Gripla - 01.01.2002, Page 123

ON TRANSLATING SAGAS
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The argument in favor of preserving the tense shifts is that they preserve the
flavor of oral narrative style. The claim is made that we shift our tenses in col-
loquial narrative today, but in fact (though there may be a class element here)
most of us tell our stories strictly in the past tense, without relapses into “and
so he says to me.” Nothing is gained by such renderings as “And when Alfdis
heard their noise she asks what thugs were on the move out there” (from
George Johnston’s The Saga ofGisli, p. 43). What was natural to saga style
and to the oral tradition behind it is not natural to literary English today. This
is one area in which the principle of strict literalism can be safely set aside.
6. The paratactic style
Njáls saga, like all of the íslendingasögur, contains many dependent clauses
— relative, temporal, causal, concessive, conditional — though far less often
than we are accustomed to, and in fact independent clauses predominate. This
style is usually called paratactic, as opposed to hypotactic; the latter makes
extensive use of subordination in connecting the details of the narrative,
whereas saga style places simple sentences and elements of sentences side by
side, giving them all equal weight and foregoing subordinating conjunctions
like “when,” “if,” “because,” and “although.” This is what we expect from
oral narration, or a literature based on oral narration. It is the natural style for
straightforward narration: Eptirþat gengr hann í braut; tókþá at morgna (88.
214). A translation which kept this style would read “After that he went away.
The dawn was coming,” rather than “Then he left the place as it began to
dawn” (B-H) or “Dawn was breaking as he went away” (MM-HP; 1999:
“After that he went away; dawn was breaking by then”); B-H and MM-HP
employ smooth modem hypotaxis, combining an independent clause with a
dependent clause. In the B-H version, Hrapp’s leaving is foregrounded by
means of the independent clause; in MM-HP the breaking of dawn is fore-
grounded. In the Icelandic the two events are given equal weight, each with an
independent clause.21
21 The extensive use of independent clauses goes along with a tendency of this style to present
information piecemeal. Maxwell (390) gives this example from Eyrbyggja saga.fann hann
Gunnlaug, son sinn, fyrir durum; lá liann þar ok var vitlauss. Schach and Hollander
translated this as “discovered his son Gunnlaug lying unconscious before the door,” but
“found his son Gunnlaug before the door; he was lying there senseless” would better preserve
the syntax of the Icelandic.