Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Blaðsíða 64

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references to a now non-existent system of dates and times,
or important details of lOth-century law? The four editions
of Laxdœla saga under consideration here differ consider-
ably as to their assessment of the need to mediate between
different cultures and in the means which they employ to
fill in the cultural gap existing between medieval Iceland
and the modern western industrialised world.
On the other hand, we are dealing with what in some
ways is a surprisingly common western heritage and a cul-
ture not so very foreign to an English reader: the events and
especially the individuals never become so exotic or distant
as to prevent us from comprehending their motives. This is
no Epic of Gilgamesh, I Ching, or aboriginal legend, but a
literary work that very clearly belongs to our common
western tradition.
In the second place, both lexis and syntax present
intriguing problems for translators, which will be dealt
with subsequently in more detail. The system of verbal and
nominal inflections in Old Icelandic has no correspondence
in modern Germanic languages (other than modern
Icelandic, of course), and any contemporary translation
into English thus requires the use of quite different syntac-
tical forms. Among linguists there is not always agreement
as to how one should interpret structural features such as
the high proportion of impersonal sentence constructions,
the semi-fixed verb position, the use of ellipsis and anaco-
luthia, or the preponderance of prepositional modifiers, to
name but a few characteristics.1
1 Among the more recent pertinent investigations into sentence struc-
ture and syntactical features in saga literature are essays by Smirnickaja
(1972:56-88) and by Kossuth (1979:37-52). In addition there are brief chap-
ters on sentence structure in grammatical texts such as Heusler’s Alt-
islandisches Elementarbuch (1950) and Nygaard’s Norr0n Syntax (1966).
None of the above-mentioned ventures very far into the area of seman-
tics, however, with the result that they offer but limited help to the investi-
gation at hand.
J