Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Síða 73
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A. Personal and place names
For English speakers, personal names such as Auðgísl,
Þjóðólfr, and Gjaflaug, with strange-looking letters and
unusual consonant groupings, are undeniably difficult to
pronounce and to remember. The problems involved in
transcribing or attempting to translate Icelandic personal
and place names are handled in different fashions by each
translator. All of them, wittingly or unwittingly, eventually
run into inconsistencies.1
Even though she attempted to produce a more or less
linguistically cognate version of the saga, Press was pre-
pared to translate or at least anglicize personal and place
names. In his contemporary review of her work Major
questions the wisdom of such an approach:
We doubt whether it is altogether wise to try and reproduce in
English the meaning of the Icelandic placenames, though we admit
there is in many cases a strong temptation to do so; but it is impos-
sible to carry out the process completely, and the mixture of
Icelandic and English names is, on the whole, detrimental to the
atmosphere of the Saga. (Major 1901-03:288)
As has become common practice in translations from
Old Icelandic, Press transcribes the unvoiced aspirant þ,
which occurs in frontal position only, as th and the voiced
ð, which occurs in medial or final position, as d. This prac-
' In her introduction, Arent admits, “Some inconsistencies naturally
arise; where rigid adherence to a system became absurd, inconsistency
proved preferable.” (Arent 1963:xlii)
In the preface to his German translation of five Icelandic sagas Rolf
Heller discusses some of the translation problems posed by person and place
names in the sagas. He maintains that “Vollstandige Einheitlichkeit ist dabei
kaum zu erreichen. So kann das Bestreben nur darauf gerichtet sein, dem
Leser mögliche Hilfen zum Verstandnis zu gewahren, ohne falschen
Assoziationen die Tiir zu öffnen.” (Heller 1982:36)