The Wander’s Havamal is a clean, easy read. The language is crisp and contemporary, heads and tails clearer than the public domain translations on the internet.
My only quibble is that they chose to separate the poetry from the explanitory notes. I understand why endnotes are necessary for ebooks, but I hate splitting this information between separate pages in physical books. Ideally, they could have followed John Minford’s Art of War, rendering the translation twice, cleanly and then with commentary.
That said, the commentary is worth reading. Dr. Crawford is a linguist so his notes are centered around the language and the challenges of translation, providing a glimpse into the challenges in bringing us the wisdom of the past.
In all, this is a great translation for a modern reader. I plan on borrowing it again from the library to go through the commentary in detail. However, I don’t think I’ll be picking up my own physical copy until it is reformatted.
Whatever you do, go check out Crawford’s unique rendition of the first 79 stanzas in the Cowboy Havamal.
I have to admit that I haven’t revisited the poem much since I first wrote this post. However, this remains “on the rotation” along with Ecclesiastes, Tao Te Ching, Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, and the I Ching. There is too much to read out there. Of the making of books, there is no end – even if we limit the library to texts older than a millennium!
Conversely, it is terrifying that this poem only survived via one book in Iceland. One rues what wisdom has disappeared through the ages, like tears in rain.
Yet again, we moderns are drowning in knowledge. Fate has placed us in an age with all the world’s wisdom at our fingertips and then gave us the addictive algorithm of social media. The gods show no shame, toying with mortal fools in this technological era.
