Gripla - 01.01.2002, Qupperneq 113

ON TRANSLATING SAGAS
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sense to etymology: “howe” (haugr) rather than “caim,” “lay meeting the
moon” (sá í móti tunglinu) rather than “looked at the moon,” “so high” (svá
hátt) rather than “so loud.” As many readers have asserted, Morris’s use of
expressions and terms which never had any place in the English language has
made his translations, in spite of their closeness and accuracy, largely inacces-
sible — even in his own day. Dasent’s English, on the other hand, was the
ordinary idiom of his day, apart from certain exceptions for which he begs
indulgence: “busk” (from at húa sik) and “boun” (húinn). “These with ‘redes’
for counsels or plans are almost the only words in the translation which are
not still in every-day use” (Preface, xvi).
The discussion of vocabulary in saga translations has often, especially in
the nineteenth century, been concemed with words of Latin and French origin.
Morris attempted not only to reject such words, but also to imitate the Ice-
landic words themselves, either through etymological translation (“howe” for
haitgr, even “flock” for flokkr when used for a group of men!) or through
archaic English words. For Morris a bóndi is a “bonder,” and he studiously
avoided that nasty French word “farmer.” Dasent, on the other hand, accepted
the fact that French and Latin words were part and parcel of the English lan-
guage, and he did not shrink from using them. This is the main difference
between Morris and Dasent (and the reason that Morris seems, to many, quite
unreadable). Maxwell finds Morris’s English archaisms “too many, too
obtrusive, often too unconvincing” (p. 384), and yet argues that
we must put up with a few archaisms — when old gods and warrior
kings and fate and fetches come into a story, it would be strange if an
occasional ‘naught’, ‘thereby’, ‘behold’, or even ‘dwelled’ did not
sneak past our pickets. (p. 385)
Johnston claims that Latin words “do not belong in the saga world,” and he
“would rather avoid them, or at any rate keep their numbers down” (1961:400;
cf. 1973:10). He claims to choose his vocabulary “from our conversational
word stock” (1961:399) and to prefer “words that I can hear myself saying”
(1973:11), and yet his translation of Gísla saga has phrases like “be wary for
yourself ’ and the virtually incomprehensible “and now she has given me
death’s word” (p. 28, for en hon hefir nú gefit mér dauðaráð).12
12 See my review of Johnston’s The Schemers and Víga-Glúm, in JEGP 100 (January 2001):
83-87, for later instances of this style of translation.