Direct Translation AS A Practice

What are the languages of your people?

It started with etymology, tracing the origins of words through time and the miasma of amnesia, finding magic in the roots. This led to reading primary medieval texts, mostly from nineteenth century translations.

My body responded with a tell. Goosebumps, eerie prickles at the back of my neck.

"That can't be what the word means,” led to an early edition of the Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, the Bosworth Toller Anglo Saxon Dictionary and searching.

This transformed my life and work and has become a cornerstone of my practice.

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Translation is not my background. I have no talent for languages or grammar structures. Translation is like math, makes me anxious with it’s implied specificity.

But when I move away from perfection and academic standardization, into the larger relationship of gnosis and myth, translation has been a great vehicle for reclaiming and reweaving relationships with the past.

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When I translate an original text, like the rune poems, I am looking for magic and the feminine, earth based ancestral traditions. It is always present, and can be excavated word by word, in incomplete patterns of incomprehensible beauty.

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I remember yet the giants of beginning

Who fed me in the days gone by

Nine women I home, nine wood giantesses

The Measuring Tree glorious before mold from beneath

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Ek man jötna ár um borna,

þá er forðum mik fœdda höfðu;

níu man ek heima, níu íviði,

mjötvið mœran fyr mold neðan.

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Original translation from the Völuspá .

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Language is culture. If I am committed to learning more of ancestral lifeways, language has to be a part of the journey.

My spiritual path demands direct relationship. It doesn't need to be perfect, or even correct by anyone else’s standards. It is not proscriptive or definitive but fluid and ever changing. It is a practice, lived and loved, bringing life closer in a joy of breath and song. It isn’t easy, or fast.

Mending never is.

By this and every effort may the balance be regained.