How to Compare Translations Despite Not Knowing any Foreign Languages

Thanks to an eagle-eyed peer reviewer, I just realized that Poul Anderson's epigraph to a short story "Chain of Logic," a translation of verse 45/46 of the Elder Edda's  Völuspá, is not actually his translation. Rather, Anderson took it almost verbatim from A.G. Chater's English translation of The Long Journey by Nobel Prize-winning Danish author, Johannes V. Jensen. Except that the Völuspá verse isn't Jensen's own translation, either. Jensen had, in turn, borrowed the verse from H. G. Møller's original Danish translation in 1870.

So this has led me on a merry-go-round of trying to compare various translations in languages I don't actually speak. Thank god for Google Translate, online ebooks, and amenable colleagues!

First things first -- Jensen took the verse straight from Møller without changes, so that's simple.**

Next question. We got two English-language versions of verse 45/46, one by Chater, another by Anderson. The latter, as I mentioned, borrowed Chater's translation nearly word for word .... but he did make some minor changes. So the question is, "Why?"

For this I needed some translation expertise. I asked social media if anyone knew Danish, and a colleague from Fafnir, Bodhi, said that he knew Norwegian, which was close enough. So I sent him the two translations, which I reproduce below, plus the original Danish.

As you can see, they're pretty close. Except for negligible punctuation and spelling changes, the minor changes are underlined, but I highlighted the major change -- two entire half-lines.

Intriguingly, although grows remains a stronger verb, Anderson's "Hard is the world" more accurately reflects Møller's Danish original (and the Old Norse: hart er í heimi). That suggests that Anderson, who grew up bilingual between English and Danish, was at least double-checking Chater against either Jensen's or Møller's original text.

The re-written half-lines are even more suggestive, though. Since Chater's translation of "cousin" more accurately reflects the Danish word søskendebørn, why did Anderson go with the less accurate phrase,  "sons of sisters"?*** The Henry Adams Bellows translation, granted, uses a close analogue -- "sisters' sons" -- but I doubt Anderson was simply borrowing from another translator. 

But here I ran into a roadblock. I emailed one colleague who knows Old Norse, but she lives in Texas and never responded. So then I just started randomly cold calling various scholars in Old Norse. My suspicion was that, since all early Germanic literature considers one's maternal relations particularly close, the phrase "sons of sisters" would actually hold truer to the Norse original than "cousins"/søskendebørn, which is a rather bland familial relationship.

And it turns out I was right. According to helpful feedback from Dr. Kirsten Wolf, Dr. Kaaren Grimstad, and especially Dr. Carl Edlund Anderson, none of whom know me from chop suey, I eventually realized that in the original O.N. phrase, munu systrungar sifjum spilla, the word systrungr means "one's mother's sister's sons." 

So while Anderson's "sons of sisters" is not a completely accurate translation, it's closer than "cousin." which removes the idea of female familial relationship. And then another wrinkle cropped up when I realized that Møller's Danish word wasn't actually søskendebørn but Sødskendebörn (!). However, another colleague told that that the latter is just a more archaic form of the former, so relief.

Simples, am I right? 

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**Well, technically, Jensen lopped off the last full line in Møller's translation, but no textual changes.

*** In fact, søskendebørn means something crazy like "parents’ sibling’s children", so cousins.