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Conference News

Genius of GMD

I just returned from an extraordinarily productive annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. There were a total of five Kierkegaard sessions at the conference, and there were very good papers at each session. I will give a full report on the conference soon. 

My post today, though, is about a conference that will take place later this month at Yale University on the George MacDonald. The conference, which is co-sponsored by Drexel University, runs from the 13th to the 14th of this month, i.e., December 2024. It is in celebration of the bicentenary of MacDonald’s birth in 1824.

I’ve written before about the similarities in MacDonald’s and Kierkegaard’s views of Christianity. My own paper for the conference is entitled “Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on ‘Original Christianity’ and concerns the use both thinkers made of their knowledge of ancient Greek to get back to what each considered to be the essence of Christianity. Ad fontes, or “back to the sources,” as many readers will be aware, was one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation. The argument of this paper is 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 makes reveals a deep affinity in their thought concerning the true message of Christianity and the nature of Christian life. 

There are going to be lots of great papers, though, on a variety of subjects from a variety of scholars, including Justin Bailey, Chair of the Theology Department at Dort University, Julie Canlis, author and acclaimed Calvin scholar (her first book was awarded a Christianity Today Award in theology), Malcolm Guite, an internationally acclaimed poet and speaker and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, Trevor Hart, Rector of St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Scotland, and former Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, and many more! And the subjects of the papers run from philosophy and theology, to MacDonald’s views on nature and science, and literature and creativity. A complete list of the speakers can be found on the conference website. Space is very limited, but there are a few places left, so hurry and register. Even if you have never heard of George MacDonald, you will be very glad you registered for this conference! 

Miller Hall, where the conference will take place, is right across the street from Yale Divinity School. Coffee and lunches will be provided, but dinner arrangements will be left to the conference attendees. Even if you don’t know anyone when you arrive, I guarantee you that you will not be eating alone. MacDonald scholars are some of the nicest people I have ever met. They make friends easily and have a real passion for sharing the thought of one of the greatest religious thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century. 

This event is going to be enormous fun! 

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Translation Recommendations

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I have just returned from a wonderful conference at Wheaton College on the thought of George MacDonald (photo at left, courtesy of Ben White). I’ve mentioned in earlier posts how close MacDonald’s thinking is in many respects to Kierkegaard’s. Despite this, however, his thought seems virtually unknown to Kierkegaard scholars, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that mine was not the only paper on MacDonald and Kierkegaard, Mark Lama presented a paper entitled “Hearing the Raven Croak: Lilith, Kierkegaard, & Selfhood.” I enjoyed the paper very much, though I’d have enjoyed it more, I’m sure, if I had read MacDonald’s novel, Lilith.

Lama’s paper led me to the discovery of yet another problem with the Hongs’ translation of The Sickness Unto Death. Lama quoted from Hannay’s translation of that work for Penguin. Hannay has: 

This then is the formula which describes the state of the self when despair is completely eradicated: in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it. (p. 48).

Where the Hongs have:

The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating to itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. (p. 14).

The Danish, however, is:

Dette er nemlig Formelen, som beskriver Selvets Tilstand, naar Fortvivlelsen ganske er udryddet: i at forholde sig til sig selv, og i at ville være sig selv grunder Selvet gjennemsigtigt i den Magt, som satte det (SKS 11, 130).

I actually preferred the Hong’s “rests” from a stylistic point of view. Unfortunately, I have to confess that Hannay’s “grounded” is better, given that the Danish in question is “grunder” and not “hviler.” My guess is that Kierkegaard chose the former because it fit better the somewhat scholarly tone of the book.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Hannay’s translation is, in this instance, superior to the Hongs’ Hannay’s translations (with the exception of his translation of the Postscript) are generally superior to the Hongs’ 

I was discussing this recently with Andrew Davison, until recently Professor of Theology and Natural Sciences, at the University of Cambridge (and sometime priest at S. Clement’s here in Philadelphia) and now Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford. Davison suggested that I should do a blog post where I identified which of the many English translations of Kierkegaard I thought were the best. I do sometimes get emails from people who want me to recommend translations for them, so it seems like a blog post that does that would be a good idea. Take these recommendations with a grain of salt, though, because I have not sat down and made studious comparisons of all the English translations of Kierkegaard. And remember, no translation can serve as a foundation for serious scholarship. 

In general, I would say that the best translations of Kierkegaard are the older ones done by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie. They are still widely available in used bookstores and on abebooks.com. Alastair Hannay’s translations for Penguin are also very good. Under no circumstances, however, should you the translation of the Postcript that Hannay did for Princeton. Something went horribly wrong with that translation as I detailed in earlier posts on this blog. There are assorted other translations, George Pattison has a couple, I believe, as does Bruce Kirmmse. But while Kirmmse has an excellent knowledge of Danish, neither Pattison nor Kirmmse is a writer of sufficient eloquence, I believe, to do Kierkegaard’s prose justice. 

I have a handful of translations by other people that I have not yet read. Among those are Stephen Crites’ translation Crisis in the Life of an Actress, and other essays on drama (Harper Torchbook, 1967), A.S. Aldworth and W.S. Ferrie’s translation Consider the Lilies (London: C.W. Daniel Company, Ltd, 1940), Alexander Dru’s The Journals of Kierkegaard (Harper Torchbook, 1958), and The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle (Harper Torchbook, 1962), and an intriguing The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Gerda M.Andersen, and edited by Peter P. Rohde.

I will check out these translations and let you know what I think of them in later posts.

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Kierkegaard’s Early Reception in Germany

url.jsonA reader of this blog informed me that Walter Lowrie’s translation of Repetition from 1941 contained an essay at the back on all the translations of Kierkegaard into English up to that point. That was actually one of the few older translations of Kierkegaard’s works that I did not have, so I hastily hunted one down on abebooks.com. 

The essay is very interesting. There aren’t any revelations in it for people familiar with the older translations, but there is lots of other interesting information. Lowrie recounts, for example, how he was impressed by “the importance the name of Kierkegaard had acquired throughout the Continent, especially in Germany” immediately following WWI (p. 184). I was aware, of course, that the Germans learned of Kierkegaard’s work even while he was still alive, to say nothing of the period after his death. I’d assumed, however, perhaps partly as a result of Georg Brandes’ attempts in the late 1880s to introduce Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, that Kierkegaard’s work was not actually all that well known among German-speaking intellectuals. That is, I’d assumed that if Kierkegaard had become well known in Germany, that, as an intellectual, Nietzsche, would already have been aware of him. When I learned he wasn’t, I like so many other scholars, assumed that Kierkegaard was a marginal figure in German intellectual history. 

I couldn’t have been more wrong. “I could hardly pick up a serious book,” Lowrie continues, “without finding his [i.e., Kierkegaard’s] name in it. Every writer who claimed to be abreast of modern thought had something to say about him, and every reputable publisher had to bring out something. S.K. had already taken the place of Nietzsche as the literary vogue in higher circles” (p. 184). 

That was revelation to me. Kierkegaard had displaced Nietzsche in early twentieth-century German thought? Of course the popularity of Kierkegaard in Germany in the post WWI period is compatible with his relative obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century. I’m not the only scholar, however, who believed Kierkegaard was a marginal figure in German intellectual history. 

It would have been helpful if Lowrie had included some references to specific works. Unfortunately, he didn’t. Fortunately, we have Heiko Schulz’s excellent essay on Kierkegaard’s early reception in the German-speaking world in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I: Northern and Western Europe. The essay is entitled “Germany and Austria: A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard.” Schulz appears to have tracked down every reference to Kierkegaard in the last part of the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the early part of the twentieth century, and includes references to specific article titles as well as helpful summaries of their contents. Most of the early German references to Kierkegaard appeared, predictably, in theological journals. 

There were early translations as well, Schulz explains however, including Einladung und Ärgernis. Biblische Darstellung und christliche Begriffsbestimmung von Søren Kierkegaard [Invitation and offense. Kierkegaard’s presentation of the Bible and Christian concepts], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, manuscript (Halberstadt, 1872); Sören Kierkegaard. Eine Verfasser-Existenz eigner Art. Aus seinen Mittheilungen zusammengestellt [Søren Kierkegaard. A unique authorial existence. Compiled from his own communications] trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halberstadt: Frantz, 1873); Aus und über Søren Kierkegaard. Früchte und Blätter [From and about Søren Kierkegaard. Fruits and leaves], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halberstadt: Frantz’sche Buchhandlung, 1874); Zwölf Reden [Twelve discourses], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halle: J. Fricke, 1875); Von den Lilien auf dem Felde und den Vögeln unter dem Himmel. Drei Reden Søren Kierkegaards [The lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Three discourses of Søren Kierkegaard], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halberstadt: H. Meyer, 1876) ; Lessing und die objective Wahrheit. Aus Søren Kierkegaards Schriften [Lessing and objective truth. From Søren Kierkegaard’s writings], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halle: J. Fricke, 1877); Die Lilien auf dem Felde und die Vögel unter dem Himmel. Drei fromme Reden.—Hoherpriester—Zöllner—Sünderin. Drei Beichtreden von Søren Kierkegaard [The lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Three religious  discourses—The high priest—The tax collector—The woman who was a sinner], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halle: J. Fricke, 1877); Søren Kierkegaard. Ausgewählt und bevorwortet [Søren Kierkegaard. A selection with prefaces], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Hamburg: Agentur des rauhen Hauses, 1906) (These references are all taken from p. 387 ofSchulz’s essay, though the English translations of the titles are my own).

“In addition,” Schulz continues, “Bärthold translated three complete pseudonymous works: Einübung im Christentum [Practice in Christianity], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halle: J. Fricke, 1878); Die Krankheit zum Tode. Eine christliche psychologische Entwicklung zur Erbauung und Erweckung [The sickness unto death. A Christian psychological exposition for edification and awakening], trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Halle: J. Fricke, 1881); Stadien auf dem Lebenswege. Studien von Verschiedenen. Zusammengebracht, zum Druck befördert und hrsg. von Hilarius Buchbinder [Stages on life’s way. Collected, presented to the press, and published by Hilarious Bookbinder]; trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold (Leipzig: J. Lehmann, 1886) (These references, like those above, are all taken from p. 387 of Schulz’s essay, with the English translations supplied by me).

I’ve always been interested in Kierkegaard’s early reception in Germany because I believe that reception had a strong influence on his reception in the rest of the world. I’ve become more interested in it recently, however, as a result of my interest in George MacDonald. MacDonald’s thought is remarkably similar to Kierkegaard’s. I can find no evidence, however, that MacDonald could read Danish and the earliest English translations of Kierkegaard did not appear until after MacDonald’s death. MacDonald appears to have had an excellent command of German, however, as did most English-speaking intellectuals around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and it seems likely that at least some of his reading would have included German theological journals and possibly even early German translations of Kierkegaard. I haven’t had any time yet to research this. That would require tracking down both what books he personally owned, what books and periodicals would have been available to him in the libraries he used, and going through all his correspondence in search of any mention of Kierkegaard’s name.

That said, MacDonald is himself a profoundly original thinker and if his view of human existence and Christianity is remarkably similar to Kierkegaard’s it is not necessarily because he was influenced by Kierkegaard but very possibly because he and Kierkegaard were similar in other ways, and that they understood easily things that the rest of us have to struggle to understand.