Studia Islandica - 01.06.1957, Blaðsíða 31

29
Stewart Mackenzie’s Travéls in the island of Icéland
(Edinburgh, 1811).
Þorláksson’s translation was based on the second edi-
tion of C. C. Lous’ Danish translation of the Essay, which
appeared in Copenhagen in 1776. Lous (1724—1804) was
a mathematician.
A careful comparison of Þorláksson’s translation with
the English original shows that he has not only succeded
in grasping the fundamental thought of the poem, but
also, which is far more important, that he has, in the
majority of cases, faithfully rendered individual lines and
passages.1) However, deviations from the original are
numerous. Sometimes they consist in a misrepresentation
of a single word or phrase. Again, they may be lines,
couplets, or in a few cases, passages. In accounting for
these deviations one does not have to go far afield. A
line by line comparison of approximately half of the Ice-
landic translation with the Danish, upon which it was
based, shows that all the inaccuracies noted in that part,
with the exception of two minor ones, already existed in
the latter.2) As it is a fair guess, that a comparison of
the rest of the Icelandic translation with its Danish model
would give results similar to those above, it follows that
Þorláksson has done his work faithfully and testifies to
his thorough knowledge of the Danish language, from
which he had already successfully translated a number of
poems, as previously noted.
Translation is, however, more than simply a reproduc-
tion of the thought of the original, whether taken in its
entirety, as an underlying idea, or as expressed in indi-
1) Cf. Richard Beck, “Pope’s ESSAY ON MAN in Icelandic,”
Scandinavian Studies and Notes, November, 1931, pp. 11-21, of
which this chapter is largely a reproduction.
2) Professor Halldór Hermannsson secured for the writer a
photostatic copy of a large part of Lous’ Danish translation of the
Essay from the Library of the University of Copenhagen, which
furnished the basis for the comparison in question.