Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Page 188

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Apart from Ms. Press, each of the translators under dis-
cussion here comments specifically upon his or her
approach to the work of translation in an introduction or
preface.
In his introduction Veblen expounds his very personal
view of the work he is translating. His translation, and
indeed much of his work as an economist, if one is to judge
by the assessment of later critics, is his own peculiar blend
of clever insight and rash assumption.
As is true of the general run of Icelandic sagas, the language of the
Laxdæla is the language of colloquial speech in its time; the speech
of practiced storytellers, idiomatic in an extreme degree and with a
pronounced bent for aphoristic diction. ...
The idiomatic speech of any given time and place springs from
and reflects the workday experience and preconceptions of men in
that given time and place. ... Under these circumstances translation
becomes in good part a work of makeshift and adumbration, in
which any consistently literal rendering of the text is out of the
question. (Veblen 1925:xii-xiii)
Whatever he has based these assumptions upon, Veblen
certainly follows the course he has mapped out for himself.
His conviction that the language of the sagas was “the lan-
guage of colloquial speech in the time” leads him to pro-
duce a saga translation that is energetic and often engaging.
He maintains the active verbs of the original narrative more
extensively than do other translators and through both his
choice of lexis and his extratextual references succeeds in
linking the saga to contemporary reality.1
In Veblen’s introduction to Laxdœla saga he describes
the occupation which lent its name to the Viking Age as
“an enterprise in piracy and slave-trade, which grew steadi-
ly more businesslike and more implacable as time went on.
It was an enterprise in getting something for nothing by
force and fraud at the cost of the party of the second part;
1 See discussion of his lexical choices in Chapter IV, especiaily with ref-
erence to his footnotes to explain the term goði (V 14) and hamingja (V 61).