Tag Archives: translating

Reading

Reading report 2: ‘Kristin Lavransdatter’ (Hubris alert!)

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I proceed with reading Tina Nunnally’s translation of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. It’s a very long work, but I’m not going to read the whole trilogy at once. After I’ve finished the current (first) volume, I’ll turn to other things for a while, getting back into my review schedule.

The thing that’s surprised me most, so far, is a subjective response of my own that will probably make me seem pretty arrogant. I believe I could have done a better job on the translation.

This is ridiculous on the face of it – Nunnally is a successful, established literary translator. I’m a low-paid screenplay translator with one large book under my belt, Viking Legacy. And VL has hardly made many waves in the publishing world.

Nevertheless, the conviction has grown on me as I read. I don’t like Tina Nunnally’s approach.

There’s an old proverb I like to quote, Italian or French in origin, I believe – “A translation is like a wife. If she is faithful, she’s probably not beautiful. And if she’s beautiful, she’s probably not faithful.”

Nunnally is a faithful translator.

She seems to be aiming at precise fidelity to the text, as in these sentences: “There is still so much between us, more than if a naked sword had been laid between you and me. Tell me, will you have affection for me after this night is over?”

That’s precisely faithful. But “laid between us” would sing better, and “feel affection for me” is an awkward construction. “Care for me,” or even “like me” would be more natural. I’d have translated it something like one of those.

A work of literature, especially a masterpiece like KL, is more than a series of bald statements. Considerations of pace and tone need to be taken into account. To borrow a term from biblical translating (without taking sides on the biblical issue), I’m an advocate of dynamic equivalence.

It’s good that an uncut version of KL is now available. But I think a more satisfying job could have been done by a more sensitive translator.

I’m available (cough, cough).

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My warrior days

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I suppose it’s a lack of imagination that drives me more and more to YouTube for videos these days. I could probably think of some contemporary issue to complain about, but… what’s the use? As far as I can tell, we’re dancing on the edge of the volcano. I have lots of opinions, but little cheerful to say.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve shared this old, old video before. Didn’t actually know it was out there. It’s a video produced by a brewing company (not sure what the connection is), offering footage of my Viking group’s combat activities in several locations on several occasions. This was back when I was new to “live steel” combat. Since then I’ve declined, retired, and sold my mail shirt (you can recognize it at the beginning and end of this video by the red material around the collar, where my padded gambeson protrudes) to a younger man.

Most of the guys in this video, to the best of my knowledge, have retired from the sport, like me. Some are old friends who are no longer friends. One that I know of is dead.

But on the bright side, I finished my translation job — for which I turned in a substantial invoice — and now they want a little more work, on some touching up they’re doing on the script. Happy to oblige, friends. Happy to oblige.

Religion, Uncategorized

Ancient wisdom

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Cactus Watching the Sunset. Photo credit: Tom Gainor @its_tgain. Unsplash license.

Finished my paying translation for today. Working on the volunteer stuff now. I came across an expression that the author himself says is something “the old folks said” (and he’s writing in the 1890s). I have a vague idea what it must mean, but I thought I’d check with a couple Norwegian resources on Facebook. One was a former seminarian, the other a historian. Neither had ever heard of it. So I figure I’ll make my best guess, and footnote it, and chances are nobody will ever figure my mistake out if I’m wrong.

Here’s a story I came up with.

There was a young man who longed for ancient wisdom. He traveled the world, speaking to the wisest people he could find in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. He sat at their feet and listened to their wisdom, but his heart was not satisfied.

Eventually he made his way to the American Southwest. He heard of a Navajo wise man who lived in a hut on a mountaintop. He climbed the mountain, with much labor, and spoke to him. “I am seeking ancient wisdom,” he said. “What do you have to tell me?”

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,” said the old Navajo.

“You don’t understand,” said the young man. “I was seeking ancient wisdom.”

“It’s 2,000 year old; what do you want?” replied the old man.

Religion, Uncategorized

Swimming in linguistic waters

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Nothing to review, and I’ve done little but work in the last few days (no, that’s not true. I loafed yesterday. It was Sunday). So I’m journaling today, I guess. Yet again.

It was warm today, in the upper 30s. Tomorrow will be even better, and I don’t see a freezing day on the horizon. I approve of this development. I shall tip the waiter generously.

I complained, the other day, about my inability to understand spoken Norwegian, the language I translate professionally in text form. One of our readers, Deborah HH, suggested I listen to Norwegian radio. I thought this an excellent suggestion, and installed a Norwegian radio app on my cell phone.

My strategy (or wishful thinking) is to attack the problem subconsciously. I will just have the radio on, listening idly as I do other things. No sustained effort to understand what I’m hearing. My working theory is that that effort is a part of the problem. I know all these words. I just don’t process them when they come in through the audible gate. When I consciously try to interpret, I get hung up on individual words and lose the flow. What I need is an involuntary response. I’m hoping that as I listen over time, my subconscious will jump the gap and connect to my dictionary storage unit. Something like “total immersion” learning.

It took some searching to find the channels I wanted. Most Norwegian radio is indistinguishable from American radio, except for the announcements. They play music, and it’s mostly American music. I wanted talk, and in the Old Country language. There’s an NRK (Norwegian National Broadcasting) channel that’s all news, and that’s just the thing, as far as it goes. But around 2:00 pm (our time) they switch to BBC News, which is no use at all (in more than one sense).

But I finally found a channel to listen to after that. It’s Jæren Misjonsradio (Jæren Mission Radio). If the name Jæren seems familiar, its old name is Jaeder, and it’s the region where Erling Skjalgsson lived in his time (around Stavanger). A region with a great evangelical tradition, of which my ancestors were a part.

They feature preaching in Norwegian, which is good. I recognize the Bible passages, and that helps me along. And the music they play is mostly in Norwegian too – and some of it’s quite excellent.

Today I heard one preacher – a good one – and happened to notice his name on the crawl. Carl Fredrik Wisløff. This was thrilling. Wisløff was a prominent evangelical preacher, teacher, and writer in Norway up to his death in 2004. I used to sell some of his books in the bookstore at the seminary – we had a large stock of one of them. He even visited our schools once, I’m told, but that was before my time.

Now, back to work.

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Notes of an imposter

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Busy, busy today. Busy like a maur, which is Norwegian for “ant.” Working on a project I won’t describe to you, of course, except to say that it’s more difficult than the usual fare. I’m dealing with some dialect here. I do surprisingly well with dialects (having figured out the “trick” of it some time back. You need to imagine the sounds of the words). But it still takes longer than the usual stuff. And involves harder thought.

It’s just as well I had inside work to do. It was cold outside. Clear, but cold, though it wouldn’t have seemed so bad a month ago. Yesterday was partly cloudy, and the temperature soared into the 40s, which feels pretty good in March. Exchanged a few words with one of the neighbors, who complained about his aches and pains due to moving snow. The warm day had been ushered in by a heavy snowfall. We have now, according to the neighbor, exceeded the average snowfall for the year. It’s been a yo-yo year, we agreed. The temps have gone up and down, and every time they passed the freezing point (either way, it seemed), we got another dump of snow.

My usual favorite radio talk show didn’t grab me today, so I slipped in my DVD of “Wisting” (a Norwegian production, you may recall, which I worked on a bit). I wanted to listen to some spoken Norwegian. When I go there this summer, I’d like to be able to understand people. I can speak TO them – haltingly, but understandably. But I can’t understand them when they talk. The words, so comprehensible on paper, blur together and mean nothing to me. It’s frustrating. Here I am a genuine Norwegian translator, with credits, and I can’t understand the spoken language.

One of my great fears is that someone will someday expose me for the imposter I am.

I guess I’m not the only person who feels that way.

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Saga Farmann

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The translation work keeps coming in. I groan under the load, but I am a man of iron, capable of enduring great hardships.

Speaking of hard ships, the short video above is of a Viking ship replica called Saga Farmann (Saga Merchant Traveler; link in Norwegian). It was launched in Tunsberg, Norway (a place that features in my Novel in Progress) in 2018, and is particularly interesting because it’s a copy of a knarr (specifically the Klåstad Ship). If you’ve been reading my novels, you know that a knarr is a Viking merchant ship. In the Viking Age these broad, deep ships were doubtless far more common than the fighting dragons (though knarrs were used in war too). But today the great interest is in the dragons, so you don’t often see a nice knarr.

Knarrs generally had rather small crews. Though they carried oars, those were only for emergencies. Knarrs sailed most places they went. What did they do when the wind was calm, or contrary? They waited. You arrived when you arrived.

If my hopes are fulfilled, I might get the chance to see this ship this summer. Plus a bunch of others. If I’m a good boy and say my prayers and eat my vegetables.

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Winter’s tale

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Winter in Minnesota. Artist’s conception.

It started snowing last night, and it’s still snowing now. It’s supposed to keep snowing till sometime overnight. I’m not even going to shovel the steps tonight. Tomorrow will do. No point doing it twice.

This is the time of year when cabin fever sets in. Winter’s fun right up until Christmas. After Christmas it becomes a thing to endure, except for the hearty Nordic types who love to tug on their multiple layers and strap on their skis and make for the blustery, aerobic slopes. They exude a moral and physical superiority that annoys me, frankly. The fact that they are in fact morally and physically superior to me is beside the point.

But by mid-February, even the Chilblain Brigade starts dreaming of beaches and barbecues. No, thank you, we won’t have another helping. We’ve enjoyed as much of this as we can stand. Wake us when the robins show up.

Yesterday I had a day without translation work, but I’d been told more was coming, so I figured relaxing a bit was okay, as I’ll be at it pretty hard in the days to come. At this point, it feels as if people are clamoring for me to take their money. I like this. It makes me feel morally and physically superior.

But I didn’t loaf all day. I went back to working on the new novel, and I made a fateful determination – my work habits have grown shoddy.

I’ve often mentioned that I like to write with the TV on. And I do. It works fine when I’m on a first draft, because first drafts are mostly sitting and thinking anyway. A TV distracts my mind just enough to keep it sparking. Or so I tell myself.

But when I’m doing revisions, as I have been for some time now, I need to concentrate more. Instead, I’ve been doing it over TV, and I think that’s why I’ve been moving so slowly.

So last night I put on music (Bach, mainly), and yes, it works better.

Maybe there’ll be progress now.

If I have any time free from translating.

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Ice Road Walker

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Winter driving in Tromso, Norway. Driving yesterday looked nothing like this, but it’s Norway. Photo credit: Remi Jacquaint @jack_1. Unsplash license.

Back to translating today. I’ve been pretty busy for… well, for the last couple months. My subjective conclusion is that, although Norway remains locked down fairly severely, its film and TV industry is planning on working pretty hard, pretty soon. I think it’s agreed by all the smartest people that entertainment folks are infallible harbingers of future events, like groundhogs in little sunglasses.

Yesterday’s drive to Montevideo (yes, we have a town called Montevideo in Minnesota. I take no responsibility for this. The culprits are long dead) was a cold one. I said the other day that this winter has been an old-fashioned one. By that I meant old-fashioned in terms of frequent snow and thick snow cover. It’s been atypical, however, in terms of yo-yo temperatures. On Tuesday it got up to over 40⁰ Fahrenheit. Stuff melted all over the place. On Wednesday I got into my car at 7:00 am with the temp around 4 below. It rose to about 2 below as I drove, and soared to 8 above by the time I got back to the Cities.

This wasn’t winter like the picture above (chosen mostly because it was taken in Norway). This was one of those clear, cloudless days where the heat is raptured into what I once saw described as “the tremendous heat-sink of a clear winter sky.” This is the cold of space. Alien. Merciless. Frigid as a Minneapolis Star & Tribune critic when sent one of my books to review.

These cold-weather drives put one in mind of Fridtjof Nansen – if you’re a self-dramatizer like me. The cold permeates the car’s frame overnight, and it lingers, even with the heater on full blast. It was an hour before I could take my gloves off, and longer before I could take off my Homburg (it was a funeral. Had to wear my black Homburg).

I wore my black suit with waistcoat, and a Thinsulate scarf and my lined trench coat. Thinsulate gloves too. I was still bloody cold.

I returned to Minnesota from Florida, years back, because I missed spring.

This is the measure of how much I love spring.

Spring, you owe me.

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Incoherent musings from an incoherent thinker

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The book I’m going through right now isn’t that long, but my reading time is limited. Translation work keeps coming in. New innovations – documents pre-translated with AI, which I then proofread. AI is surprisingly good in some instances – awful in others. For instance, it will sometimes translate last names, creating inadvertent humor. Also, the latest stuff I’m doing is supposed to actually show up in subtitles, negating my oft-stated insistence that nothing I do ever appears on screen. I’m not unhappy about the development, but my explanations will have to be more complex now.

The weather has been wintry. Cold. Snowy when not cold, by and large. This is actually pretty much like those childhood winters we old folks like to talk about – the ones we aren’t supposed to get anymore.

My church is located within the city of Minneapolis, which means they have to enforce that city’s revived masking ordinance. Which makes me sad. But I still have faith this will all be over soon.

Somebody asked me to watch and comment on a YouTube lecture by a pagan, on why Christianity makes no sense. Debate gives me the heeby-jeebies, but his argument didn’t challenge me much. He wanted Christianity to be a clean logical proposition – provable and incontrovertible. Surely an omnipotent God knows how to make His message clear to all, right?

The God of Christianity knows how, but He chose not to. He made that choice the moment He decided not to make us automatons, but free beings. That made redemption not a syllogism, but a drama. The Word became flesh. Truth was embodied in blood and guts. Everything got messy. This is foolishness to the Greeks.

See you tomorrow. I likely won’t post Wednesday. I’ve got a funeral out of town that day. Not Covid but a very old relative, who passed in the fulness of time. That’s almost comforting these days.

Reading

Post-Fram reaction

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Some of the Fram crew with a couple their dogs.

Busy with translation today, but I was finished in the afternoon. I think there might have been more work available if I’d asked, but I’m busy with meetings tomorrow (volunteer stuff, of course), so I couldn’t commit. This is the first project I’ve done involving a certain new technology. I don’t think I’ll tell you what that technology is, because you have no Need To Know. Enough to say it might someday put me out of work entirely. For that reason I, for one, welcome our new android overlords. Me good human; not make trouble.

Seems odd not to have anything to write about Fridtjof Nansen today. But come to think of it, I do. Leftover thoughts, musings, and pharisaisms out of a long read.

I find it odd how the world judged Nansen vs. Roald Amundsen in terms of their dogs. Nansen and his companion Johansen, as I mentioned in the review, killed their sled dogs on their trek home, feeding them to the other dogs. Amundsen and his men, on his South Pole expedition, ate their dogs themselves (it was an emergency). But Nansen was hailed as a hero, with little mention of the dogs, while Amundsen came in for a lot of criticism for his canophagia (probably not a real word, but a quick web search didn’t produce a scientific term, so I improvised). I can only assume it was the eating, not the killing, that people objected to. In those days, killing dogs in itself wasn’t much of an issue in the public mind.

On a related issue, something I read once had given me the impression that Nansen’s distant treatment of Johansen after their return may have contributed to Johansen’s eventual depression and suicide. However, on further reading, I find that Nansen was a prince to the guy compared to Amundsen, who kicked him off the South Pole expedition and expunged his name from all reports.

It should also be noted that Johansen had a drinking problem, which probably didn’t help.

Is it spring yet?