The Greenlanders’ Saga by George Johnston (review)

488 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 The Green/anders' Saga. Translated by George Johnston. Oberon Press. 48. $7.95 cloth The Greenlanders' Saga tells of three successive voyages to North America by Norsemen from Greenland at the end of the tenth century. The saga, found in a fourteenth-century manuscript, has been translated into English numerous times, most recently as a Penguin paperback. Professor Johnston's new rendition is for the saga connoisseur. He is sensitive as few scholar/translators are to the kind of prose in which Icelandic narratives were composed, a prose which resembles verse in its economy of expression, density of meaning, and elusive, siren rhythm which catches and holds the hearer. The overall effect is just right. Johnston with rare exception (perhaps 'mighty big' on p 14 is one) maintains the dignified, serious tone of the Norse author, keeping close to the original and echoing where possible its vocabulary and sentence structure. He follows his usual practice (The Saga of Gisli, 1963; The Faroe Islanders' Saga, 1975) of preserving the abrupt shifting back and forth from past to present that is characteristic of saga style; here he even adopts the voice and shifting tenses of the oral story-teller for his introduction. Johnston believes that a translator should make no more concessions to the reader than the original narrator would have. He sometimes makes fewer, however, for English pronouns are not as precise as their Norse counterparts and become a cause of confusion for the novice who is likely to get lost on the very first page. Johnston never over-interprets, never supplies gratuitous information, and succeeds thereby in never diluting the reader's sense of being part of the old story and among Icelanders, even if he occasionally pushes this virtue too far. The translation, although it presents itself as a story and not as a piece of scholarship, is accurate and generally free of typographical errors (the one possibly confusing slip is brother's for brothers' on P 34). There is one annoying bit of non-conformity: the designers at Oberon Press have for some reason removed needed accents from all capital letters (e.g. Olafr, Islendingab6k), not so venial or acceptable in Icelandic as the omission of accents over capitals in French. (ROBERTA FRANK) Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker. The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History. Oxford: Blackwell and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1975. xiii, 303, illus. £7.50; $21.50 Glittering court decor, virtuoso romantic acting, meticulous naturalistic detail, bold stylized images, vigorous physical expression - these are ...