Saga, translated by Robert Cook. The Complete Sagas oflce-
landers, vol. 3 (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing, 1997): 1-220.
Revised for Njal’s Saga, translated with Introduction and Notes by
Robert Cook (London: Penguin Books, 2001). The passages cited
below are from the Penguin version.
Translation is, to varying degrees, an exchange between different cultures.
Jón Karl Helgason has pointed out that for Dasent “Icelandic medieval
history was, in its very nature, like parts of early and even contemporary
British history.”7 This is not the place to go into Jón Karl’s argument in
detail, but he, like Andrew Wawn,8 shows how for Dasent and Victorian
England the Germanic virtues of courage and loyalty and energy, so well
exemplified in the Icelandic sagas, had been handed down to the English
more than to other Germanic peoples, as part of their nineteenth-century
role as leaders of the world community. For Dasent this cultural continu-
ity, added to the linguistic proximity, made it natural to aim at close trans-
lation. Medieval Iceland was not, from his point of view, an alien culture,
and it is interesting that he compared translation to the act of fostering a
child:
It was a foster-father’s duty, in old times, to rear and cherish the child
which he had taken from the arms of its natural parents, his superiors
in rank. And so may this work, which the translator has taken from the
house of Icelandic scholars, his masters in knowledge, and which he
has reared and fostered so many years under an English roof, go forth
and fight the battle of life for itself, and win fresh fame for those who
gave it birth. (Preface, xx)
This metaphor minimizes the difference between cultures and languages: a
foster-child, even though reared in another’s house, remains the same per-
son.
It is instructive to compare Dasent’s style of close translation with that of
the other famous nineteenth-century translator of sagas into English, William
7 Tlie Rewriting of Njáls saga. Translation, Politics and Icelandic Sagas. Topics in Translation
16 (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1999): 47.
8 The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000).