by Tom Birkett
argue, is off-putting to readers.
At the same time, many readers actual y want more information. One of the more disgruntled Amazon US reviews of my 1996 translation complained: ‘There’s virtual y no context here as far as a meaningful introduction to the individual works or
27 Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, ed. K. von See et al., 7 vols to date (Heidelberg, 1997–).
28 See Icelandic Poetry, trans. Cottle, p. xxiii; Edda Sæmundar, trans. Thorpe; and the translations by William Herbert: Select Icelandic Poetry: Translated from the Originals with Notes. Part First and Part Second, ed. W. Herbert (London, 1804; 1806) and the revised translations and comment in Works of the Hon. and Very Rev. Wil iam Herbert, Dean of Manchester etc. Excepting those on Botany and Natural History; with Additions and Corrections by the Author, 3 vols (London, 1842). Vol. 1 contains Horae Scandicae: Or, Works Relating to Old Scandinavian Literature: Select Icelandic Poetry; Translated from the Originals with Notes; Revised with Three Additional Pieces from Sæmund’s Edda.
29 Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale; The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century, ed. G. Vigfusson and F. York Powel , 2 vols (Oxford, 1883), I, p. cxvi.
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the work as a whole. The individual introductions are cursory at best, written in a
dismissive “Oxford” tone which assumes the reader is familiar with the works and
their context.’30 Other people pointed out the existence of the Notes at the end to this individual. In the end I do not think that much could be added to my fairly succinct account of Norse myth and heroic dynasties, because there is not a whole lot more
to know, though there is of course much more that can be speculated about. This
raises the question of how much the translator should, as this customer wanted,
intervene between the reader and the poet in terms of offering a literary interpreta-
tion. One of my colleagues, when consulted informal y about what changes I might
make to the new edition, said, ‘Just tell us what the damn things mean!’ And from the point of view of a teacher, that is entirely understandable. Nevertheless, I do not think that it is legitimate to impose a great deal of subjective interpretation even
on difficult poems; for interpretation should be the privilege of the reader – both a
challenge and a pleasure.
Reception and Reflection
In 2012 my World’s Classics editor took the view – partly in the light of the competi-
tion offered by the Penguin volume – that it was time to revisit the edition, in order to re-establish its position in the markets constituted by the academic, student, UK,
US and trade readerships. Now that I knew a bit more about who was likely to
review the translation in scholarly journals (though of course there is no accounting
for Amazon reviewers) I had a clearer view about who the translation is actual y
for.31 Quite contrary to what I imagined in the 1990s, the main market for the book
is undergraduates taking courses taught in translation in the US, but also, increas-
ingly, in the UK. I had assumed that I was writing very much for the lay person, the
habitual buyer of World’s Classics, who wanted to read a reasonably literal, but not
pedantical y accurate, translation, and I had not intended to produce a translation
crib for Old Norse students struggling through Neckel and Kuhn’s fourth edition.
The reviewers of the first edition, by and large, were not in sympathy with this view
of the implied reader I envisaged; they were largely other scholars with their own
rather sharp axes to grind, and a heavily annotated text of a different edition of
Neckel and Kuhn at their elbows.
For a collection of essays, Old Norse Made New, published in 2007 by the Viking Society for Northern Research, I was asked to write an essay about the history of
eddic translation in the English-speaking world.32 This offered a very welcome
opportunity not only to trace the history of the canon and to uncover a whole series
of different lexical decisions made by the different translators (not to mention some
30 See http://amzn.to/1Xnn63I for this and other reviews, variously positive, critical and wrong-headed.
31 A round-table discussion of ‘Translating the Sagas’ at the Sixteenth International Saga Conference in August 2015 proposed a dichotomy between the ‘ordinary, well-educated amateur reader’ and the ‘student and scholar in a neighbouring field’. Each type of implied reader is positioned differently on the sliding scale between accuracy and expressiveness I mentioned above: striking the right balance for every reader may thus be impossible.
32 Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda into English’ as in note 7 above.
Translating the Poetic Edda
173
hideous misunderstandings), but also to reflect critical y on my own and others’
translation practices.
This overview of previous translations showed how other translators responded
to different kinds of problem. The first of these is formal, whether to use prose or
poetry, and if poetry, what kind? The eighteenth-century translators used couplets:
Amos Cottle’s verse sometimes gives a nicely epigrammatic turn to the eddic line.
For example, this couplet ‘Remember once your hand was bit / By Fenrir in an angry
fit’, though perhaps it trivialises Lokasenna st. 38.33 There is however some grandeur to the latter part of Skírnir’s curse in Skírnismál ( The Sayings of Skírnir) st. 36: Þurs ríst ek þér oc þriá stafi,
ergi oc œði oc óþola;
svá ek þat af ríst, sem ek þat á reist,
ef goraz þarfar þess.
(Mark the giant! Mark him well!
Hear me his attendants tell!
Can’st thou with the fiends engage,
Madness, Impotence and Rage?
Thus thy torments I describe
The furies in my breast subside.)34
Rhythm is a strong point of Auden and Taylor’s work; I have already mentioned
their substantial discussion of it in the 1969 introduction. Thus their version of the curse ( Skírnismál, st. 35) has a pounding, hypnotic beat:
Hrímgrímnir heitir þurs, er þik hafa skal,
fyr nágrindr neðan;
þar þér vílmegir á viðar rótom
geita hland gefi!
Œðri drikkio fá þú aldregi,
mær, at þínom munom,
mær, at mínom munom.
(Hrimgrimnir shall have you, the hideous trol ,
Beside the doors of the dead,
Under the tree-roots ugly scullions
Pour you the piss of goats;
Nothing else shall you ever drink,
Never what you wish,
Ever what I wish.
I score troll-runes, then I score three letters,
Filth, frenzy, lust:
33 Icelandic Poetry, trans. Cottle, p. 163.
34 Icelandic Poetry, trans. Cottle, p. 95.
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Carolyne Larrington
I can score them off as I score them on,
If I find sufficient cause.)35
A second issue faced by translators is lexical choice. Nineteenth-century transla-
tors went in for archaism and etymologising, reflecting the fact that Modern English
simply does not have enough words for ‘blood’, ‘girl’, ‘fighter’, and a number of other heroic items of lexis, to provide sufficient variation. Vigfusson and York Powell
boldly claim that their translation in the Corpvs Poeticvm Borealis eschews ‘the affectation of archaism, and the abuse of archaic Scottish, pseudo-Middle English
words’.36 This is a rather pointed dig at Willia
m Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon’s
translations from 1870.37 Magnússon and Morris were creative and fearless in solving
the lexical problem through coinages or the free use of archaism. So Fafnismál ( The Sayings of Fafnir), st. 6/4–6: ‘fár er hvatr, er hrøðaz tekr, / ef í barnæsko er blauðr’
is translated, ‘Seldom hath hardy eld a faint-heart youth’. This rendering obscures
the meaning of the Norse – if you are a coward when young, you will not be brave
when you are old – rather suggesting that few brave men will have been cowards in
their younger days. Similarly in Fafnismál st. 21/1, ‘Ráð er þér ráðit’, a nicely gnomic line meaning something like ‘wel , you’ve said what you had to say’, Magnússon and
Morris expand and explain, ‘Such as thy redes are I will nowise do after them’, losing the brevity of Sigurðr’s dismissal of the dragon’s warning.38 Despite their criticism
of their predecessors, Vigfusson and York Powell enthusiastical y rendered Norse
words with their English cognates and coined philological y possible but otherwise
unattested words, such as: ‘Anses’ for Æsir, and ‘Ansesses’ for Ásynjor, ‘Tew’ for Týr,
‘Eager’ for Ægir, and Woden instead of Óðinn. They also refer to ‘bearsarks’ for
berserkir and use the archaic ‘methinks’ and ‘wight’.
Lee Hol ander’s translation is still frequently reprinted; the eleventh printing of
the second revised edition appeared as recently as 2004. Hol ander is thoughtful
about the problems of reflecting the broad range of synonyms available in Norse
and he too finds that these can only be reproduced in English through recourse to
archaic equivalents, ‘I have, therefore, unhesitatingly had recourse, whenever neces-
sary, to terms fairly common in English bal adry, without, I hope overloading the
page with archaisms,’ he remarks, though modern readers now find the archaisms
off-putting.39 Even Auden and Taylor, whose translations usual y sound reasonably
contemporary, employ words such as ‘thurse’, ‘maids’, ‘mighty-thewed’, and they refer
to ‘garths’, ‘Vanes’ (for Vanir) and ‘orcs’. The latter may likely be ascribed to Tolkien’s influence, for the volume is dedicated to him. ‘Busk yourself Freyia’ demands Loki
in their Þrymskviða ( The Poem of Thrym), st. 12. Already in William Herbert’s 1842
translation, ‘Now, Freyia, busk, as a blooming bride’ needed an explanatory note,
and time has not helped to make its meaning clearer.
The problem of finding appropriate synonyms for different elements of heroic
35 The Elder Edda, trans. Auden and Taylor, p. 123.
36 Corpvs Poeticvm, I, cxv.
37 Völsunga saga: The Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, trans. William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon (London, 1870).
38 Völsunga saga, trans. Morris and Magnússon, pp. 61, 62.
39 Poetic Edda, trans. Hol ander, p. xxix.
Translating the Poetic Edda
175
lexis, if it is not to be solved by archaisms, leads to a repetition of ‘warrior’, ‘fighter’,
‘hero’ which is almost unavoidable. Fighting, of which there is a great deal in the
Poetic Edda, entails variations of ‘smiting’, ‘slaying’ and ‘felling’. Patricia Terry
prefers ‘strike’ and ‘lay low’, while Auden and Taylor alternate between ‘fel ’, ‘kil ’ and
‘lay low’. I used ‘strike’, ‘batter’ and ‘kil ’ in my translation, but ‘batter’ may be both too colloquial and perhaps not forceful enough. The language of romance poses
difficulties: women and girls become ‘damsels’, ‘wenches’, ‘that fair’ or, for Thorpe, the rather un-courtly ‘lass’. Auden and Taylor have a good number of ‘maids’ and
Terry ‘maidens’. I tried to keep the maidens out of my version, preferring ‘girl’.
Sex always raises difficulties for earlier translators; incestuous sex is even trickier.
In Lokasenna st. 32, Freyja is accused of being caught by the gods having sex with her brother; so alarming was this experience that the goddess farted. In the eighteenth century Cottle completely misunderstood the charge and he suggested that
Freyja orchestrated ‘mortal strife’ against her brother.40 Thorpe coyly gave, ‘against thy brother the gentle powers excited’, while Vigfusson and York Powell leave out
Loki’s accusation altogether.41 The early-twentieth-century translator Olive Bray
has the gods find Freyja ‘at thy brother’s’ as if she were merely visiting for tea and characterises her reaction as ‘frightened’ rather than as letting fly a fart.42 In my first version, I got carried away by the verb síztic at (‘you sat with your brother’) or, more idiomatical y, (‘you were at close quarters with your brother’), and I made Freyja sit on him. I still rather like that interpretation, but I am not sure that I can justify it any more. The fart that results when Freyja is discovered in flagrante was first noted by Henry Bellows: ‘Freyja her wind set free’.43 An Amazon.com commenter objected
to my mentioning the fart, but such sensitive souls should probably avoid reading
Lokasenna altogether, lest, like the gods, they be scandalised.
Avoiding archaism is one challenge; using colloquialisms is another minefield. I
was faintly unhappy about having described Freyja, even in a rather comic poem,
Þrymskviða, as ‘sex-crazed’ in my first edition and I have now changed that to
‘man-mad’ (st. 13). In the same poem a giantess is given blows instead of the gifts
which she expects. In Norse this is: ‘Hon skell um hlaut fyr skillinga’ (st. 32). Like some other translators I rendered skell with ‘striking’ and skillinga with ‘shillings’.
I thought long and hard for the first edition about whether shillings were now too
outmoded, but in the end I kept them for the chime, and they have survived in the
second edition. To sum up then, the lexical problems which the translator faces
involve how to grapple with variation, archaism and colloquialism, in addition to
the formal questions of translation into prose versus poetry and the paratextual
issues of what to put in the introduction, commentary and notes, discussed above.
40 Icelandic Poetry, trans. Cottle, p. 160. For Herbert’s strictures on the quality of Cottle’s translations, see Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda’, p. 24.
41 Edda Sæmundar, trans. Thorpe, II, p. 95.
42 The Elder or Poetic Edda, trans. O. Bray (London, 1908), p. 257, a volume beautiful y il ustrated by W. G. Collingwood.
43 Poetic Edda, trans. Bellows, p. 162.
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Carolyne Larrington
Rethinking the Sources
Thus in 2012 it was time to roll up my sleeves and start over again. What had changed
in the meantime? I think that readers are more used to seeing eths and thorns than
twenty years ago, but World’s Classics still prefers to get rid of accents and special characters, and so, as before, I followed Anthony Faulkes in his usage for Anglicising names.44 But the question about which texts to use as the basis for translation has
arguably become more complicated. First, the major Frankfurt Edda-Kommentar
project has brought what is, in effect, a new edition of the Poetic Edda into play.45
The project has been underway since the early 1990s and offers a very detailed
commentary, in addition to a text and German translation of the canonical poems.
One volume, in some respects the most complicated one, dealing with the first three
poems of the Codex Regius, remains to be published, but thanks to Beatrice la Farge,<
br />
who sent me draft versions of tricky verses, I was able to consult their unpublished
material while working on the new translation. Another new edition was published
in Iceland in 2014, in the prestigious Íslenzk fornrit series.46 This edition takes
account of new developments in manuscript studies and in editing, but as it was
long in preparation, it is not as up-to-date as the final Edda-Kommentar volume.
And of course we are still waiting for the long-promised harvest of user-friendly
digital editions of individual poems which have been signalled as forthcoming for
the last twenty years, but which always somehow run out of steam before producing
anything usable.
Although the Neckel-Kuhn fourth edition has as its base an edition that is over a
hundred years old, it still seemed to be the most accessible complete text before the
Íslenzk fornrit edition appeared, despite the fact that its apparatus was in German.
But even in the 1990s it was clear to me that Neckel-Kuhn are very much more inter-
ventionist in their approach than editors are today, freely imposing emendations on
the manuscript versions and reorganising stanzas at wil . In their edition, the first
poem in the Codex Regius, Vǫluspá, is in effect a hybrid of three different recensions: one as preserved in the Codex Regius, one from the early fourteenth-century
compendium Hauksbók and a third confected from the different versions preserved
in the manuscripts of the Snorra Edda. Is it still legitimate to offer a translation of a text for which we have no medieval witness? This may give the erroneous impression that there is an ‘original’ text of Vǫluspá, which it is possible to reconstruct and to render into Modern English. I was persuaded by discussion at the First Eddic
Workshop (held in Oxford in July 2013) that it would be better to open up discussion
of Vǫluspá as an oral y transmitted text, as continual y re-composed in individual performance and as captured in different forms across our three principal witnesses.
In the second edition then, I offer a translation of the Codex Regius text and of the
later Hauksbók version. My editor drew the line at offering the third version, the
verses from Snorra Edda, in a popular translation. Here, the much-vaunted digital revolution came into its own – at least to some extent. I was able to make use of
