Gripla - 01.01.2002, Page 115

ON TRANSLATING SAGAS
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than vocabulary in defining a translation style that is a “word-by-word” as
well as “sense-by-sense” rendering of the Icelandic. My illustrations will all
be from the four translations of Njáls saga, and it should be stated at once that
the comparisons are not meant to be invidious. Each of the four translations is
reliable and accurate, and each translator has been true to his own program:
Dasent’s was mentioned above; Bayerschmidt and Hollander preferred “the
more natural idiom of today” as better suited to suggest the original than “the
artificial and ponderous vehicles of earlier periods” (p. 14); similarly, Magn-
usson and Pálsson found fault with Dasent for his “deliberately archaic fla-
vour, a too-literal rendering of the Icelandic style and syntax, that make it un-
necessarily alien to the modem reader” (p. 33). They represent the post-war
agenda of the Penguin Classics under the editorship of E. V. Rieu: to supply
the general reader with a wide body of translations in
readable and attractive versions, ... shom of the unnecessary difficul-
ties and erudition, the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that ren-
ders so many existing translations repellent to modem taste.14
The Penguin program included Rieu’s prose versions of the Homeric epics,
readable but unexciting, and Dorothy Sayers’ quite non-literal Divine Com-
edy. In this same vein, Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson exploited
their authority as native speakers of Icelandic and their excellent command of
English to provide a smooth and readable version, trustworthy without being
closely literal. Their aims and those of Bayerschmidt and Hollander are essen-
tially the same, though the American team is slightly more conservative.
My own translation, some forty years on, attempts a retum to Dasent-like
literalness, by which I mean imitating the original in as many ways as possi-
ble. Like all translators, I am a product of my time. Just as period instruments
have come to the fore in performances of early music (especially in the
1980s), and paintings are restored to their original colors, and old texts are
edited faithfully according to one manuscript rather than presenting a modem
editor’s conflation of texts, I aim at an authentic re-creation of the original, in-
sofar as modem English idiom and syntax allow.
It has been interesting, at the very latest stage in the preparation of this
paper, to look at Magnus Magnusson’s revision (1999) of the 1960 Penguin
14
E. V. Rieu's objectives forthe series, taken from the penguin ni-website (http://www.penguin.
co.uk/), July 9, 2002.