I work from home, in my office on the top floor of my medieval house. The room is full of books. There is the usual pile of dictionaries, grammars and style guides, paper or digital. Those are the ones I use regularly, often daily. Then there are multiple bookcases, stuffed with archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and much else, collected over many years and used for background research or specific terminology. They were recently joined by new books I could not resist. What attracts a translator’s attention?
There is a fat ‘Dansk sproglære’, a combination of a professional grammar and a biography of the Danish language, all in Danish (by Dansklærerforeningen). There is an equally fat overview of Danish history from the first centuries AD until the present, also in Danish (by Aarhus Universitetsforlag).
In a brave moment I also picked up an introduction to Old Norse. Viking language, sword language. It is in English (by E.V. Gordon, revised by A.R. Taylor), looks daunting but is fascinating. Only a fellow language freak can understand my joy upon discovering that Old Norse verbs had a ‘middle voice’. I should have known; modern Danish has traces of it, Indo-European was riddled with it. This is how a palaeontologist feels when a supposedly extinct creature hops past. One of my former teacher at Groningen University, Professor Stefan Radt (an exceptionally brilliant lecturer and a kind man) needed a full semester to explain the intricacies of this beast and its kin to us in their Classical Greek disguise; those were fascinating lectures. Is it relevant to my translations? Rarely. But it makes my day.
Another new gem on my shelves, a bridge between this Norse and my English: ‘The Reckoning of King Rædwald’ by Sam Newton. Short in pages but rich in content, thorough, and overflowing with useful notes and references. Inspiring. That is important: good translation is impossible without inspiration and joy. I will soon need extra bookcases.
