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C. Stephen Evans wins C.S. Lewis Prize!

Kierkegaard scholar C. Stephen Evans has been awarded the C.S. Lewis Book Prize for his new book for Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The prize, made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, is awarded by the St. Thomas University Philosophy of Religion Project.

“The C.S. Lewis Book Prize,” to quote the St. Thomas U. Department of Philosophy web page, “recognizes the best recent book in the philosophy of religion or philosophical theology written for a general audience.”

C. Stephen Evans, for those few of you who do not know, is one of the finest Kierkegaard scholars working today.  Evans, whose Ph.D. is from Yale, is currently University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University and is a past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers and of the Kierkegaard Society of North America.

Evans’ publications extend well beyond the confines of Kierkegaard scholarship. He’s published numerous books and articles on the philosophy of religion and on Kierkegaard and every single one of them is excellent. Among my favorites (though I’ll confess I haven’t read them all) are: Søren Kierkegaard’s Christian Psychology (Zondervan, 1990), Wisdom and Humanness in Psychology (Baker Books, 1989) and Preserving the Person: A Look at the Human Sciences (InterVarsity Press, 1977; Baker Reprint, 1982). His two books on Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs (or “Fragments” as it was known at the time) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript are far and away the best studies of these works. I’ll not give you the bibliographical info on those books because I want you to go to Evans’ page on the Baylor website to check out his entire bibliography. Anything that is out of print you can probably find on abebooks.com.

One would think that someone so prolific as Evans would have to spend all his time in his study. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every time I write him he replies from some remote corner of the globe where he’s been invited to give a lecture. Far from being a recluse, Evans and his beautiful wife Jan E. Evans, a professor of Spanish (also at Baylor) and scholar of both Unamuno and Kierkegaard, are bons vivants. Fortunate are their dinner companions at the various conferences they attend! (Actually, I’ve long suspected that Evans has an identical twin brother and that one of them is shut away cranking out those books and articles while the other trots the globe giving lectures and learning about the local wines and cheeses.)

No one is more deserving of the C.S. Lewis Prize than C. Stephen Evans. He’s and outstanding scholar and one of the finest human beings I have ever met!

And oh yeah, his new book, God and Moral Obligation, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Congratulations Steve!

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Kierkegaard on the Danish fear of Germany

I was reviewing some of Kierkegaard’s remarks on Germans and Germany recently, when I came across a passage I thought it might be interesting to try re-translating. Neither of the existing translation is a disaster, but each could stand some improvement. The translation below appropriates language from both but improves upon them in some important respects. The language of the Hongs’ translation is surprisingly lyrical with lots of alliteration and so I have preserved much of it in my own translation below. It’s not necessarily better in the sense of being more accurate than is the new English translation, but it reads better and in that sense is, at least in places, superior to the new translation the language of which is more formal than was the language of the original.  The following paragraph is my translation of the passage, which comes from Pap. VIII1 A 531.

All this fear of Germany is fantastical, it’s a game, a new attempt to flatter national vanity.  One million people who honestly admitted that they were a small nation, with each person resolving before God to want to be what he is, would be an immense force; there’s no danger at all in that. No, the calamity is something else entirely; the calamity is that this little nation is demoralized, divided in itself, each man nauseatingly envious of the other, unruly toward everyone who is supposed to rule, petty toward everyone who achieves anything, impertinent and undisciplined, riled up to a kind of rabble tyranny. This creates a bad conscience; therefore people fear the Germans. But no one dares to say what’s the source of the problem [hvor Ulykken stikker]–so one flatters all these unhealthy passions and becomes self-important by polemicizing against the Germans.

Okay, now where are the changes and why have I made them. I’m not going to address every change, but only the ones that merit examination. Many of the changes, such as my “fantastical” instead of the Hongs’ “hallucination” or the new “fantasy,” are purely stylistic (and mine is actually less literal in that the original, en Indbildning, is a noun not an adjective). Some of the changes do merit examination though.The new translation does a better job, I think, than the Hongs’ with the sentence that begins “One million people…” but regrettably uses the abbreviation “1 mill. ppl.” for the original “1 Mill. Msk.”  Kierkegaard often used abbreviations, but to try to preserve them everywhere is not only, as I argue in my review of the first volume of the new Journals and Papers in the Scottish Journal of Theology, an affectation, it’s occasionally even confusing to the reader.

The new translation has “problem” where I, following the Hongs, have “calamity.” The Danish is Ulykken (and later Ulykke without the definite article). Ulykke, according to Ferrall and Repp’s A Danish-English Dictionary (Copenhagen, 1845) is properly translated as “misfortune,” “calamity,” or “disaster.” There is a Danish word for “problem”; it’s “problem,” or in Kierkegaard’s time “Problem.”  “Problem” isn’t a disastrous translation (I couldn’t resist that!), but it’s isn’t a very good one either because it obscures the tone of the original. “Problem” is more neutral in tone than “misfortune,” “calamity,” or “disaster,” and hence takes some of the bite out of the piece, some of the bite that was in the original.

Both the Hongs and the new translation have also inexplicably stuck “root” in the text when it does not appear in the original. The Hongs have “the root of the calamity” and the new translation has “the root of the problem” for “hvor Ulykken stikker.” “Stikker” according to Ferrall-Repp, however, means to “poke,” or “prod,” or “jab,” or “stab.” “Root” works in both translations. The reason I pointed it out is that is illustrates how heavily later translations tend to be influenced by earlier translations.

My complaints with the new translation are generally minor ones that have to do with similar points of style. There’s only one place where I’d argue there’s a serious problem. The new translation leaves out an entire phrase that is actually very important. Where I have “petty toward everyone who achieves anything,” the new translation has simply “petty toward everyone.” “Petty” is better than the Hongs’ “malicious” (at least according to Ferrall-Repp), but the new translation omits any reference to the phrase “der er Noget.” That is, the original reads “smaalig mod Enhver, der er Noget.” The whole phrase translates literally as “petty toward anyone who is anything.” I used a bit of license in translating “er” as “achieves.” I think it makes the meaning of the passage clearer though. There is an important difference between “petty toward everyone,” as the new translation reads, and “petty toward everyone who achieves anything.” In that sense, the new translation is actually inferior to the earlier one. Let’s hope that’s corrected in subsequent printings.

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Publishing News

I have a few miscellaneous bits of publishing news that might be of interest to readers of this blog. First, the URL for my website has changed. It used to have a “www” at the beginning, but it is now simply mgpiety.com. Simpler is better, I think. Unfortunately, the new URL is not the only change to the website. The site used to be hosted on Apple’s Mobile Me, but when Mobile Me closed down at the end of June, I had to move it to another host and the move resulted not only in the name change, but in the loss of several features of the site, such as the one that allowed people to post comments to the entries on my blog Reading Notes. There were quite a few comments, but they were all lost and it appears there’s no way to get them back. My plan is to create an entirely new website. I will probably move it to WordPress, the host of this blog. WordPress is fantastic.

I made another discovery relating to Ferrall and Repp’s excellent Danish-English dictionary from 1845. Not only is it available as an ebook that can be downloaded for free from Google Books, it is now available in actual physical book form. That is, it can be printed on demand for $28.69! Here is a link to the page on Amazon with the details.

Finally, I received and email recently from a journalist at Jyllands-Posten in Denmark. He said they were doing a series on important books published in the last 50 years and planned to include a piece on Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard. He said he’d noticed that I was writing a book on the biography and asked me how I saw the issue today, “almost ten years later.” He said the whole controversy had been largely forgotten in Denmark.

I responded that that was, unfortunately, what I had feared would happen and precisely why I was doing a book on the controversy. Everyone involved tried to cover the thing up. The Danish publisher GAD issued a corrected paperback edition of the book without indicating anywhere that it was a corrected edition. It has the same copyright date as the original uncorrected edition. This information was in the newspapers, of course, in fact Garff was effectively forced to promise in print to produce such a corrected edition, but who is going to read eight-year old newspaper articles, let alone ten or twenty-year old newspapers articles.

The situation is even worse with the English translation of the book. When I wrote to Peter Dougherty, the head of Princeton University Press, to inquire whether the new English paperback edition incorporated the corrections that had been made to the Danish paperback edition, he said he didn’t know what had been done to the Danish edition, but that the new English paperback incorporated 52 pages of corrections. Fifty-two pages–that’s a lot. We’re not talking typos here. We’re talking 52 pages of corrections of factual errors. Just as was the case with the Danish edition, however, there is nothing to alert readers to the fact that the English paperback is a new edition. It too has the same copyright date as the original uncorrected English edition. But where many Danes still remember the controversy, most readers of the English edition don’t know anything about it because the only piece that appeared on it in what could generously be called the popular media in the U.S. was a whitewash in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The controversy over Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard was not merely an indictment of scholarly publishing, it was a particularly ugly chapter of intellectual history more generally. It’s one we can all learn a great deal from though–if we don’t forget it.