{"id":13684,"date":"2020-05-06T18:28:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T22:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=13684"},"modified":"2020-05-06T18:28:14","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T22:28:14","slug":"the-faraway-north-translated-by-ian-cumpstey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=13684","title":{"rendered":"‘The Faraway North,’ translated by Ian Cumpstey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And it was then Sigurd Sven,<\/p>

He rode on under the hills,<\/p>

And a troll came down from the high fells,<\/p>

And asked to ride with him.<\/p>

A troll came down from the high fells,<\/p>

All dressed in a shirt of silk,<\/p>

His nose was like a cattleshed,<\/p>

And his eyes like tarns on the hill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I have a fondness <\/strong>for old ballads. Mostly I\u2019ve read the British kind (you may have read \u201cBarbara Allen\u201d or \u201cSir Patrick Spens\u201d in school). They\u2019re voices of the past; sometimes heard indistinctly, sometimes garbled in the hearing, sometimes in the retelling. Often they\u2019re like assemblies of interchangeable parts \u2013 you can mix and match them. Or change the hero\u2019s name and you\u2019ve got a ready-made new story. The ballad is often a marvel of narrative simplicity \u2013 you may learn what\u2019s happening solely through dialogue (even monologue); you may even have to guess a bit what’s going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve had some exposure to Scandinavian ballads in the past; generally they follow the same forms the British ones. The chief difference is that when a hero in a British ballad meets a supernatural being, it\u2019s likely to be some kind of Faery. In the Scandinavian kind, you get trolls most often, then sometimes it\u2019s the Huldre <\/em>(the Underground Folk, the Scandinavian equivalent of Faery; I mention them in my novels).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ian Cumpstey is a Swedish-to-English translator, but in his collection, The Faraway North<\/a><\/em>, he has collected examples from Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish ballads, all done over into English. They sound very much like the ones we\u2019re familiar with. They don\u2019t always rhyme, but ours don\u2019t either \u2013 I wondered as I read whether the translator\u2019s creativity had failed, but he says in his notes that the originals often don\u2019t rhyme either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We encounter some famous characters in these verses \u2013 St. Olaf and King Harald Hardrada, for instance, or Sigurd (the one in the verses quoted above), better known to us as Siegfried the Dragon-slayer. But many of them are mysteries \u2013 if their characters ever lived at all, their stories are preserved only in these songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed read The Faraway North <\/em>very much. You might like it too, if you\u2019re fond of antiquities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And it was then Sigurd Sven, He rode on under the hills, And a troll came down from the high fells, And asked to ride with him. A troll came down from the high fells, All dressed in a shirt of silk, His nose was like a cattleshed, And his eyes like tarns on the … Continue reading ‘The Faraway North,’ translated by Ian Cumpstey<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}