Gripla - 01.01.2002, Qupperneq 114

112
GRIPLA
I agree with Dasent that French and even Latin and Greek words have in
the course of centuries become thoroughly naturalized in our everyday speech
and are no less vigorous than native Germanic words. Only a kind of linguistic
puritanism, stemming from an insular tum-back-the-tide-to-the-year-1000
mentality, would prefer “self-doom” to “self-judgement,” or “scathe” to
“injury,” or “outlander” to “foreigner,” or “be wary for yourself ’ to “be on your
guard.”13 (The avoidance of “guard” carries a special irony, in that the word is
of Germanic origin, though transmitted to English through French.) And how
are we to avoid words like “vengeance” and “avenge” and “discuss” and
“agree” and “compensate?” (In the legal passages it is of course impossible to
make do with native words, since our legal system derives from the French.)
Another problem with sticking to a Germanic vocabulary is the loss of
shades of meaning and a consequent lack of precision. At the end of Ch. 8, the
young boy who had mocked Hrut and then been forgiven with the gift of a
gold ring, says (in my translation) “I shall always remember your decency”
(“þínum drengskap skal ek við bregða"). Apart from the Latinate “decency,”
which I chose in preference to Dasent’s “manliness” and B-H’s and MM-HP’s
“noble-mindedness” (1999: “goodness”), I decided that the “foreign” word
“remember” was better than the native “recall,” since it suggests a permanent
condition rather than an occasional burst of memory.
Apart from these matters of diction, Morris’s translation is more faithful to
the original than Dasent’s, though both aimed at literalness. Dasent’s passage
begins with a “Now” of his own, as if to announce and call attention to a new
event; “and lo!” is a similar interjection. He expands the simple tunglskin var
bjart to two doublets: “The moon and stars were shining clear and bright,”
evocatively rhythmic but a departure from the original. Prefacing the plain
statement that they thought they saw Gunnarr’s mound open, Dasent adds
“Then at once.” We may well wonder whether these intensifying devices were
necessary. Nonetheless, Dasent’s translation of Njáls saga is far more literal,
more true to the syntax and style of the original, than the two succeeding
translations of that saga.
In the following I will say a bit more about word choice and then pass to a
number of other topics, chiefly syntactic, which seem to me more important
13 The first three examples are taken from Karl Litzenberg, “The Diction of William Morris,” Ar-
kiv för nordisk filologi 53 (1937): 327-363, at 355 and 345. The fourth occurs (twice) on p. 16
of Johnston’s The Saga of Gisli, for vertu var um þik.