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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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Kierkegaard on “Reasoning”

I don’t go looking for problems in translations. I find them, usually by accident. My research generally begins with word searches on the online edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Though it is increasingly clear that SKS is not complete, it’s the most complete searchable version of Kierkeaard’s works and hence is enormously helpful. There are links in the hits on word searches that will take me directly to the text in question from which I can then cut and paste into a document of my own the text I want to use. This text is, of course, always in Danish. I could translate it myself into English, but as I’ve written before, I was taught that doing one’s own translation is acceptable only in instances where the text in question does not exist in a translation that has been accepted by scholars. So the next step, after I’ve found the passage I want in the original Danish, is to find it in one of the newer translations of Kierkegaard. I go to the Hongs’ translations first because these are the ones that are generally used by scholars.  Most of the time, the Hongs’ translations are fine. They aren’t always fine, though, as I have documented in earlier posts. Sometimes the problems are relatively minor and sometimes they’re quite significant. I ran across a passage with some problems of the latter sort recently. Not only is the translation problematic, but the problem in question illustrates the danger of over-translation that sometimes happens when translators take themselves, or their responsibility to properly represent the thought of the original author, too seriously. 

The passage in question appears in Two Ages. “What does it mean,” asks Kierkegaard there,

to be loquacious [at raisonere]? It is the annulled passionate disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. As abstract thought, loquacity [Raisonnement] is not sufficiently profound dialectically; as conception [Mening] and conviction, it lacks full-blooded individuality. But in extensity loquacity [Raisonnerende] has the apparent advantage: a thinker can comprehend his branch of knowledge, a person can have a concept [Mening] of what is related to a particular subject, can have a conviction based on a specific view of life, but the loquacious man [den Raisonnerende] chatters [raisonnerer] about anything and everything (TA, 103.)

The Danish text reads:

Hvad er det at raisonere? Det er den ophævede lidenskabelige Disjunktion mellem Subjektivitet og Objektivitet. Som abstrakt Tænkning er Raisonnementet ikke dialektisk dybt nok, som Mening og Overbeviisning er det uden Individualitets Fuldblodighed. Men extensivt gaaer den Raisonnerende af med Skin-Fordelen; thi en Tænker kan omfatte sin Videnskab, en Mand kan have en Mening om hvad der hører til et bestemt Fag, kan have en Overbeviisning i Kraft af en bestemt Livs-Anskuelse, men den Raisonnerende raisonnerer om alt Muligt.

There are several problems here. The first, and to me, entirely inexplicable one, is that the Hongs have translated Mening as “conception” and “concept” rather than “opinion.” Danish has a term for “concept,” it’s Begreb, a cognate of the German Begriff and Kierkegaard makes frequent us of it. Mening, on the other hand, means opinion, as any Danish-English dictionary makes clear.

“[A]nulled” should also, arguably be “sublated,” since the Danish term in the original is ophævede, which is a cognate of the German aufgehoben, which scholars will immediately recognize as a Hegelian term. This term generally appears in English translations of Hegel as “sublated,” hence ophævede, when it appears in Kierkegaard’s works is probably also best translated that way. 

The biggest problem with the Hongs’ translation of this passage, however, is with the translation of Raisonnement as “loquacity.” The Hongs acknowledge themselves in a note that such a translation at least appears problematic in that Raisonnement is a cognate of “reasoning” and, in fact, was translated as “reasoning” in a translation that appeared from Oxford in 1940. “[A]t raisonere,” the note continues

does mean to reason. But it also means the dissipation of reason in verbosity, loquacity, garrulity, and therefore in Danish Raisonneur means “one who uses his mouth” (Ludvig Meyer, Fremmedordbog, 1844; ASKB 1034). On p. 97, at raisonere was changed in the final draft to at snakke. In the draft of p. 97 at snakke and at raisonere are used as synonyms” (TA, 173).

At snakke and at raisonere are not used as synonyms, however, in the final version of the book and this suggests that while Kierkegaard considered them related, he did not consider them to be synonyms.

Raisonneur, or “one who uses his mouth,” does not appear in the passage in question. What the Hongs translate as “the loquacious man” is not den Raisonneur, but den Raisonnerende, which suggests he does not mean to refer to a loquacious man as such, but to someone who is overly fond of reasoning. Ferrall-Repp lists the meaning of Raisonnere as “to reason, argue” and Raisonnement as “reasoning” (the foreign words are at the back of the book). It’s thus likely by den Raisonnerende, Kierkegaard has in mind someone who is overly fond of argument, or publicly debating with others. This, in any case, appears to be the sense in which Kant used räsonniert in What is Enlightenment. Kierkegaard was well aware of Kant’s use of räsonniert because he comments on it in his journals (see NB16:50). That is, den Raisonnerende is not someone who is simply fond of the sound of his own voice, but someone who is fond of rational disputation. The qualification “rational” is important, because otherwise Kierkegaard’s qualification of at raisonere as “abstract thought” does’t make much sense. 

I have an ebook version of the Hongs’ Two Ages, so after I discovered this problem with at raisonere, I did a word search on “loquacious” to see if it occurred elsewhere in the translation, and discovered that the only other place it appears is on page 22 (or thereabouts, ebook pagination is not always exact) where there is a reference to “every loquacious barber.” When I checked the original Danish, though, I discovered that the term there is snaksom, not raisonnerende. 

Snaksom ought properly to be translated as “talkative,” or “chatty,” rather than “loquacious” because the use of “loquacious” is an affectation and affectation was something Kierkegaard abhorred. That’s less important, however, than the fact that using a single English term, “loquacious” to translate what are clearly two quite distinct concepts in the context of the work in question conflates these two concepts for the reader. There’s a big difference between a barber who blathers on mindlessly about “anything and everything,” and someone who endlessly disputes about anything and everything. 

Finally, The Hongs have also inexplicably translated en Mand as “a person.” We might all wish that Kierkegaard had written et Menneske, i.e., “a person,” but he didn’t. He wrote “a man.”. In fact, its not impossible that Kierkegaard thought the problem of excessive cerebration, or the tendency to rationally dispute about anything and everything, was specifically masculine. 

I believe, and will argue in a paper I’m giving in a conference at Princeton next week, that what Kierkegaard says in this passage about what it means to raisonere gives us an important insight into his view of the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. That is, Kierkegaard claims here that reasoning, in the sense in which Kant uses it, brings the two together. It simply does this in a way that for Kierkegaard is imperfect in that it lacks “full-blooded individuality.” There are times, however, such as when one is engaged in the study of nature or history, when “full-blooded individually” is arguably inappropriate. What the scholar and scientist want is objective truth, and that is entirely appropriate for them as scholars and scientists. It’s only when the “reasoning” in question is about what Kierkegaard identifies as as “subjective truth” that reasoning’s lack of “full-blooded individuality” would appear to be problematic. 

I know I am occasionally hard on the Hongs. It’s the job of scholars, however, to be meticulous in their treatment of their sources. That I’m often critical of the Hongs does not mean that I’m unaware that I owe them an enormous debt, as does everyone who works on Kierkegaard in English. They were the first people to do an extensive translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, and I have to say that I prefer the language of that translation to the language of the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. I still depend on that translation to correct the wording of passages in the latter when it seems to me to have gone terribly wrong. 

The Hongs’ contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship is not restricted, however, to their translations of Kierkegaard. They founded the Kierkegaard library at St. Olaf College and that library, and the fellowships it offers, has done incalculable good for scholars over the years. I had one of those fellowships myself, back when Howard was still alive and a constant presence there. He had a little of the vanity that I think nearly every scholar has, but he had a generous heart as well and helped me many times in my stay there at the library. I remember him, and Edna, very fondly. 

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Death and Nonsense

Death has been on everyone’s mind for awhile now. I’m presenting a paper on the topic of death in Kierkegaard at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. As regular readers of this blog will know, I recently completed my own translation of the portion of Works of Love that deals with loving someone who has died. (That translation will appear in print soon, from Gegensatz Press in an edition that will have the original Danish and my English translation of that text on facing pages.) I thought I ought to review Kierkegaard’s other writings on death, as well, to help me prepare the presentation.

One such work is the religious discourse “At a Graveside” from Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. I don’t know whether I had ever read it before. If I did, then it was either in the original Danish or in a translation that preceded the Hongs’ translation from 1993. Until reading “At a Graveside,” I would have said that the Hongs’ translation of The Sickness Unto Death was the most problematic of their translations. “At a Graveside” may actually have it beat, though, for reasons I will present below.

The first indication I had that it wasn’t a good translation is that it doesn’t read well. Kierkegaard’s writing is not always equally brilliant, but it is never bad. This, is bad, though: 

“Death’s decision is therefore not definable by equality, because the equality consists in annihilation. And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living!” 

The expression that the Hongs consistently translate as “decision” here and elsewhere in the discourse, is Afgjørelse. The Danish term that most closely corresponds to the English “decision” is not Afgjørelse, however, but Beslutning. According to Ferrall-Repp, Afgjørelse means “finishing, etc., completion; decision, adjustment, settlement.” “Decision” is there. The definition makes clear, however, that an Afgjørelse is a “decision” in a formal, or legalistic sense, such as the decision of a referee or a judge. This explains, at least in part, why the passage above is confusing. 

Dødens Afgjørelse would be better rendered here as “Death’s reckoning.” 

To make matters worse, not only is Dødens Afgjørelse confusingly translated as “Death’s decision” in the passage above, it’s consistently translated that way throughout the entire discourse, even where it is used as a section heading. This, along with additional translation problems I will detail below, makes the discourse anything but “pellucid” in the manner Gordon Marino claims in his essay “A Critical Perspective on Kierkegaard’s ‘At a Graveside,’” in Kierkegaard and Death. 

There’s more to this lamentably translated passage than the unfortunate translation of Afgørelse as “decision.” The preposition ved that the Hongs have translated as “by” is probably better translated as “through.” “By” is listed before “through” in Ferrall-Repp, but the latter is there as well, and I think it is preferable because Kierkegaard appears to be trying to say that we can’t actually grasp death by thinking of it as the great equalizer, because the equality is established through annihilation and we have no better grasp of that than we have of death. That is, he isn’t suggesting we ever attempt to define death as equality, but that we often think we can come to a better understanding of it by thinking of it as, among other things, the great equalizer.

What about the second sentence: “And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living!” The use of “alleviating” there is unidiomatic. “Alleviating” generally takes a direct object in English. We say, for example, that a particular lotion is good at alleviating itching. We don’t normally speak of something being alleviating for someone. 

The Danish term that is translated as “alleviating” is formildende. Formildende isn’t in Ferrall-Repp. Formilde is though, and it’s defined there as “to soothe, soften, mollify, appease, assuage, alleviate, temper, mitigate.” So once again we see that the Hongs have chosen an English term that could, in principle, be an acceptable translation of the Danish term in question. It just doesn’t work in this passage. 

“And pondering this is supposed to be soothing for the living” is clearly preferable to “And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living.” I’m going to go out on a limb here, however, and suggest that “comforting” would actually be the most idiomatic translation. It isn’t offered as a possible translation of formilde in Ferrall-Repp, but it captures the sense of formildene in this passage. 

Let’s try out our new translation of the passage and compare it with the Hongs’. The Hongs have:

“Death’s decision is therefore not definable by equality, because the equality consists in annihilation. And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living!” 

We have:

“Death’s reckoning is therefore not definable through equality, because the equality is in annihilation. And pondering this is supposed to be comforting for the living!”

The Hongs have interpolated “consists” here. That isn’t really a problem, however, in terms of understanding the meaning of the passage. It’s just what Strunk and White would call bad form in that it’s unnecessary. The real problems are with the Hongs’ translations of Dodens Afgjørelse as “Death’s decision,” ved as “by,” and formildende as “alleviating.” The first, I would argue, is both unidiomatic and confusing. The second suggests an equation of death with equality that is clearly not intended in the original, and the third is unidiomatic. 

There are lots more of the kinds of problems described above. Page 86, for example, has four instances of  the same unidiomatic use of “alleviating” as appears in the passage above. This is arguably simply a stylistic problem rather than a substantive one, but not only is it a disservice to both Kierkegaard and readers of the Hongs’ translation to render Kierkegaard’s flowing Danish in an awkward an unidiomatic English, it can lead to substantive problems. That is, readers may wonder what is being alleviated and why Kierkegaard is being so mysterious about it. 

These are not the worst problems with the Hongs’ translation of “Ved en Grav” (literally, simply “At a Grave”). The Hongs’ inexplicable choice to translate Afgjørelse as “decision” leads to even greater problems in another passage. This one is on page 97 where, in what Ralph Waldo Emerson would refer to as a foolish attempt at consistency, the Hongs translate Uafgjørtheden as “indecisiveness.” Afgjørt is the past participle of Afgjøre, which, according to Ferrall-Repp means “to finish, complete; to decide; to settle, adjust.” It is, of course, related to Afgjørelse, hence the Hongs’ apparently decided to translate it as “indecisive” in order to preserve in the translation a terminological consistency found in the original Danish text. 

The problem is that meaning was sacrificed here to consistency. The passage includes two references to holding death “in the equilibrium of indecisiveness.” It isn’t at all clear, however, what that could possibly mean. That is, the passage does not concern someone contemplating suicide who can’t make up their mind. It concerns our difficulty in grasping what, exactly, death is.

It gets worse. “To paganism,” reads the translation on page 97, “the highest courage was the wise person (whose earnestness was indicated expressly by his not being in a hurry with the explanation [i.e., of death]) who was able to live with the thought of death in such a way that he overcame this thought every moment of his life by indecisiveness.”

What? How can one overcome anything by indecisiveness? Kierkegaard would never say such a thing. If there was anything of which Kierkegaard was contemptuous, it was indecisiveness. By this point, you can probably figure out for yourself how Uafgjørtheden should be translated here. It refers to indeterminacy, or, more awkwardly, undecidability, not indecisiveness. This is made clear in the text that follows. “The wise person,” the passage continues, “knows that death exists [er til]; he does not live thoughtlessly, forgetting that it exists [er til]. He meets with it in his thoughts, he renders it powerless in indeterminability [Ubestemmelighed], and this is his victory over death.”  

Finally, translators of Kierkegaard should avoid, if at all possible, rendering er til as “exists,” because “existence,” i.e., Existens, is a technical term for Kierkegaard. The passage above would be less misleading if er til were translated simply as “is,” or “is [real]” with brackets to indicate that “real” is an interpolation.

How can Gordon Marino have thought that the Hongs’s translation of “Ved en Grav” was “pellucid”? Portions of it are flat out nonsensical. Kierkegaard and Death, the volume in which Marino’s essay on “At a Graveside” appears, is a collection of essays by various scholars. Many of the essays understandably focus on “At a Graveside.” What is less understandable is that none of them mentions the numerous problems with the translation. 

The strange silence of the contributors to Kierkegaard and Death concerning the problems with the Hongs’ translation of “Ved en Grav” reveals a serious challenge to rigorous Kierkegaard scholarship. It would appear that either the impression that Kierkegaard’s writing is often nonsensical even in the original must be so pervasive among scholars that many don’t bother to check awkward and confusing passages in translations against the original Danish, or that knowledge of Danish, even rudimentary knowledge, is so rare among Kierkegaard scholars that most are simply unable to determine problems with translations even when they suspect they may exist.