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Some Praise for the Hongs as Translators

I’ve been hard on the Hongs’ translations of Kierkegaard’s works in posts on this blog. My criticisms of the Hongs’ translations don’t stem from any personal animosity. That’s how I was trained. That is, I was taught that scholars needed to be hard on one another in order to push scholarship forward. I sincerely hope, however, that my criticisms of the Hongs’ translations have not blinded my readers to the debt everyone in the community of Kierkegaard scholars owes to them. Where would we be without their years of that selfless dedication? The Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College has been a real force for good, and for scholarly progress in the world of Kierkegaard studies. Don’t take my work for that, though, please check out the library’s website if you are not already familiar with the many programs they offer. 

I first met Howard and Edna Hong in the summer of 1987 when I had a fellowship to study at the Kierkegaard Library. They were both lovely people and wonderful hosts to all the visiting scholars. Howard was a ubiquitous presence around the library, which at that time was housed on the very top floor of one of the classroom buildings and was outfitted with large black slate tables that must have come from some science classroom. It was cool and dark and quite, just like a library should be. It was a wonderful place to work. 

Howard had put together a collection of used books that were duplicates of some of the books in the library. He invited the visiting scholars to purchase, at very modest prices, any of these books that took their interest. My purchases from Howard’s duplicates were the beginning of my own library of works on Kierkegaard. Both he and Edna were, as I mentioned, wonderful hosts. I was only a graduate student at the time, but I felt as welcome in the community there at the library as if I had been a full-blown scholar!

I like to think that neither Howard nor Edna would be offended by my criticisms of their work, that they would accept them in the spirit of commitment to the progress of scholarship, because it is certainly from such a commitment that those criticisms spring rather than, as I mentioned above, any personal animosity. I had nothing but admiration and affection for both of the Hongs, and for everything they did to advance Kierkegaard scholarship. I’m able to engage with Kierkegaard’s texts in the manner I do, at least partly because of the work they did before me. Everyone in Kierkegaard studies is enormously indebted to the Hongs for their selfless commitment to the promotion of Kierkegaard’s thought. 

I’m, therefore, deeply honored to have been invited to be the keynote speaker at the 10th International Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College this summer and thought I would use this occasion to highlight some places where one of the Hongs translations has corrected some errors in an earlier translation. 

I’ve decided to focus on Works of Love because I am currently reading through it with Mark Lama, a newcomer to Kierkegaard studies, but an enormously talented scholar with a truly enviable affinity for Kierkegaard’s thought (check out this fantastic post by Mark on a mathematical metaphor in Works of Love)! And while reading through it, I’ve discovered several places where the Hongs’ translations, both the older translation for Harper and Brothers (1962) and the new translation for Princeton (1995), correct errors in the Swensons’ translation (Princeton, 1946). I generally love the Swensons’ translations, but there is no getting around that there are actual errors in their translation of Works of Love. 

The first of the Swensons’ errors concerns the translation of Kierkegaard’s “Christenhed” as “Christianity” on page 39. The Danish for the passage is:

Det kunde rigtignok synes, at da Christenheden nu saa længe har bestaaet, maa den vel have gennemtrængt all Forhold og  — og os Alle. Men dette er et Sandsebedrag. Og fordi Christendomen har bestaaet saa længe, dermed er jo dog vel ikke sagt, at det er os, der har levet saa længe eller saa længe været Christne. (SKS 9, p. 53.)

The Swensons have:

It might certainly seem that since Christianity has now existed for so long, it must by now have penetrated every relationship—and all of us. But this is an illusion. And because Christianity has existed so long, that is certainly not saying that we have lived as long, or have so long been Christian. (p. 39.)

The Hongs’ translation from 1962 has:

It might well seem that since Christendom has existed so long now it must have penetrated all relationships—and all of us. But this is an illusion. Because Christianity has existed so long it cannot thereby be said that it is we who have lived so long or have been Christian for so long. (p. 60.)

That is, the Hongs correctly translated Kierkegaard’s “Christenhed” as “Christendom” and Kierkegaard’s “Christendom” as “Christianity.” The passage is clearly talking about two different things, the enduring nature of Christian culture, or what one might think of as the visible church, on the one hand, and the enduring nature of genuine Christian faith, or the invisible church, on the other hand. 

Unfortunately, the newer Hongs’ translation for Princeton appears to make the same mistake as the Swensons’ translation (see page 46). My own experience with the copyediting that is done by publishing houses leads me, however, to believe that this was likely not an error on the Hongs’ part but on the part of some editor at Princeton. This belief is supported by the fact that both the second edition of Kierkegaard Samlede Værker, or “collected works” (which is generally considered the best of the three editions of the Samlede Værker), and the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter have first “Christenhed” and then “Christendom” in the passage in question and the Hongs knew well how each of these terms should be translated.

The next error in the Swensons’ translation occurs in the context of an analogy Kierkegaard draws between learning to read by first learning the alphabet and only later learning to recognize the letters in the combinations that constitute words. No child, observes Kierkegaard, has ever deluded itself that it could read long before it could spell. “But in spiritual matters, how seductive! Does not everything here begin with the great moment of the resolution, the intention, the promise—where one can read as fluently as the most accomplished lecturer presents the most practiced reading.” The problem, Kierkegaard points out, is that one then has to go out and live according to one’s resolution. That is, one has to conform one’s will and subsequent individual mundane, or everyday, actions to one’s great resolution. But how is one to do that? “[J]ust as it is with spelling,” Kierkegaard explains, “which separates the words and takes them apart” so that the meaning of the whole is lost, the mundane actions of everyday life do not stand in an obvious relation to the meaning of one’s great resolution (Hongs’ p. 133). 

That’s a pretty straightforward, and yet hugely important, point that the Hongs get right. Unfortunately, the Swensons seem to have been confused by the presence of the definite article on the end of the Danish “Stavning,” or “spelling” (the definite article is enclitic in Danish), and hence rendered Kierkegaard’s “Stavningen” (SKS, 136) as “the spelling which tears the words apart into letters” (Swenson, 109 emphasis added) with the result that it looks like Kierkegaard is talking about a particular kind of spelling, or a particular approach to spelling, when he is simply talking about spelling in general.  

The most egregious translation error in Swenson’s translation, though (or at least the most egregious I have found so far) occurs on page 126 where the Swensons have:

[F]or this is just the mystery of love, that there is no higher certainty than the beloved’s renewed assurance; humanly understood it is unconditionally to be certain of being loved, not of loving, since it is superior to the relation between friend and friend (Swenson, 126).

Does that make sense to you? I have to confess that it does not make much sense to me. The Danish is:

[T]hi dette er just Kjærlighedens Gaade, at der ingen høiere Vished er end den Elskedes fornyede Forsikkring; menneskeligt forstaaet er det, ubetinget at være vis paa at være elsket, ikke at elske, da det er at staae over Forholdet mellem Vennen og Vennen (SKS 9, 157.)

The Swensons appear to have been confused about the function of “er det,” literally “is it” but in this instance more properly understood as “it is.” That is, it actually qualifies “ikke at elske” or “not to love,” rather than “ubetinget at være vis paa at være elsket,” or “unconditionally to be certain of being loved.”

The Hongs, thankfully, again, get it right. They have:

[T]he very enigma of love is this—that there is no higher certainty than the beloved’s renewed assurances. In the human sense, to be absolutely certain of being loved is not to love, since this means to stand above the relationship between friend and friend (Hongs, 156). 

It might be tempting to assume that Kierkegaard is contrasting erotic love here with friendship. It is precisely friendship he is referring to in this passage, however, because the passage concerns Christ’s repeated question to Peter “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” That is, Kierkegaard is talking about Christ’s very human need to be loved by his friend, Peter, and loved in what philosophers call the preferential sense, or “more than these” (John 21:15-17).

I’d like to close with reference to what it is tempting to think of as a very mundane sort of error in the Swensons’ translation. That is, the Swensons translated “Vor Pligt at elske de Mennesker, vi see” (SKS 9, 155) as “Our Duty to Love the Men We See” (Swenson, 125)! I kid you not, Swenson translates the Danish “Mennesker,” which even a beginning student of Danish knows means “human beings” not “men,” as “men,” hence lending credence to the view that Kierkegaard was sexist, or even worse, a misogynist! Fortunately, the Hongs, again, get this right!

I don’t mean to suggest that I have suddenly done an about face on my view of the Hongs’ translations. I still prefer the the Swensons’, and Swenson-Lowrie translations, as well as Alastair Hannay’s translations for Penguin, to the new Hongs’ translations for Princeton from the perspective of style. I think it’s important for me to acknowledge, however, that there are instances where the Hongs get points of translation correct, where some of the works I prefer on stylistic grounds do not. I think it’s also important to point out that I like the style of the Hongs’ translations of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers for Indiana University Press, better than the style of much of the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks from Princeton. Just as is the case with the Hongs’ translations, though, style was sacrificed by the team that produced the Journals and Notebooks for what they were hoping would be increased accuracy and certainly the commitment to accuracy is a laudable one. 

My hope is that translators of Kierkegaard will one day get beyond what I believe is the false dichotomy of style vs. accuracy. We can do that, however, only by being relentlessly meticulous in both our reading of Kierkegaard and our holding one another to account in how we read him. This, I believe, is the responsibility of all scholars. At least that is what I was taught by my scholarly mentors, and I believe they were correct. We make progress by pushing one another forward, so a little rough and tumble is just as it should be. 

That said, by “rough and tumble” I mean holding one another to account for the quality of our scholarship by exposing flaws or weaknesses in it. I emphatically do not mean that it is ever acceptable to engage in ad hominem attacks of one another, or to misrepresent the substance of one another’s scholarship in an attempt to discredit it, etc., etc. There is too much of that now in the scholarly community, and not only is it contributing, I believe, to the diminishing esteem in which the humanities are held by the general public, it is antithetical to the objective of all scholarship — the search for truth. I’m sure the Hongs would agree with me there.

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Debunking the Kierkegaard Myths

kierkegaard2_360x450Kierkegaard kept voluminous journals. It’s reasonable to assume from that that his would be an easy biography to write. In fact, it is fairly easy to write a biography of Kierkegaard and quite a few have been written including David F. Swenson’s Something About Kierkegaard (Augsburg, 1941), Walter Lowrie’s A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton, 1942), Johannes Hohlenberg’s Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Pantheon, 1954), Henning Fenger’s Kierkegaard, The Myths and their Origins (Yale, 1980), Alastair Hannay’s Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge, 2001), Joakim Garff’s Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton, 2005), Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard: A Single Life (Zondervan, 2016), and most recently, Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart (Allen Lane, 2019). What isn’t so easy is to write a biography that is genuinely revealing, that delves beneath the surface facts of Kierkegaard’s life and his own well-known observations on them to show something of the man behind the biographical myths.

All the existing biographies give essentially the same picture of Kierkegaard, a picture that has been cobbled together from Kierkegaard’s journals and accounts of some of his contemporaries. They present him as a somewhat reclusive, oddly attired, physically misshapen, passionately religious melancholic from a similarly passionately religious melancholic family. There is little question that the “passionately religious” qualification is correct. Kierkegaard came from a devoutly religious family whose spiritual roots were in the individualistic tradition of the Moravian Brethren, and they maintained their connection to this denomination even while enjoying membership in the official Danish Lutheran Church.

The picture of Kierkegaard as a melancholic loner who was the product of an unhappy childhood comes largely from his own observations about himself in his journals. Even Fenger and Garff, both of whom point out how careful Kierkegaard was at crafting the image of himself that he wanted to survive his death, give too much credence to what Kierkegaard writes about himself. Scattered among the many reminiscences of people who knew Kierkegaard are clues that suggest the narrator of the journals is unreliable.

Kierkegaard writes repeatedly that his childhood was unhappy. Observations of the Kierkegaard household, however, by visiting friends and acquaintances invariably describe it as warm and happy, presided over by loving parents who took conspicuous pride in their children’s abilities and accomplishments. See, for example, the reminiscences collected in the section entitled “Barndom og skoleår” (childhood and school years) in Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard (memories of Søren Kierkegaard) (Reitzel, 1980).

Kierkegaard describes his father as profoundly melancholic. There is little evidence, however, to support that Michael Pedersen suffered from depression until very late in his life after his second wife, and the mother of his children, died and then his children began to die off, one by one, in early adulthood. Kierkegaard’s older brother, Peter Christian, gives a similar picture of the family, and it is well known that he struggled with depression himself. But again, there is little evidence that this was a serious problem until after he lost his mother and siblings to death and after he lost his first wife shortly after their marriage.

The death of a loved one naturally leads to depression and to lose one’s children is reportedly one of the worst kinds of losses. Peter Christian lived through the death of nearly all his siblings, as well as the death of his first wife, and added to the grief of those losses was the undoubtedly disturbing spectacle of his once strong father’s own struggles with grief. That both Kierkegaard’s father and his older brother suffered from depression later in their lives makes perfect sense. That in itself is not sufficient, however, to support that the family had any sort of congenital predisposition to depression, or that Kierkegaard’s childhood home had been characterized by it. My point is not to argue that the traditional picture of Kierkegaard’s family and childhood is necessarily wrong, but simply that there are reasons to doubt it.

Kierkegaard describes his father as authoritarian, yet it is well known, as a contemporary, Peter Munte Brun observes in Erindringer, that the elder Kierkegaard encouraged his children (his male children anyway) to debate with him on points of philosophy and theology. Michael Pedersen may well have been authoritarian in some respects, but most devoutly religious heads of households insist, if they are authoritarian, on conformity on intellectual matters and, in particular on points of theology. So if Michael Petersen was authoritarian, it was not in the traditional sense.

But if this negative view of Kierkegaard’s family and childhood home is inaccurate, why do we find it in Kierkegaard’s journals? There are two possible reasons. The first is that the Romantics tended, paradoxically, to have a positive view of melancholy—it was romantic. Kierkegaard was steeped in the Romantic worldview and appeared to enjoy thinking of himself as a romantic figure. Second, many of his accounts of his family and childhood that support this view were written after the family experienced the tragic losses referred to above, hence Kierkegaard’s later view of his family and this period of his life may well have been negatively affected by these losses in the same way that his brother’s likely was.

Part of The Corsair’s merciless caricaturing of Kierkegaard included depicting him as hunch-backed with trouser legs of two different lengths. Was Kierkegaard hunchbacked? Most accounts of contemporaries make no mention of this purported deformity and the medical records from Frederiks Hospital, where Kierkegaard breathed his last in 1855, include no reference to it. There are a few accounts of Kierkegaard from contemporaries that describe him as “slightly hunched” (Erindringer, 67-68), but that’s very different from saying he was hunch-backed. Strangely, even Fenger gives too much credence to the view that Kierkegaard was hunch-backed. There is actually no evidence, however, to suggest that Kierkegaard suffered from anything more than poor posture, or what is sometimes referred to as a “scholarly slouch.” Even that is largely conjecture given that the few references we have to this purported physical characteristic of Kierkegaard date from the period after he was portrayed this way in the caricatures published by The Corsair when people’s memories of Kierkegaard might well have been influenced by those caricatures.

Were Kierkegaard’s trouser legs of two different lengths? Anyone who knows anything about Kierkegaard and gives this idea a moment’s thought will realize that it’s extremely improbable Kierkegaard would ever have appeared in public in such poorly-tailored attire. Kierkegaard was a notorious flâneur whose excessive tailor bills were the bane of his father’s existence. This is likely the reason, in fact, that The Corsair chose to depict him as poorly attired. Nothing would have irked the vain Kierkegaard more than being presented as anything less than impeccably dressed.

I address the myth that Kierkegaard was reclusive in a publication that will appear shortly, so I won’t scoop myself by going into that issue here. Suffice it to say that it makes little sense to suppose that a well-known flâneur could also have been a recluse.

So there you have it. More support could be presented, of course, to challenge each of the prevailing myths about Kierkegaard that turn up in nearly every biography of him like so many bad pennies. Again, my point here is not to argue that there is no truth to these myths, but only to point out that there is reason to suppose that there is less truth than has traditionally been thought.

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Remembering the Dead

9d1af61698cd834326cd38729144efaa--mourning-jewelry-opalineI’m on sabbatical now. My plan had been to use this time to finish Fear and Dissembling, the book I have been working on for many years. I’d conceived that plan, however, before my father died, and since his death I’ve found it hard to get back to that project. I’ve actually found it hard to do anything constructive. I need to do something, though, to occupy my time until my powers of concentration have returned, something worthwhile, so I have hit upon a project that I have so far found very therapeutic. I am translating the chapter from Works of Love entitled “The Work of Love of Remembering the Dead.” My plan is to find a publisher for this little book so that it can be available as a comfort to people who have recently lost someone they love. It will be a very slim volume because the chapter is only ten pages or so long, so even with the original Danish text on facing pages, a translator’s introduction, a preface, and very wide margins, it should come in well under a hundred pages.

I think it should have very wide margins because wide margins make for a more attractive page. The volume I am envisioning will be small and thin and beautiful, something that the bereaved can carry around with them, like a breast-pocket New Testament; something they can find comfort in, not merely because of the words, but because of the beauty of the object itself. There is something comforting about beauty. People realize this at an instinctive level. That’s the reason, or at least part of the reason, for mourning jewelry. That’s also part of the reason, I believe, why there is so much work on the relation between aesthetics and religion.

I have pasted the first two pages of my translation below. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I favor what is known in translation theory as “semantic translation,” or translation that endeavors to preserve the sense of the original, or “source,” text but which tends to be freer than “literal” or “faithful” translation (see Peter Newmark, A Textbook of Translation). Hence I have taken a few liberties in the text below. The term “graveyard” (i.e., Kirkegaard) does not appear in the original. Where I have “go out to a graveyard,” in the second paragraph, the text actually reads “gaae ud til de Døde” ––i.e., “go out to the dead.” My husband thought, however, when I gave him the text to read, that this might be a little disorienting to the reader, so he suggested that for at least this first reference to “de Døde,” I substitute “graveyard” for “the dead.” That seemed to me a good suggestion, so I have taken it.

I have also added, at my husband’s suggestion, more paragraph divisions than exist in the original. The entire text below is only two long paragraphs in the original, and that is also, I fear, a little disorienting.

I used both the Swensons’ translation from 1946 and the older Hongs’ translation from 1962 as guides. The Swensons’ translation is, unsurprisingly, generally superior to the Hongs’, but even it is not without problems as I will explain in detail in the eventual “Translator’s Introduction.” For now, the only translation issue I want to draw your attention to, in addition to the aforementioned one, is my choice of “reduced circumstances” for Kierkegaard’s “indskrænke sig.” That, I hope you will agree, is a clear improvement on both the Hongs’ “cut back,” and even the Swensons’ “restrict itself.”

But read the text and judge for yourself.

When, for some reason or other, a person fears he will be unable to maintain a general grasp of something complicated and complex, he tries to make, or to acquire, a brief summarizing concept of the whole –– to help him maintain his grasp. Death, in this way, is the shortest summary of life, or life reduced to its shortest form. That’s why it has always been so important to those who reflect on the meaning of life, frequently to test what they have understood about it by means of this short summary. For no thinker has such a command of life as death has, that powerful thinker, who is able not merely to think through every illusion, but to grasp it in its parts and as a whole, to think it to nothingness.

If then, you become confused when you consider the many and various paths life can take, go out to a graveyard, there “where all paths meet” –– then the grasp becomes easy. If your head swims from constantly observing and hearing about life’s diversities, then go out to the dead; there you have control of the differences; there in “Muldets Frænder,” “the fellowship of mold,” there are no differences, only close kinship. That all human beings are blood relations, that is, of one blood, this consanguinity is often denied in life, but that they are of one mold, are related through mortality, cannot be denied.

Yes, go again out among the dead, so that you can, from there, get a view of life. This is what a sharpshooter does. He seeks a place where the enemy can’t hit him but from which he can hit the enemy, and where he can have the requisite calm for taking aim. Don’t choose the evening for your visit because the stillness of the evening, of an evening spent among the dead, is often not far from a certain exaltation of mood which strains and “fills one with restlessness,” creating new mysteries instead of solving the old ones.

No, go there early in the morning when the sun peeps between the branches, alternating light with shadow, when the beauty and friendliness of the sea, when the singing of the birds and the multitudinous life everywhere almost allows you to forget that you are among the dead. It will seem to you as if you have arrived in a foreign country, a place unfamiliar with the distinctions and confusion of life, a childlike place, consisting entirely of small families. Here is attained what is sought vainly in life: equality. Each family has a little plot of land for itself, of approximately equal size. Each has more or less the same “view.” The sun can easily shine equally over them all; no building rises so high that it cuts off the sun’s rays, or the nourishment of the rain, or the wind’s fresh breezes, or the songs of the birds, from a neighbor. No, here everyone is equal.

It happens sometimes in life that a family that has enjoyed wealth and abundance must accept reduced circumstances, but in death, everyone must accept reduced circumstances. There may be minor differences, perhaps six inches in the size of a plot, or that one family has a tree, which another inhabitant does not, on its plot. Why do you think there are these small differences? It is to remind you, by means of a profound jest, of how great the difference was. How loving death is! For it is certainly loving of death to use these small differences to remind us, through edifying humor, of just how great the difference was. Death does not say “there is absolutely no difference”; it says “you see there how great the difference was: six inches.”

If there were not these small differences, neither would death’s grasp be completely reliable. Life returns, in this way, in death, to childishness. Whether one owned a tree, a flower, a rock, made a great deal of difference in childhood. And the difference hinted at what later in life would appear on a very different scale. Now life is over and this little hint of a difference among the dead remains to soften, through humor, the memory of how things were.