Gripla - 01.01.2002, Qupperneq 117

ON TRANSLATING SAGAS
115
It is possible — and I would argue, desirable — to imitate what Otto Springer
called “the colorless monotony of the verbs,”18 and render all five occurrences
of segja with a form of “say,” as Cook does; Dasent, less strict for the nonce,
has “asks” on the fourth occurrence. B-H, on the other hand, use “asked” three
times and “answered” twice. MM-HP have “asked ... said ... asked ... asked
... replied”. The effect is to tum the stark, simple language of the saga into
“the more natural idiom of today,” but such variety gives an unnecessarily
false impression of saga style.19
The vocabulary of Njáls saga is deliberately limited, and the simplest
words are used over and over again. The literal translator will want to translate
sjá consistently as “see,” avoiding such variations as “glimpse” or “observe”
or “catch sight of ’ or “spy” (MM-HP translate Skarpheðinn sáþá at 45.115 as
“Skarphedin caught sight of them”). Verbs for travel are for the most part re-
stricted to fara and ganga and ríða — again, the English equivalents should
be limited. The battle scenes pose a particular temptation to translators who
wish to liven up and “color” the narrative, even though the Icelandic uses a
limited number of stock terms, like hQggva and þrífa and snúask and reka and
kasta and hlaupa and leggja til and renna and snara and klofna and brotna
and falla. Those are precisely the verbs used in the following passage from
Ch. 77, cited in two contrasting translations:
At this point, Thorbrand Thorleiksson leapt up on to the wall and
slashed through Gunnar’s bow-string. Gunnar seized his halberd two-
handed, whirled round on Thorbrand, drove the halberd through him,
and hurled (1999: threw) him off the wall. Thorbrand’s brother, As-
brand, leapt up; Gunnar lunged again with the halberd, and Asbrand
thrust (1999: got) his shield in the way. The halberd went right
through the shield and between the upper arm and forearm. Gunnar
then twisted the halberd so violently that the shield split and both As-
brand’s arm-bones were shattered; and he, too, toppled from the
wall. (MM-HP, 170; only changes to the verbs in the 1999 version are
included here)
18 “The Style of the Old Icelandic Family Sagas,” JEGP 38 (1939): 107-128, at 114.
19 Although mæla seems to have more ponderous implications, whereas segja is more appropri-
ate to everyday speech, the pattem is not consistent enough to suggest that mæla should be
translated consistently as “speak” and segja as “say.” Njáll’s important speech about accept-
ing Christianity, for example, is introduced with sagði (100.255).