Egil’s Saga Read online

  Two translators of sagas stand above the rest: Sir George Dasent and William Morris. Their virtues and their weaknesses are complementary. Dasent, holding fast by the simple and natural, does not always escape the charge of colloquialism and prosiness: he has no great sense of the beauty and the living quality of words, and by that defect he loses in his versions some of the dignity and splendour of his originals. Morris, himself a poet, is drawn to an opposite error: his joy in words and their rhythm and music, while it enables him to produce a translation which has the life and freshness of an original composition and which preserves on the whole the very tone and accent of the saga, leads him astray sometimes into too great a smoothness of style and sometimes into a curiosity of archaism that has a sophisticated and literary effect quite alien to the works he is translating.

  It would be interesting to compare Morris with Dasent in the same passage; but (fortunately, from other points of view) their work does not overlap. But the living quality of a good translation, which (like Morris’s) is faithful word by word to the original and inspired with its spirit, is easily seen by placing a passage from his Heimskringla beside the same passage in the earlier translation by Samuel Laing. This is not to condemn Laing: he worked under difficulties unknown to Morris, many years before Dasent had set the example of bare simplicity or Vigfusson’s monumental Icelandic Dictionary had smoothed the way for English scholars, and with no Icelandic collaborator to help him. Moreover he was interested rather as a historian and a student of institutions than as an artist. In his preface to his translation of the Heimskringla, with its long and valuable preliminary dissertation and its appendices and notes, he says, “The adventures, manners, mode of living, characters, and conversations of these sea-kings, are highly dramatic, in Snorro’s work at least; and are told with a racy simplicity and truthfulness of language which the translator cannot flatter himself with having attained or preserved. All he can say for his work is, that any translation is better than none; and others may be stimulated by it to enter into the same course of study, who may do more justice to a branch of literature scarcely known among us”. Laing’s was a noble pioneering work, and it is with a deep respect for him, and in the spirit of his own words, just quoted, that I use his translation as a foil to the more perfect achievement of another Englishman who wrote half a century later.

  The passage (Heimskringla: Saga of Hakon the Good, Ch. XVIII) reads in Morris* as follows:

  “In the autumn at winter-nights was there a blood-offering held at Ladir, and the king went thereto. Heretofore he had ever been wont, if he were abiding at any place where was a feast of blood-offering going on, to eat his meat in a little house with but few folk, but now the bonders murmured at it, that he sat not in his own high-seat, where the feast of men was greatest; and the earl said to the king that so he would not do as now. So it was therefore that the king sat in his high-seat. But when the first cup was poured, then spake Earl Sigurd thereover, and signed the cup to Odin, and drank off the horn to the king. Then the king took it and made the sign of the cross thereover; and Kar of Griting spake and said: ‘Why doeth the king thus, will he not do worship?’ Earl Sigurd answers: ‘The king doth as they all do who trow in their own might and main, and he signeth the cup to Thor. For he made the sign of the hammer over it before he drank’. So all was quiet that eve. But on the morrow, when men went to table, the bonders thronged the king, bidding him eat horse-flesh, and in no wise the king would. Then they bade him drink the broth thereof, but this would he none the more. Then would they have him eat of the dripping, but he would not; and it went nigh to their falling on him. Then strove Earl Sigurd to appease them, and bade them lay the storm; but the king he bade gape over a kettle-bow, whereas the reek of seething had gone up from the horse-flesh, so that the kettle-bow was all greasy. Then went the king thereto, and spread a linen cloth over the kettle-bow, and gaped thereover, and then went back to the high-seat; but neither side was well pleased thereat.”

  Laing† renders the same passage as follows:

  “The harvest thereafter, towards the winter season, there was a festival of sacrifice at Lade, and the king came to it. It had always been his custom before, when he was present at a place where there was sacrifice, to take his meals in a little house by himself, or with some few of his men; but the bonders grumbled that he did not seat himself on his throne at these the most joyous of the meetings of the people. The earl said that the king should do so this time. The king accordingly sat upon his throne. Now when the first full goblet was filled, Earl Sigurd spoke some words over it, blessed it in Odin’s name, and drank to the king out of the horn; and the king then took it, and made the sign of the cross over it. Then said Kaare of Gryting, ‘What does the king mean by doing so? Will he not sacrifice?’ Earl Sigurd replies, ‘The king is doing what all of you do, who trust to your power and strength. He is blessing the full goblet in the name of Thor, by making the sign of his hammer over it before he drinks it’. On this there was quietness for the evening. The next day, when the people sat down to table, the bonders pressed the king strongly to eat of horse-flesh; and as he would on no account do so, they wanted him to drink of the soup; and as he would not do this, they insisted he should at least taste the gravy; and on his refusal they were going to lay hands on him. Earl Sigurd came and made peace among them, by asking the king to hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle upon which the fat smoke of the boiled horse-flesh had settled itself; and the king first laid a linen cloth over the handle, and then gaped over it, and returned to the throne; but neither party was satisfied with this.”

  This passage was chosen haphazard. It is by no means a good example of Morris, (indeed, it shows some of his more serious faults), nor a bad of Laing. To translate 260 words of Icelandic Morris has used 328 English words and Laing 337: there is nothing between them there. The capital difference is that Laing’s version is heavy and lifeless, while Morris’s is, by comparison, living human speech. Morris has the feeling and general effect of the original; he also follows it far more closely word by word. It is true to say that in every particular where he differs from Laing he is closer to the original.

  This is not a matter of verbal accuracy or a matter of vocabulary, though both those have their importance. ‘High-seat’ is better than ‘throne’ for hásœti; ‘first cup was poured’ is better than ‘first full goblet was filled’ for hit fursta full var skenkt. ‘Signed to Odin’ is a translation of sígnaði Óðni while ‘blessed it in Odin’s name’ is a poor paraphrase; and the same is true of ‘hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle’ for gína yfir kettilhödduna, which is, simply and literally, ‘gape over’. The real mischief, the reason why Laing’s translation gives really no idea at all of the style of Snorri Sturlason, may be seen by comparing in the two versions the passage beginning, in Morris, ‘But on the morrow’ and ending ‘nigh to their falling upon him’. The mischief is plain enough, and can be summed up in one word: Latinism.

  Participial phrase and relatival and absolute constructions, so deeply rooted in the Latin language and by adoption grown not foreign to our own, are utterly foreign to the classical Icelandic. So repugnant are these constructions to the genius of that language that they kill it out of hand, completely, so that no flavour remains of the original in an English translation that makes free use of these idioms. There may be an Icelandic Gibbon or a Johnson or a Sir Thomas Browne: there is at any rate no whiff of him in the sagas. The point is so important, that it is worth while to give a literal translation of the passage just referred to, so that it may be seen on what a bed of Procrustes Laing has here laid and mutilated his original:

  “The day after, when men went to table, then thronged the bonders about the king and bade him eat horseflesh; the king would for no sake do that. Then bade they him drink the broth; that will he surely not. Then bade they him eat the dripping, but the king will not that either (vill pat ok eigi). There was then made ready for a setting upon him.”

  Lai
ng says they pressed him to eat of horseflesh—

  “and as he would on no account do so, they wanted him to drink of the soup; and as he would not do this, they insisted he should at least taste the gravy; and on his refusal they were going”, etc.

  Morris has himself taken unnecessary licence in this passage. But Laing, no doubt quite unwittingly, has gone the whole hog, and lost touch with his original altogether.*

  Worse men than Laing have fallen into the same error and, unlike him, sought to justify it. Sir Edmund Head, in his translation of Viga-Glum, a saga told in an unusually rugged and primitive style, uses language like this: “It happened one summer, on his arrival in the Eyjafirth, that Arngrim did not invite him to his house, and though they met he did not speak to him, imputing to him that he had talked with his wife, Thordis, more than was proper; but the report of most men was that there was little or nothing in the matter”. And in his preface he tells us: “I have adhered to the original as closely as was consistent with my desire of presenting to the English reader a translation that could be read without being very stiff and tiresome, but I am by no means sure that I have attained this object”.

  One thing is certain: no great work of human genius can be translated successfully by persons pre-occupied with the question how far they may safely follow their original and how far they would be well advised to alter, expurgate, adorn or rearrange it in order to recommend it-to the popular taste of the moment. Pope,* in an auguster field, gives precedent here to Sir Edmund Head. In his Essay on Homer, prefixed to his translation of the Iliad, he expresses the view that many of Homer’s compound epithets “cannot be done literally into English without destroying the purity of our language”. Some, however, “may have justice done them by circumlocution; as the epithet εìνοσίɸνλλος to a mountain, would appear little or ridiculous translated literally leaf-shaking, but affords a majestic idea in the periphrasis:

  The lofty mountain shakes his waving woods”.

  And later: “Upon the whole”, he writes, “it will be necessary to avoid that perpetual repetition of the same epithets which we find in Homer, and which, though it might be accommodated… to the ear of those times, is by no means so to ours: but one may wait for opportunities of placing them, where they derive an additional beauty from the occasions on which they are employed; and in doing this properly, a translator may at once show his fancy and his judgement”.

  So Mr Pope will go on avoiding “that perpetual repetition of the same epithets “which is by no means accommodated to the ear of persons of good taste, and Sir Edmund Head will go on talking about people “assuming a high position in the district”, and “imputing” things, and saying, “on his arrival”, where his original says, stiffiy and tiresomely, “when he came out”, Meanwhile, those of us who would like to know something about Homer and Viga-Glum’s Saga must set to work and learn Greek and Icelandic, or find a translator* who is not ashamed of his original.

  For, as translators, Pope and Head and their kind are deserving, really, of no respect at all. They are ashamed of their mistresses, that are of an infinitely greater worth than they; and for that, we must call them ungallant coxcombs and send them to the Devil. “Every Lover admires his Mistress”, says old Robert Burton, “though she be very deformed of her self, ill-favored, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tan’d, tallow-faced, have a swoln juglers platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-ey’d, blear-ey’d, or with staring eys, she looks like a squis’d cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-ey’d”—(the blemishes go on for another twenty lines). He that proposes to introduce a saga, or any other great old work in a foreign tongue, to a public that does not know her, must be a true lover of his mistress, after that kind. To “show his fancy and his judgement”, as Pope counsels, is a mere impertinence. He has to ‘show’ not anything that is his, but his original. That will cost him all his pains, and try all his powers.

  For the translator, then, this is the commandment that contains all the law: Thou shalt love thy Mistress. The sagas took shape in the mouths of people who, as that great saga-lover W. P. Ker has said, have a self-conscious principle of style and good grammar: people who were the greatest story-tellers the world has ever seen. These prose epics have the qualities of great poetry: they are “simple, sensuous, and passionate”.* They have the quality of what they spring from, the spoken word. The saga-man (simply, no doubt, as simple men enjoy good beer or sunshine) tasted and enjoyed every word: so must the translator, if his translation is to bear any likeness to his original. The strong and bare simplicity of the saga, so cosmically remote from all that is precious, bizarre, soulful, conceited, self-consciously self-important, or, in the popular sense, artistic, makes it hard on first acquaintance to grasp its essential quality. That quality is in fact pure style. And here, as in all art, style is life.

  It may be useful in conclusion to refer briefly to two matters affecting the translation of the sagas: the first a matter of principle, the second of convenience.

  (1) ARCHAISMS

  Controversy has made itself heard from time to time on the question of diction, mainly in the form of attacks upon William Morris for using archaic words and phrases. Morris, as we have seen above, is open to the charge of employing sometimes a preciosity of expression that gives too literary a flavour to his versions; but the attack on the ground of his archaisms is misconceived. People who have never given much thought to the question are apt to take the view that old-fashioned language must be artificial and therefore devoid of life. They forget that the sagas themselves are written in what is, to us (and to Icelanders to-day, for that matter), old-fashioned language. The heroic age itself is old-fashioned to us to-day: it will seem not old-fashioned only but unreal and ridiculous if we attempt to galvanize it into a semblance of modernity by putting into its mouth the sophisticated parlance of our own very different times. The truth seems to be, indeed, the exact converse of the contention of these thoughtless critics: an archaic simplicity of speech is necessary in translating a saga (or Homer, or the Bible, or the Arabian Nights) if we wish to retain its spontaneity and vitality unimpaired.*

  The reason for this is not far to seek. Much of our present-day language is literary, in the sense that it is a language no humane person speaks except in formal business, nor reads except because he cannot help it (e.g. in official documents or the newspapers). It is a written language, full of redundancies and pomposities and full of all manner of clichés and jargons. It is moreover highly abstract. And these ingredients and characteristics themselves carry associations foreign to the background of daily life under the old, simple, unmechanized civilizations. It is perhaps unnecessary to labour the point further, certainly in addressing a reading public who have welcomed Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, a book which owes its effect of startling and breathing reality in an incalculable degree to the fact that it is written in a language framed by its author for the occasion in the greatest tradition of pre-Spenserian English. I will only add that that most vital and sparkling spring, the living water of Boccaccio himself, becomes flat and turbid at the touch of a translator who tries to make his version ‘vivid’ by making it modem. Let anyone who would test this read that most perfect of short stories (of Rinaldo d’Asti and the Widow Lady) first in John Payne’s beautiful version, then in one of those which invite our preference (in one case at least) on the ground that Payne is heavy and dull. I think they will agree that the archaic version is the one that bubbles over with life and sprightliness, while the other is by comparison but a lame and out-of-fashion piece of vulgarity.

  Archaic language is not an end in itself. The end is, truth to the original. In the present version of Egla I have proceeded on a principle not unlike Doughty’s: and my single aim has been to maintain, so far as the English language is capable of maintaining it, both generally and in detail, the style of my Icelandic original.

  (2) PROPER NAMES

  Th
e treatment in English of Icelandic proper names, both personal and place-names, is chaotic. Pedants and cranks go their various ways in this matter, and revile one another; and the plain reader, for his part, is apt to be prejudiced in favour of the particular form in which a name or set of names first came to his knowledge. But it is tiresome and bewildering, especially to the plain reader, to find the same name served up in half-a-dozen different forms in as many books: Haraldr, Haraldur, Harald; Hairfair, Fairhair, the Fair-haired, Harfagri, Haarfagre, Harfager; Breiðifjörðr, Breiðifjörður, Breidifjordr, Breidifiord, Broadfrith, Broadfirth; Olaf Tryggvison, Olafr, Olafur, Olave, Tryggvi’s son, Tryggvason, Tryggvesson.

  It is time that a tradition was established and followed. Certain points are to be noted:

  (a) The actual Icelandic names will not amalgamate with English: we cannot work in our own genitival inflexion –’s with the common masculine termination -r after a consonant, e.g. ‘Haraldr’s’ or ‘Thorolfr’s’.

  (b) The names are often extraordinarily closely related to English: fjörðr and firth,dalr and dale, sker and skerry, are the same words.

  (c) The problem is purely a literary one, and is to be solved by practical good sense, ear and judgement, and not by some ridiculous system of rigid rules (e.g. to translate everything, or to translate nothing, or, most astounding inspiration of wrongheaded pedantry, to put it all into—Anglo-Saxon).*

  Common sense suggests that, to establish a tradition, the best beginning is to base our practice broadly on that of translators whose works seem to have some chance of occupying a permanent place in English literature, viz. Morris and Dasent. This is what has been done in the present version of Egla. Where Morris and Dasent disagree, I have in most cases preferred to follow Morris. Is it unreasonable to suggest, in the interests of clearness and continuity, that future translators, and indeed all who write on these subjects in English, might sacrifice their pet pedantries and follow this practice?