In the Translator's Workshop: Featuring Emily Osborne on "Oláfr Tryggvason’s Death" by Hallfreðr Óttarsson
- Emily Osborne
- 45 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Amit Majmudar, George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism
George Steiner wrote one of the most perceptive books we have on translation and based its title on one of our most profound parables on ambition and communication: After Babel. As a sometime translator myself, I know first hand the Babel-like misunderstandings that bedevil all those who would dismantle and rebuild a tower of words.
I am aware, accordingly, of the poet-translator’s background sense of the endeavor’s futility, one that writers have lamented for hundreds of years. In Don Quixote (quoted here in John Rutherford’s translation), the priest who helps burn Quixote’s books of chivalry remarks, “...He [the translator] left behind much of what was best in it, which is what happens to all those who try to translate poetry: however much care they take and skill they display, they can never recreate it in the full perfection of its original birth.”
As Cervantes notes, a translator’s problems compound specifically with poetry, so deeply dependent on nuances and idiosyncrasies in the language of its composition. Readers rarely learn about the “inside baseball” behind a translator’s choices and sacrifices, about dilemmas of etymology and connotation, about the slippages between counterpart, counterfeit words. In poetry translation, when it’s done correctly, no detail is too pedantic, no feature of syntax or diction is irrelevant, and no choice is trivial.
I reached out to poets who translate from languages or cultures far afield from English: Norse, Russian, Ki’che’ Maya (Castilian), Chinese, Sanskrit. I asked the poet-translators to focus on a line or stanza and share the nitty-gritty of moving poetry between the original and English. This series features the translators' mini-essays, showing us how much thought and hard work go into what poetry translators do.
Amit Majmudar
Emily Osborne: Untangling a Question and a Kenning
Listen to Emily Osborne read “Oláfr Tryggvason’s Death” in Icelandic and English.
veitkat hitt hvé heita
hungrdeyfi skalk leyfa
dynsæðinga dauðan
dýrbliks eða þó kvikvan
I cannot settle this, how
I shall praise the queller of hunger
of tumult-seagulls of Heiti’s
steed-gleam: as living still or dead?
What the medieval Icelandic poet Hallfreðr “cannot settle” is surely a mouthful. The question sandwiches a complex kenning. A kenning is a circumlocution employed by the medieval Scandinavian “skalds” (poets) to stand in for a regular noun. Kennings were often embedded within other kennings, creating difficulties in deciphering the intended subject. This particular kenning is a seven-part substitution for Hallfreðr’s “lord” Oláfr Tryggvason, a Viking ruler infamously remembered for converting Scandinavia to Christianity by the sword, and in whose court Hallfreðr served. After Oláfr was defeated at the sea-battle of Svoldr (c. 1000), rumours circulated that the king had not died, but had escaped by jumping ship. Thus Hallfreðr asks: veitkat hitt: hvé skalk leyfa…: kvikvan þó eða dauðan? (“I cannot settle this, how I shall praise [Oláfr]: as living still or dead?”).
This half-stanza from Hallfreðr’s memorial poem bears a rich manuscript tradition, having been recorded in ten extant medieval manuscripts (c.1250-1450), as well as early modern redactions. Hallfreðr’s question of “how” he should memorialize Oláfr was, intriguingly, a point of departure for the medieval scribes. Hvé (“how”) was written as hvárt(“whether”), áðr (“before”), hvert (from hverr “whom”), and þó at (“although”). These are not scribal copying errors, but emendations aimed at clarifying the skald’s statement, even if they strain grammar.
And for the twenty-first-century translator, the question of how to translate Hallfreðr’s question is both editorial and emotional. I feel the pull of various nuances to capture the weight of a poet coming to terms with his grief: “I cannot settle this before I must praise him;” “I cannot settle the matter although I compose for him;” “I cannot comprehend who it is I am praising.”
Although Hallfreðr highlights the unclear status of the king he praises, he can tell you several things about Oláfr through his complex kenning: hungrdeyfi dynsæðinga heita dýrbliks (“the queller of hunger of tumult-seagulls of Heiti’s steed-gleam”). To understand the kenning, we need to break it down into its embedded kennings. Often it is helpful to perform this process more-or-less backwards. So, the “queller of hunger of tumult-seagulls of Heiti’s steed-gleam” can be broken down as follows: Heiti is a sea-king, and his “steed” is a ship. The “gleam” on this ship is a shield (shields were hung on the sides of Viking longships). The “tumult-seagulls” of the shield are the beasts who feed on the corpses of battle. The “queller of hunger” of the beasts of battle is the warrior-lord who provides the beasts with flesh to eat. The kenning highlights Oláfr’s martial prowess, and it also superimposes imagery of land and sea, apropos to a king who reportedly escaped a sea-battle and remained in hiding on land somewhere.
Word order in skaldic poetry was fluid. As such, students and scholars reading skaldic poetry today must work out how the parts of a complex kenning fit together. This interpretive process involves an understanding of basic grammar combined with familiarity with the massive corpus of surviving kennings and also with medieval treatises on poetics and mythography. Unsurprisingly, manuscript traditions reveal that scribes were often stumped by the kennings they recorded or copied, and Hallfreðr’s seven-part kenning for Oláfr is no exception. Heita, here interpreted as from the masculine noun Heiti, has other intriguing aural and scribal resonances. Heita is also the infinitive form of the verb “to call, give name to.” It is tempting, given the subject, to construct Hallfreðr’s question and the kenning slightly differently: “I cannot settle how to call the hunger-blunter of the tumult-seagulls”; unfortunately, in this case, the determinant “of the steed-gleam” is left without a logical place to fit in the verse. Nevertheless, it is an aural resonance which may have led to the scribal variations on the conjunction hvé (“how”) which directly precedes it, for example, in its interpretation as hverr(“whom”).
In this context, it is interesting to note that scholars today remain conservative about some words which may be the names of minor divinities about whom we know essentially nothing, but which are also related to more common nouns. Scribes of Hallfreðr’s poem were not sure whether Heiti was pertinent to the matter: this word also appears as hætta, possibly from the adjective hættr, “dangerous” or the verb hætta (“to risk”), although these are difficult to fit within the grammar of the stanza. One scribe also interpreted this word as hreyti, from the nomen agentis hreytir (“flinger”), presumably construing dýr not as “beast, steed” but as the adjective dýrr (“precious”), creating a kenning where Oláfr is the “flinger of the precious gleam”, that is, the one who gives away treasure to his thanes, a common kenning type. In this case, we find two apposite kennings, where Oláfr is both the “flinger of treasure” and the “queller of hunger of tumult-seagulls,” and more than one of his praise-worthy attributes has been highlighted. In the end, Hallfreðr’s question may be ironic: while he claims not to know how to speak of his lord, he shows his audience he is fully capable of composing an outstanding work of poetic praise.
Emily Osborne’s books include the forthcoming anthology of translations of Old Norse poetry, The Skalds (W. W. Norton/Liveright, 2027), and two volumes of poetry, Safety Razor (Gordon Hill Press, 2023) and Biometrical (Anstruther Press, 2018). Her poetry, fiction, and translations have been published in journals such as The Paris Review, The Adroit Journal, The Fiddlehead, and The Literary Review of Canada. Emily has a PhD in Old Norse Literature from the University of Cambridge. She lives on Bowen Island, Canada, with her husband and two young sons.
