Piety on Kierkegaard

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.