THE TRANSLATION OF SKALDIC POETRY

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« A LL POETRY is untranslatable, but all verse Skaldic -**• poetry is the most aloof from translation. Thus the English scholar, E. V. Gordon.2 Then why translate at all, especially in view the exiguous audience which the most perfect performance such an impossible task can possibly command? Well, this translator wants to make a clean breast it and try to explain at least for himself. Whether my answer fits the case other translators course I am not speaking paid hacks I do not know; but I suspect it does so to a large extent, from great poets in their own right, from a Coleridge, a Shelley, from a Schiller, a Stefan George, from a Mattias Jokkumsson (to mention, at random, some who lent their magic voices to others) down to the humblest the lot. Very simply, it is the same urge that makes people exclaim : Isn't that sunset gorgeous! and causes them to call out to others, insisting that they too must come and witness the spectacle. Often, it blends with the innocent pride the discovere

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