SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Book Reviews 97
THE POETIC EDDA. Translated with an Introduction and
Explanatory Notes by LEE M. HOLLANDER. Second edition,
revised. University of Texas Press. Austin, 1962. xxix +
343 pp.
Despite the hard work that has gone into the revising of this
annotated translation (first published in 1928), it still makes
barbarous reading. The jostling archaisms, where the original is
quite una.rchaic - hight, thuswise, sate (i.e. sat), me dreamed,
gan - and the bewildering, often grotesque inversions that make
it difficult to grasp what is being said ('evergreen o'ertops Urth's
well this tree') obliterate all distinction of style among the poems
themselves and quite fail to convey the startling speed and clarity
of idiom in the finer poems. The crude approximation to the
alliterative metres, so laboriously achieved, is not worth the
divergence from literal accuracy (aurgo baki, Lokasenna v. 48, is
not 'with a stiff back', sualar unnir, VQluspd v. 3, are not 'salty
waves', etc.) nor the distortion of English idiom. Alliterative
rhythms spring from the natural rhythms of a language, and these
depend on the conventional ways in which meaning is presented
in the language: in sacrificing natural English word-order,
therefore, Hollander is destroying his metre. Proper names are
sometimes introduced to help the alliteration even though they
are not in the original: this can alter the poet's intention by
irreleva.nt association or inept precision (e.g. VQluspd v. 54, a
stanza which should in any case have been revised in the light of
]6n Helgason's edition, Brot af Siguroarkviou v. 19, Atlalnnoa
v. 30). Though it may have a few more inaccuracies than
Hollander's, Bellows's remains the more valuabletranslation, more
sympathetic to the original and more lucid in meaning (compare
his VQluspd v. 40, "Among these one in monster's guise / Was soon
to steal the sun from the sky", with Hollander's .'will one of these,
worse than they all, / the sun swallow, in seeming a wolf"). It is
sad that the antiquated principles of translation which Hollander
asserted in 1920 (see his General Introduction p. xxviii) should be
repeated today when such a sparkling standard of translation is
being set by American scholars and poets in other fields (Arrowsmith's
Petronius - also from Texas, Lattimore's Greek poets,
Lowell's 'Imitations'). The stylistic feeling of the translator must
not be 'the court of last instance' but of the first. This is the
greatest challenge he must meet.
URSULA DRONKE