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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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End-of-Year Bits and Pieces

The last few months have been packed with Kierkegaard-related activities. There were not the standard two Kierkegaard sessions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego in November, but actually five! You can find a list of the sessions as well as the presenters here.

The papers were of varying quality, but none stood out as particularly bad. I realize that that observation is sort of damning with faint praise. Sadly, however, faint praise is often all that is appropriate with respect to contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. The problem isn’t just that a decent command of Danish is all too rare among Kierkegaard scholars, it’s also that far too many are not familiar with the breadth of Kierkegaard’s writings. Many scholars continue, for example, to view Kierkegaard as sexist simply because they are unfamiliar with the material from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers that I presented in my paper “Kierkegaard on the Paradox of Feminist Progress” as part of a session of the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit and that I have presented here on this blog. 

There are several difficulties here. First, Kierkegaard’s unpublished material collected first in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, and then again in the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, while not complete is still very extensive, so it takes some time to get through it all.

Second is the fact that the short cut of searching for relevant material in the online edition of Kierkegaard’s works is unavailable for scholars who don’t have a very good knowledge of Danish. A little knowledge just isn’t enough because in many instances, there will be literally thousands of hits on a search for a particular term such as Evighed (i.e., “eternity”). There are 149 pages of hits for that term and each page has what appears to be a minimum of ten hits, but which can be greater because each hit will give a number of appearances of the term in question for a particular text. So that’s over a thousand hits for a single term, each of which must be read for its relevance to the topic being researched. One has to be able to scan these hits very quickly to see if they are indeed relevant, and most scholars simply can’t do that. 

Third, as I mentioned above, and have mentioned before, even the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (and the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, which is based on the Skrifter) while purporting to be complete, is not actually complete. Some very important material is missing. That material can be accessed only in the old Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Very few people have a set of the Papirer, though. I did a search just now for a set and couldn’t find a complete one, though I did find this set that has 19 volumes. The listing says that the complete set is actually 20 volumes. My own hard-cover set actually has 25 volumes, though. Three of those volumes are indexes, but that means that a complete set, sans the indexes would be 22 volumes and not 20. 

But enough of the problems with contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. There is other news, both good and bad, to report. The good news first: The Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College is doing its best to improve the quality of Kierkegaard studies. First, they offer courses in Danish during the summer for visiting scholars and will be offering one on translation as well in the summer of 2026. Second, they have launched a new journal dedicated to Kierkegaard scholarship.

Finally, the bad news. Robert Alastair Hannay passed away on the eighth of December. Hannay was an outstanding Kierkegaard scholar, though perhaps not always so sensitive to the depth and influence of Kierkegaard’s religious convictions on his thought more generally. He was rare among Kierkegaard scholars in having had a rigorous analytical training in philosophy and he put that training to good use in his scholarship. He was also an outstanding translator. His translations of Kierkegaard’s works for Penguin are unsurpassed in both their accuracy and readability. Hannay will be sorely missed. 

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Bruce Kirmmse’s Shame

Bruce Kirmmse was a key player in the controversy over Joakim Garff’s book SAK (Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography). Kirmmse did the English translation, which inexplicably included many of the errors that Peter Tudvad had already exposed in the original and indeed appeared calculated to cover up some of the apparent plagiarism in the original.  (See previous blog post, as well as, “Rot in the Ivory Tower.”)

Kirmmse also played attack dog, authoring some articles defending the book in the Danish media.  One of them was a scurrilous, defamatory hit piece against me, “M.G. Piety’s Shame,” published in the September 23-29, 2005 Weekendavisen.  I don’t use those labels lightly; when I saw the article, I consulted with a well-known defamation attorney in Philadelphia, who concluded that the article was defamatory. I didn’t pursue litigation because of a lack of funds (the lawyer didn’t want to take the case on a contingency fee, because he didn’t foresee big damages).

The article has never appeared in English.  I present it below.

I’ve decided to republish the piece here because Kirmmse was recently selected as the keynote speaker at the Seventh International Kierkegaard Conference, sponsored by the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf’s College this coming June. I believe Kirmmse’s scurrilous role in the controversy over Garff’s book makes him unfit to be honored in this way.

Two preliminary points: (1) An astonishing aspect of Kirmmse’s piece is that Kirmmse never reveals anywhere in it that I entered the controversy as a result of the fact that the errors and plagiarisms Tudvad had exposed in the Danish edition of Garff’s book appeared uncorrected in his English translation that was published a year later.  Instead, he accuses me of ”resurrecting” Tudvad’s attack, as if out of thin air and out of spite.  That’s deliberately misleading. I knew about the controversy from the beginning but chose to write about it only after it became relevant to people who were forced to rely on Kirmmse’s translation.

(2) Kirmmse also never revealed in the piece his own self-interest. Not only did he do the translation of SAK, he was being considered to head up the new translation of Kierkegaard’s journals, a project that had been conceived by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, one of Garff’s staunchest defenders, and over which he, Cappelørn, had control in that he could restrict access to the new Danish editions of the journals on which the translation would be based.  Many Weekendavisen readers were likely deceived into thinking that Kirmmse was a disinterested American scholar commenting on the controversy.  Instead, Kirmmse was most likely seeking to deflect attention from Tudvad’s well-documented criticisms of Garff’s book – that is, to deceive and deflect attention from his own complicity and duplicity in his translation of SAK. (See the details in “Rot in the Ivory Tower”) as well as to curry favor with Cappelørn, who had come under heavy criticism for his own role in the SAK controversy.

I realize that I could be accused of not being disinterested in how I’ve translated Kirmmse’s article. So I asked Kirmmse via an email dated 8/22/2012 for the English version of his piece (he didn’t write the article in Danish originally – it was translated by someone else for Weekendavisen).  Kirmmse never replied to my email.  So I emailed him again on 8/29/2012. This time I sent him my version and asked if he had any issues as to its accuracy. Again, he failed to reply. So on September 4, I tried to call him. The only number I had for him was the general number for the History Department at Connecticut College, where he is now emeritus.  The secretary there said she didn’t have a number for him, not even his home number.  She informed me that because he traveled a lot, email was the best way to contact him and reassured me that the email address I had for him was correct and that he was good about responding to email.   Apparently, he doesn’t want to respond.  In any event, I’m confident that I’ve translated this piece accurately.  

M.G. Piety’s Shame

by Bruce Kirmmse

Peter Tudvad expresses surprise, in an article entitled, “SAK Redux” that I, despite my generally positive review of his Kierkegaards København (Books, 2 September 2005) have also been critical of his work. I won’t repeat my review here, but merely point out that anyone who read my article in this paper as well as my longer review in Kierkegaardina 23 (Copenhagen, 2004), will quickly see that in both cases I expressed both genuine praise and serious criticism.

My praise concerns Tudvad’s industry and rigor with respect to uncovering some concrete details that were unknown to earlier scholars. My criticisms were directed at his methodology. His belief in 19th century positivism causes him to believe that one can “discover” the historical truth, and that this exists eternally uninfluenced by “interpretation.” As an historical scholar, I find Tudvad’s methodological assumptions untenable and unsuited to both historical scholarship in general as well as to its sub discipline of biography in particular. Tudvad’s unreflective positivism has, to put it bluntly, caused him to make a category mistake, with the result that he misunderstands the character of biography and it was on the basis of this misconception of the work of biographical authors that he initiated his attack on Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard.

A result of this category mistake was that Tudvad was not entirely clear about what he was doing when he initiated his attack on Garff’s biography. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Marilyn Piety, who decided over the course of the summer to resurrect Tudvad’s year-old attack. Piety knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s an assistant professor of philosophy at a technically oriented educational institution in Philadelphia, has a good knowledge of Danish and had published some articles on Kierkegaard. Her real specialty, however, is the writing of polemical exposés of what she believes is “nepotism” and “corruption” in the academic world, in particular in connection with Danish universities.

It’s clear from her article in The Philosophers’ Magazine (nr. 31, 2005) as well as from her subsequent pieces in the Danish press and her contributions to the public debate on the internet, that she doesn’t have anything new to say. It’s clear that when she ventures out on thin moral ice with, for example, her repetition of Tudvad’s claim of academic misconduct or plagiarism, she attempts to protect herself by asserting that the accusation of academic misconduct “was not my accusation,” that she is “only repeating” Tudvad’s accusations. This morally questionable mode of attack makes it possible for her to do damage while at the same time distancing herself from it. It is worth noting that she earlier conducted herself in precisely the same manner.

In the beginning of the 1990s, when Marilyn Piety lived in Copenhagen and was working on her dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, the rector of the university, the neurologist Kjeld Møllgård, was accused of scientific misconduct in connection with a twenty-year old study. The charge was taken seriously and brought before the Board of Ethics (etisk råd) the body that has jurisdiction over such cases in the Danish academic world. They transferred the case to the Committee on Scientific Misconduct [Udvalget Vedrørende Videnskabelig Uredelighed] who thoroughly investigated it and concluded that all charges against Møllgård proved “groundless.”

Even though Piety lived in Copenhagen in 1994 and thus must have been aware of all the facts surrounding the case–i.e., both the charges against Møllgård and the fact that Denmark’s highest authority for academic ethics had found all the charges “groundless”–she nevertheless publicized them in a full-page article in 1997 (15 August 1997) entitled “Nordic nadir for nepotism” in the Times Higher Education Supplement. She mentioned the charges against Møllgård to support her own charge of pervasive corruption in the Danish academic world, but failed to mention that he had earlier been cleared of all charges. She formulated, in fact, her presentation of the case in such a way that the reader got the impression that the question of Møllgård’s guilt was still an open one. Piety’s behavior in this case was so extreme that the Committee on Scientific Misconduct wrote to the  Times and demanded they print a retraction which was then printed in the paper on the 17th of October 1997.

So far as anyone knows, Piety has never herself issued a retraction or made any public apology for having spread false accusations of scientific misconduct on the part of Rector Møllgård, even though she knew he had been cleared of these charges three years earlier. And even though the charges of academic misconduct that have been advanced against Garff have never reached the stage of a formal investigation (there was no reason for such an investigation), two prominent Danish academics, Thomas Bredsdorff and the director of the Center for Søren Kierkegaard Research, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, investigated Garff’s work in the ligt of Tudvad’s charges and declared publicly that the charges were groundless.

Garff has, in addition, publicly reacted to some of Tudvad’s criticisms, refuted some and promised to take others into account, particularly those concerning concrete historical facts, when the book appears in a new edition. Piety must have known about Garff’s public reaction (both his disagreement with elements of Tudvad’s critique and his willingness to correct some of the errors in a new edition of the work), and she undoubtedly was aware of Professor Bredsdorff’s and Centerleader Cappelørn’s public refutation of Tudvad’s complaint [of academic misconduct]–just as she knew when she wrote her article in 1997 that Møllgård had been cleared of all charges in 1994.

But just as she failed to issue either a public retraction or an apology for her backstabbing of Møllgård in 1997, so is it unlikely that she will do so in connection with her backstabbing of Garff in 2005. As she puts it herself “they are not my accusations,” “I’m merely restating” what others have said. This is a clear pattern in Piety’s behavior. Her method of backstabbing others through insinuation is morally condemnable and should not be taken seriously. Has she no shame at all?

After having unapologetically smeared Møllgård eight years ago by simply “repeating” charges made against him by others, she is now attempting to do the same thing to Garff in an effort to support her claim that there is “something rotten in Denmark” especially in the Danish academic world. Danes have long been sensitive to these words of Shakespeare’s and this is perhaps the reason that the Danish media were willing to publicize Piety’s views without checking her sources. The best way to react to such behavior is perhaps to answer with another quotation from Shakespeare: “Oh shame, where is thy blush” [Hamlet, III iv].

Some additional points:

–At the end of his article, Kirmmse argues that the entire Danish media somehow failed to spot my alleged errors. They didn’t spot them, I submit, because there weren’t any as the Danish media well knew because they had been covering the controversy over the biography for approximately a year by the time my first piece on it appeared.

–Kirmmse never disputes the correctness of any of the points I made in the material I published on Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard. It’s curious as well, that he attempted to discredit my efforts to inform readers of the problems with the English translation of the  book by charging that my points were not “new.” As I explained above, I decided to “resurrect Tudvad’s year-old attack” when the English translation of Garff’s book came out a year after the original Danish edition and I discovered that the problems Tudvad had identified in that edition were in the English edition as well. Kirmmse’s charge that my claims were not “new” was simply an attempt to deflect attention from that fact by invoking a well-known and widely discredited rhetorical technique frequently invoked by the public relations industry and discussed, for example, in Rampton and Stauber’s excellent Trust Us, We’re Experts (pp. 68-69). It is never an indictment of a claim, or argument, to point out that it is not “new.” Many excellent arguments (e.g., those in favor of freedom of expression and equal protection under the law) are not new, but they are excellent arguments nonetheless and bear repeating despite their lack of novelty.

–Kirmmse criticizes me for my pointing out that the charges against Garff’s book were Tudvad’s, not mine. It would have been inaccurate, however, if I had said they were mine. In fact, it would have been plagiarism if I’d repeated Tudvad’s points in print claiming that they were my own. Far from being “morally questionable,” as Kirmmse charges, my identification of the points as having come from Tudvad was morally obligatory. Tudvad was the one who deserved credit for identifying the problems with Garff’s book and I endeavored to be conscientious in making that clear.

–Kirmmse is correct when he claims that I never issued “either a public retraction or an apology” for my purported “backstabbing” of Møllgård in my 1997 article. The Times pressured me repeatedly to do this, but I stood my ground. I wasn’t mistaken in my presentation of the Møllgård case and I wasn’t sorry I had presented it.

–As for checking facts, neither Kirmmse nor Weekendavisen can have checked the facts in the Møllgård case, because if they had, they’d have discovered that the charges of scientific misconduct had been brought against Møllgård, not twenty years after the fact as Kirmmse suggests, but while Møllgård was working as a post doc at the University of California at Berkeley. The investigation had been inconclusive.

–Yes, the Danish Committee on Scientific Misconduct “cleared” Møllgård of all charges relating to the case. I didn’t know about this, however, because it was not widely publicized. Had it been, someone might well have pointed out that a Danish committee did not have the authority to clear someone of charges that had been brought by a U.S. committee.

–It’s unlikely Kirmmse even read my article “Nordic nadir for nepotism.” If he’d had he’d have seen that it was not an attack on Møllgård. Møllgård receives only passing mention in the piece. The subject of the article was, as the title indicates, nepotism in higher education in Denmark, and the point of the mention of Møllgård was that it would be difficult for him to do anything about this problem because an unresolved case of purported scientific misconduct in his past would make him vulnerable to blackmail. In fact, the reason I was aware of the case, which was twenty years old, as Kirmmse rightly pointed out, by the time it made the Danish newspapers, is that someone had apparently dredged it up in an effort to sabotage Møllgård’s candidacy for the position of rector of Copenhagen University. Hence my speculation that the scientific misconduct case would make it difficult for Møllgård to take a hard line on corruption within the university, was well supported.

–Compare the tone of my article “Nordic nadir for nepotism” to the tone of Kirmmse’s “M.G. Piety’s Shame” and ask yourselves which article is more properly described as a piece of character assassination. Kirmmse so misrepresented the content of my article that either he condemned me for writing an article that he had not in fact read and in this way violated academic and scholarly ethics, or he had read the article but deliberately misrepresented its content and in this way violated pretty much every code of ethics.

So anyway, there you have it. Not Kirmmse’s most distinguished work, but perhaps more relevant than some of his other pieces to the issue of whether he’s an appropriate keynote speaker for an international conference on the centennial of Kierkegaard’s birth. It’s a shame the library didn’t pick someone more appropriate, someone such Edward Mooney, the current president of the Søren Kierkegaard Society, or Robert Perkins or Sylvia Walsh Perkins, both of whom have devoted their lives to Kierkegaard scholarship and produced outstanding work, or C. Stephen Evans who’s work on Kierkegaard is unsurpassed, or Alastair Hannay whose Kierkegaard translations for Penguin are some of the best that have ever been done, or, finally, Peter Tudvad, who in a very Kierkegaardian way, has endured a great deal of personal abuse and repeated ad hominem attacks in the service of the truth.