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Yet Another Error in the New Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks

I’ve found yet another significant error in the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. I don’t go looking for errors, as I believe I’ve explained in earlier posts, I discover them by accident, usually when I’m updating references from the old Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Due to the generosity of my friend Sylvia Walsh Perkins, I have a complete set of both KJN and the earlier JP. Most of the journal references in my earlier writing, as well as the notes I’ve made over the years, are to the JP, so when I need to update those references to the new KJN, I go first to the relevant JP entry because that entry always includes a reference to the passage in Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, the only complete edition of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers in Danish. When I find the passage in the Pap. I type the Danish into the searchable edition of the new Danish Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. That then gives me the location of the passage in SKS. The new KJN is keyed to SKS, so once I have the SKS info I can find the passage in the new KJN.

Unfortunately, I keep discovering problems with the new KJN. The problem I am going to talk about in this post concern the following passage from KJN

For a thinker there can be no worse anguish than having to live in suspense while people pile up detail upon detail; it always looks as if the idea, the conclusion, will arrive very soon. If a researcher in the natural sciences does not feel this anguish he must not be a thinker. This is the terrible tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is, as it were, in hell as long as he has not found certainty of spirit. (KJN 4, 72.)

The Danish for this passage is:

For en Tænker kan der ikke gives nogen rædsommere Qval end at skulde leve hen i den Spænding at medens man opdynger Detail, det bestandig seer ud som kom nu Tanken næste Gang, Conclusionen. Føler Naturforskeren ikke denne Qval saa maa han ikke være Tænker. Dette det Intellectuelles rædsomme Tantalisme! En Tænker er som i Helvede saa længe han ikke har fundet Aandens Vished.

The Hongs render the Danish as:

For a thinker there is no more horrible anguish than to have to live in the tension that while one is heaping up details it continually seems as if the thought, the conclusion, is just about to appear. If the natural scientist does not feel this anguish, he must not be a thinker. This is the most dreadful tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is literally in hell as long as he has not found certainty of spirit.

Here is how I would translate the passage: 

There is no torment more dreadful to a thinker than to have to live in the tension that while one is heaping up details it constantly seems as if the conclusion will come with the next thought. If the natural scientist [Naturforsker] does not feel this anguish, he must not be a thinker. This is the most dreadful tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is in hell as long as he has not found certainty [Aandens Vished].

The Hongs’ translation of this passage is generally superior to the new KJN translation. There are numerous problems with the translation in KJN. First, the term translated in KJN merely as “worse” (rædsommere) is the same term that is translated later as “terrible” (rædsomme). The latter translation is more accurate in that rædssom has connotations of fear given that it is derived from ræd which Ferrall-Repp translates as “fearful, timid, afraid, frightened, timorous.” One can’t actually call the translation of rædsommere  as “worse” a error, though. It just isn’t ideal. The Hongs’ “more horrible” is actually preferable.

The same thing could be said of KJN’s tortured attempt to keep Kierkegaard’s simile “som i Helvede” a simile by translating in as “is, as it were, in hell.” The phrase sounds intolerably pedantic in English, whereas the original Danish, som i Helvede would not sound pedantic to a native Danish speaker. The tone of the original is far better preserved by rendering the simile as a metaphor. That is, som i Helvede is better translated as “is in hell,” without the Hongs’ “literally,” since if some translation of som were necessary, “figuratively” would be more appropriate, but would, again, render a passage that sounds more pedantic in English than it does in Danish.

The last annoying departure from the Hongs’ translation of the passage in question that I’m going to list in this post is the rendering of opdynger Detail  as “pile up detail upon detail.” Opdynge, according to Ferrall-Repp means  “to heap up, amass, accumulate,” so the Hongs’ “heaping up,” is arguably preferable to KJN’s “pile up,” but again, the new translation does not actually alter the sense of the passage. Even the fact that KJN renders Detail (which has no plural in Danish but which is clearly used in the plural sense in this passage) as “detail upon detail” doesn’t doesn’t actually alter the sense of the passage. 

There are lots of these unnecessary deviations from the Hongs’ translations in the new KJN translations. Rendering “Spænding” as “suspense” rather than “tension” is less desirable than the Hongs’ “tension” given that Ferrall-Repp does not list “suspense” as one of the possible English translations of Spænding. Those translations are: “1. tension; 2. estrangement; 3. excitement.” That said, “suspense” isn’t actually misleading. It’s just an unnecessary deviation from the earlier translation. One gets the sense, going through the new KJN, that many of the deviations from the Hongs’ earlier translations were made not because there was any problem with the original, but because the more changes the new translation team could come up with, the greater would be the impression that a new translation was necessary.  

No such justification for a new translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers was necessary, however, because the Hongs’ translation was not complete. That is, there was definitely a need for a complete English translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. Sadly, KJN is not a complete translation of all of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers because is it based on SKS and SKS is not complete. That is, there’s lots of important material missing from SKS (see earlier posts on the problems with SKS).

The error in the new KJN translation of the above passage is the translation of the Danish man as “people.” Not only is this incorrect, it is seriously misleading. Man, in Danish, just like man in German, is properly translated as “one” (as indeed the Hongs did render it in their translation of this passage). That is, it isn’t other people who Kierkegaard describes as piling up “detail upon detail” (opdynger Detail), but the researcher who is the subject of the passage. 

The error in KJN actually gives the passage a different meaning. That is, it makes it look as if the thinker in question experiences rising anxiety, or whatever, as he or she watches other people’s research amass more and more material that would be relevant to some issue to which the thinker is seeking a resolution, or some question to which he or she is seeking an answer. In fact, such a view could be attributed to Kierkegaard, as I in fact did attribute it in the paper I gave at Princeton in July. That is, I pointed out in that paper that science and scholarship, according to Kierkegaard, are collective endeavors, that no individual scholar or scientist can be the sole arbiter of truth in his or her discipline. 

The new KJN translation of the passage in question from Kierkegaard’s journals would appear to support such a view and could easily be appropriated by scholars as a reference that would support such a view. The thing is, it doesn’t. It isn’t inconsistent with such a view. It just doesn’t speak to the issue of how the establishment of truth in science and scholarship is a collective endeavor. The issue of this passage is how intellectuals, or scholars and scientists, are actually unwittingly searching for a kind of certitude, or mental calm, that cannot be found in the realm of science and scholarship, or of ideas more generally, but only in the realm of spirit. 

So scholars beware. If you are not actually fluent in Danish and have your own edition of Soren Kierkegaards Papirer (or easy access to a library that has it). Then you are going to want to get ahold of a copy of the Hongs’ Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. As hard as I sometimes am on the Hongs, I think they actually did a very nice job with the journals and papers. Sadly, as I mentioned about, their translation is only a selection, so serious Kierkegaard scholars are going to need to supplement it with references to the Papirer, and that, of course, means they are going to have to learn Danish!

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More on the Decline of Editing

Everyone is familiar with Kierkegaard’s famous journal entry about the “secret note.” 

“After my death,” wrote Kierkegaard in 1843,

“no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find that script in my innermost being that explains everything, and which often, for me, makes what the world would call trifles into events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note that explains it” (Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE-KK, p. 157).

Or did he write this? The answer is both yes and no. There are some issues with both the existing English translations of this passage, as well as with the passage as it appears in the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter. Two are relatively minor and two are more serious. This post will address each issue in turn, leaving the more serious issues until the end.

The Danish in the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter is:

“Efter min Død skal ingen i mine Papirer (det er min Trøst) finde en eneste Oplysning om hvad der egentlig har udfyldt mit Liv; finde den Skrift i mit Inderste, der forklarer Alt, og som ofte gjør hvad Verden vilde kalde Bagateller til uhyre vigtige Begivenheder for mig, og hvad jeg anseer for Ubetydelighed, naar jeg tager den hemmelige Note bort, der forklarer det.” (SKS, 18, p. 169.)

KJN’s translation of the original Danish is arguably defensible. That is, there is no glaring semantical mistake. The Hongs’ translation for Indiana University Press is thus very similar. It reads:

“After my death no one will find in my papers the slightest information (this is my consolation) about what really has filled my life, no one will find the inscription in my innermost being that interprets everything and that often turns into events of prodigious important to me that which the world would call bagatelles and which I regard as insignificant if I remove the secret note that interprets them.” (Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Vol. 5, p. 226).

Both translations work to convey the sense of the passage in the original Danish. The Hongs’ is actually closer to the original, though, than is the new KJN because there is no noun in the original that corresponds to KJN’s “importance.” KJN’s editors have changed “uhyre vigtige Begivenheder,” which translates literally as “enormously important events” into “events of enormous importance.” They’ve done this to get the subject to agree in number with Kierkegaard’s singular pronoun “det,” or “it,” at the end. That is, there appears to be a grammatical problem with the original where the subject appears to be “Begivenheder,” or “events,” which is plural, and Kierkegaard’s singular “det,” or “it,” at the end.

Unfortunately, the original manuscript of this journal entry appears to have been lost (more on that below). It’s thus possible that there was no such grammatical problem in the original. That is, it’s possible that the last word in Kierkegaard’s hand-written journal was actually “dem,” or “them,” and not “det,” or “it.” It would be relatively easy, I think, to mistake a hand-written “m” for a “t,” and also relatively easy to become confused about what the subject was and so to fail to notice what appears to be the grammatical problem. It’s also possible, of course, that the grammatical problem was in the original. It’s the type of mistake that’s easy to make, especially if one is writing quickly. Since the passage in question wasn’t originally intended for publication (we assume), Kierkegaard would have no reason to go back and proofread it.

Since there appears to have been a problem in the original, it is hard to fault either the editors of KJN or the Hongs for the manner in which each chose to correct it.

There is another minor issue with KJN’s translation of Bagateller as “trifles.” This translation is just annoying given that “bagatelles” is a perfectly acceptable English word that is a cognate of the Danish Bagateller. My suspicion is that the editors of KJN chose “trifles” as part of a general strategy designed to justify a new English translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. That is, the more differences there are between the Hongs’ earlier translation and KJN the greater is the impression that a new translation was needed. The thing is, pretty much everyone in the Kierkegaard community knew that a new translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers was needed, and not because there were serious problems with the Hongs’ translation (which I think is generally very good), but because the Hongs’ translation was not complete.

It is, of course, tempting, when doing a new translation of a work that has already been translated, to try something new. I did that in my own translations of Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. One should give in to that temptation, however, only when an alternative translation is arguably equally good. When there is actually a cognate in what translation theorists call the “target language,” which is to say the language of the translation, then no other term could possibly be superior to it.

Neither of the above issues is likely to cause a serious problem for scholars. Unfortunately, there are two more issues with both KJN and the Hongs’ translation of this passage from Kierkegaard’s journals that are more serious. 

My own translation would look something like this:

“After my death, no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least bit of illumination concerning what has really filled my life; [no one] will find that inscription, which is written in the core of my being, that explains everything, and which often makes what the world would call bagatelles into exceedingly important events for me, and which I, too, view as insignificant, if I remove the secret note that explains them.”

The translation of Oplysning as “information” that occurs in both KJN and the Hong’s version of this passage would indeed be defensible if there were no other English term that would work. That is, “information” conveys the sense here of the the Danish term Oplysning. The problem is that there is an English term that not only conveys the sense of Oplysning, but which does so more effectively than does “information.” In fact, there are several better options than “information.” “Information” is not listed as a possible definition for Oplysning in Ferrall-Repp, “Solution,” as in a solution to a riddle is the closest Ferrall-Repp comes. The venerable Vinterberg-Bodelsen, in contrast gives us “illuminate,” “elucidate,” and “enlighten” and these translations are much better than “information” because Oplysning includes a reference to light, i.e., lys. Lower down in Vinterberg-Bodelsen’s extensive list of definitions is “piece of information,” which is undoubtedly why both the Hong’s and KJN chose “information” for their translations, despite that any one of the three definitions that involve metaphorical references to “light” would be preferable.

An argument can be made, in fact, that Kierkegaard chose Oplysning precisely because of the metaphorical reference to light. That is, light is enormously significant in Christianity. Elsewhere, when Kierkegaard means to indicate information in the traditional sense, he generally uses other terms such as Efterretning, as is the case, for example, in the Postscript where he writes “What does it mean to give assurances that one has reflected oneself out [of the immediate] and to communicate this in direct form as information [Efterretning]—what does it mean?” (CUP, p. 281).

There is yet another problem with KJN’s translation of this passage about the “secret note.” I don’t know whether readers will have noticed by this point but some of the above versions of this passage have italics and some don’t. KJN, following the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, has italics, but neither the Hongs’ translation nor my own suggested translation has them. Why not? 

The italics are in the Efterladte Papirer. The question, however, is whether they were in the original? They are conspicuously absent from the same passage in Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, which scholars generally consider to be superior to the Efterladte Papirer.  I’ve written about the Efterladte Papirer before. It is a somewhat flawed first edition of selections from Kierkegaard’s unpublished journals and papers. Indeed, Jon Stewart has an article entitled “An Overview of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. Part Two: the Editions” (Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Vol. 20, Issue I) in which he says that “[w]hen judged from a philological perspective by the standards of today, this edition [i.e., the Efterladte Papirer ] can only be regarded as a disaster.” 

Stewart’s article is worth a read. H.P. Barfod was the first editor of the Efterladte Papirer and Stewart goes into some detail concerning Barfod’s shortcomings as an editor. Stewart even includes a paragraph concerning what he charges is Barfod’s failure to give any account of his use of italics. 

“One thing not mentioned by Barfod,” asserts Stewart,

“is his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining for emphasis. Perhaps the reason that he does not mention it is that he does not follow any consistent rule in his handling of it. In some cases when Kierkegaard has underlined something, Barfod has failed to reproduce it with extra spacing of w o r d s, which was the way in which emphasis was indicated at the time (instead of with the use of italics). However, elsewhere he inserts his own emphasis into the text where there is no underlining from Kierkegaard’s own hand” (Stewart, p. 352).

The weird thing is that, in contrast to Stewart’s claim, Barfod does, in fact, “mention” his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of “underlining,” or Skilletegn, as it was known then, in the preface to the Efterladte Papirer. To skille means to separate, and tegn is of course “sign,” so Skilletegn was the equivalent of italics in the old Gothic, or Blackletter, typeface where italics were not possible. Emphasis was indicated simply by increasing the space between the letters of the word to be emphasized. The use of Skilletegn can be see in the illustration to this post. That illustration is, in fact, a photo of the very mention Barfod makes of his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining, or Skilletegn, for emphasis that Stewart accuses him of not making. 

Is it possible that Stewart did not actually read Barfod’s preface to the Efterladte Papirer before he wrote his “Nachlass” article? That seems pretty incredible. Is it possible that his Danish was so rudimentary at that point that he didn’t know that Skilletegn was the Danish term for italics, which is to say for the emphasis indicated by underlining in hand-written manuscripts when those texts were typeset?  That seems equally incredible, but I can think of no other possible explanations for Stewart’s accusing Barfod of failing even to mention “his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining for emphasis” when he actually devotes an entire, albeit brief, paragraph to precisely that issue.

Roughly translated, the passage from page XV of the preface of the first volume of the Efterladte Papirer reads as follows:

“The correct use of emphasis [S k i l l e t e g n], in contrast, has been difficult, because there has often here been no rule to be discovered in the hand-written [manuscripts]. I was thus forced, with respect to this issue, to adapt the use of emphasis according to what seemed most convincing and I believe that in the majority of instances that I have either approximated or actually captured the author’s own intention” (Efterladte Papirer, Vol I, p. XV).

That is, Barfod directly confesses that he occasionally “inserts his own emphasis into the text where there is no underlining from Kierkegaard’s own hand” (Stewart, p. 352). The original manuscript of this passage must have been lost because the editors of SKS indicate that they have relied for their rendering of this passage on Barfod! Why would they do that when Barfod is notorious, as Stewart correctly points out, for being too cavalier in his approach to standard editorial practices. Not only was he cavalier in that way, he had something of a mania for Skilletegn. He uses them all over the place. He uses them in his preface for every mention of Kierkegaard’s name, as well as for a variety of other terms. Page XIII of the preface includes eighteen uses of Skilletegn. 

If we don’t have the relevant original manuscript any longer, and we know that Barfod was given to inserting emphasis where there was none in the original, what a responsible editor should have done, and what the editors of the Papirer did do, was remove the emphasis that appears in the Efterladte Papirer but which evidence suggests was probably not in the original. 

So we have yet another failure of the editors of SKS to adhere to defensible editorial practices, a failure that then subsequently affected the new KJN. Emphasis is precisely the kind of thing that scholars occasionally seize upon as particularly significant. It seems unlikely to cause any serious misunderstandings of the text in question, but it is not impossible. 

More importantly, the decision of the editors of SKS to follow the Efterladte Papirer rather than the Papirer, when the former is universally acknowledged to be inferior to the latter, is part of a larger pattern of problems with both SKS and KJN (which was based on SKS) that it is disappointing to see in these new editions that were supposed to be improvements on the earlier editions but which it is increasingly clear are actually in some respects regressions to a lower editorial standard.          

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Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on “Original Christianity”

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of George MacDonald. There were a number of conferences held to celebrate this auspicious event. I was fortunate to be able to attend two of them. I wrote earlier about the first conference that took place at Wheaton College last summer. This post is about a conference that took place at Yale University on the 13th and 14th of December. 

I discovered by accident that Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has the largest collection of MacDonal materials of any library in the world. That knowledge encouraged in me the hope that Yale might be willing to host a conference on MacDonald, so I “cold-called” several members of the faculty at Yale to see if there was any possibility that my hope might be realized. I didn’t have to wait long, David Mahan, of Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music responded almost immediately that the ISM could provide us with a venu. He couldn’t promise any financial support, however, so I turned to Drexel in the hope that they might be willing to provide the money we needed. They did! 

Drexel, or more specifically, David Brown, dean of Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, and former Drexel President John Fry, very generously agreed to cover all the costs associated with the conference. That promise was absolutely crucial in making the conference the success that it was because quite a few of the speakers could not count on institutional support to cover their costs. I will forever be indebted to Drexel for their generosity in what are hard times for pretty much every institution of higher education.

The conference was absolutely wonderful. We were treated to a tour of some of the MacDonald materials in the library, and encouraged to apply for the numerous fellowships the library has to support scholars doing research on their collections. There was a truly impressive list of presenters, as well, including Malcolm Guite and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, president and co-chair respectively of the George MacDonald Society, Julie Canlis, Kerry Magrudder, Trevor Hart, and many more. A full list of speakers can be found on the program. 

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, there are lots of similarities between Kierkegaard’s and MacDonald’s thought. Mine was the only paper, however, comparing the two. There is talk of all the papers presented in celebration of MacDonald’s bicentenary being published, so I won’t give you the whole paper here. The paper, “Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on ‘Original Christianity,’” argues that “Kierkegaard and MacDonald share a reverence for the original Christian texts and a healthy skepticism for the official Christian tradition and its tendency to lapse into dogmatism and authoritarianism, that was unusual both for their own time and for ours and that this reverence and skepticism reveals a deep affinity in their thought concerning the true message of Christianity and the nature of Christian life.” Both Kierkegaard and MacDonald, I observe in the paper, had extensive knowledge of ancient Greek and used this knowledge to correct what they felt to be errors in the interpretation of the Christian message. Again, I’m not going to present my entire argument here. I will, however, give you a little taste of the nature of my argument. The paper begins…

“Ad fontes, or “to the sources,” was one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation. It appears in Psalm 41 of the Latin Vulgate (Psalm 42 in most other versions), which reads “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,(desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum) so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” 

The sources, or fonts, as we say in English, of Christian faith are first and foremost the earliest Christian writings, and to access these requires considerable knowledge of ancient Greek. It is not merely the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament that were written in Greek, but also the works of the earliest of the Church Fathers.”

The paper gives a number of example where both Kierkegaard and MacDonald use their knowledge of ancient Greek to defend their own interpretations of the true message of Christianity. The paper, as a whole, is yet another argument in support of the view that Kierkegaard, like MacDonald, was a universalist, and while I didn’t have the space to develop the argument in the detail I would like, I think I made a fairly convincing case, drawing not merely on texts from the works of both thinkers but also on the impressive scholarship of Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan, whose co-authored book Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts makes a very compelling argument that there are few if any references to eternal damnation anywhere in the New Testament. This fact has been obscured by church history which, from the period of at least Augustine onward, has arguably systematically misinterpreted the meanings of these terms. Scholars well-versed in ancient Greek, however, as both Kierkegaard and MacDonald were, would certainly have been aware of the paucity of references to eternal damnation in the New Testament as well as of the fact that the church appears to have labored mightily to obscure this. This fact could actually be one of the reasons that both thinkers exhibit such a healthy skepticism for the authority of various thinkers throughout church history. Interesting, eh?

The Yale MacDonald conference was such a success, that we are hoping to be able to make it a regular event every two, or perhaps three years. So there is time for you Kierkegaard scholars to familiarize yourself with MacDonald’s thought before the next conference!