Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric with Historical Glossary of Kierkegaardian Terms, trans. Alexander Jech (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2024). Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: A New Translation, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022).
Reviewed by Stacey E. Ake, Drexel University
Translation is a necessary, if occasionally thankless, task. After all the research, the pondering, the debating about whether to be accurate or precise, about whether to use a cultural equivalent or stay with the given idiom, you are then left with trying to see whether it all makes sense. Does it reflect the intent of the author? Does it reflect the historical context? Does the translation communicate the “feel” of the author’s text? Does the translation “speak” to today’s audience? After all that, the translation is published, and you wait for the salvos to drop. For then come the invariable critiques. Someone disagrees about a verb tense. Someone else believes that another noun would have been more apt. Yet another person simply says that you got it wrong.
Is all this a screed to caution you against undertaking translation? No. It is simply to point out that all translations are interpretations. Translation is not transcription. It is not something that can be done by AI. It is not about the words per se but about understanding those words. Both authors discussed here understand the words, but in some cases their interpretations are quite distinct. In part, I believe this is due to their backgrounds—Bruce Kirmmse is an historian and Danish translator of renown; Alexander Jech is a professor of “the practice of philosophy” at Notre Dame. But what also creates the difference between their translations is their intended audiences.
Jech’s translation, published by Hackett, is intended to be a teaching translation. It is an excellent one. It is, like other Hackett publications, aimed at the upper-level undergraduate or graduate student. What makes it an exceptional introductory text is the over 200-page “Historical Glossary of Kierkegaardian Terms,” which makes up more than half the book. This “Glossary” elaborates on many English-language Kierkegaardian terms by giving the original Danish term, the definition and etymology of that term, and cited examples of where it can be found in Kierkegaard’s published works. This makes the book perfect for the student in search of an overview of Kierkegaard’s ideas as well as hints to where those are found within the Kierkegaardian opus.
Kirmmse’s translation, published by Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, is a milder, more religious translation of Fear and Trembling, more sensitive to the reader’s experience of the text. While it, too, could be used as a teaching text, I do not think that is where its best use lies. It seems to be aimed for more personal use. Not exactly as a devotional, but perhaps as something to be discussed in a group setting. It has a phenomenal “Translator’s Introduction,” wherein the translator sets out his approach to translating the text. Perhaps one of the indicators that this translation is meant for personal use, rather than academic use, is the absence of an index.
Now for the translations themselves. Let us start with the Forord. Here is a simple question. Should you translate it as “Foreword” as Jech does (5ff) or “Preface” as Kirmmse does (3ff)? It is a subtle change. Foreword seems more obvious and direct, but Preface alludes to Nicholas Notabene’s Prefaces. Here we are talking about a translation precedent. Does one stay with tradition or does one change it to relate to a new audience? Let’s consider the section title Forelobig Expectoration. While Jech translates it as the traditional “Preliminary Expectoration,” Kirmmse gives a wonderful explanation of why he chooses to translate it as “Preliminary: Getting Something Off My Chest.” It is accurate in terms of what Johannes de Silentio is doing existentially at that moment, but it does not capture the fact that expectoration is something that comes from within the body. Preliminary expectoration is a fancy way of saying “clearing one’s throat,” which is what one does before they have something painful or important to say.
As for tradition versus novelty, how does one translate Viv in the phrase “min Hukommelse er en trofast Viv” (SKS 129)? Since this is a metaphor and not a philosophical point about the feminine, Kirmmse translates it as “spouse” (40), resulting in a more gender-neutral reading. But one must ask, is it possible (or desirable) to create a gender-neutral reading of Kierkegaard? There are other things that are perhaps a little pedantic to inquire about, such as the question of whether it is better to translate Citharspiller (SKS 123) as “lyre player” as Kirmmse does (33) or as “zither player” as Jech does (27). Because this instrument is referred to in the story of Orpheus, the correct translation is “lyre player,” which is a kind of harp. Zither is a completely different instrument. An important question to ask, though, is whether Kierkegaard got it wrong. If so, Jech has the correct translation of Kierkegaard’s text, but Kirmmse is conceptually correct given the actual literary context. In the 1845 Danish-English Dictionary by Farrall and Repp, Cithar is translated as “cithern.” A cithern is a cheap, easier-to-play version of a lute, which evolved into the guitar. This brings up the broader problem of what to do with errors in the Kierkegaard’s original text. Keep them or correct them? For instance, in Problema III, where de Silentio is expanding on a story from Aristotle’s Politics (SKS 182), he uses the term “augers” (Augurerne). Jech points out rightly in a note (113) that augur is a Roman term for a person who observes animals, thus determining whether a course of action is a propitious one. It is not a Greek term. Kirmmse solves this problem by using the word “diviners” (107).
We have yet another challenge: words that have been lost to cultural change within Danish as well as words that have changed within English. At the end of Forord, we have the words Registrator and Paragraphsluger (SKS 103). According to the 1845 dictionary, Registrator means register, but I certainly have no idea what register meant in 1845. Register of wills? Jech has some fun with these terms. Jech translates Registrator as “enterprising archivist” (60). Why not? And Paragraphsluger as “paragraph-gobbler” (60). It certainly has the right feel. Kirmmse, on the other hand, chooses to go for something more elegant and explanatory: a “busy scholarly bureaucrat, who gorges on paragraphs” (7). Again, “paragraph-gobbler” is something that would immediately grab the attention of a younger audience.
There are other differences in translation that may reflect the translator’s background or intent. One of the more curious differences is for the section title Stemning. Kirmmse chooses “Tuning Up” (9ff) as if one were listening to an orchestra before a performance. This makes sense when one considers that the root of Stemning is Stemme or voice. Jech, who has a background in music and an interest in ballet, observes in a note that Stemning in Danish is “an artistic miniature used to establish a particular mood” (15). Moreover, he adds that Kierkegaard made a marginal note about the Greek word for “introduction” in his text. Because of this, Jech chooses the word “Prelude” (11ff).
Now we come to the troublesome word Anfægtelse. In his “Translator’s Note,” Kirmmse makes it quite clear that he will consistently translate Anfægtelse as “spiritual trial.” For Jech, it is another matter entirely. While he acknowledges that it has traditionally been translated “spiritual trial,” Jech chooses to translate Anfægtelse as agon (141ff). I do not know whether he was intending to convey the pain, the agony, that Abraham must have gone through in responding to God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, but the word simply does not work. It is too alien a word in English to communicate any immediate meaning. Perhaps the term “spiritual ordeal” would have worked better as it implies more pain and effort than “spiritual trial” does. Nonetheless, it is good to be reminded that not only the meanings, but the emotional valences, of words change as language evolves.
For instance, when in Problema II it is said that the knight of faith can say “Du til Gud I Himmlne, medens selv den tragiske Helt kun tiltaler ham i 3die Person” (SKS 168), it is meaningless to translate “3die Person” as “third person.” It simply does not reflect English grammar. Both translators explain that “Du” means the informal you in Danish, the pronoun reserved for family and friends. But I think the answer is that the knight of faith no longer needs to say “De” to God, which is the formal you in older Danish. Today, you would still address a member of the Royal Family this way. However, “de” (not capitalized) is the third person “they” in Danish. Did Kierkegaard make a mistake?
An interesting difference between the two translations is how they go about presenting supplementary information. Kirmmse uses traditional endnotes, found, as you might expect, at the end of the book. Jech does something more unusual. He has end-of-each-section notes. At first this was annoying, but it made perfect sense once I realized that he has a “Historical Glossary” at the end of the book. Kirmmse’s endnotes are helpful for explaining Biblical, literary, philosophical, and historical mysteries. However, Jech’s are by far the more detailed. He has been a zealous researcher. I assume many of these notes are to be found in the Realkommetar to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, but one also wonders whether Kirmmse’s Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark as well as the Kirmmse-coedited Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries were not also sources. Furthermore, a scholarly addition to Kirmmse's text is his placement of the pagination of SKS within the book. This enables any reader with his translation to look up questions they might have about the original text. Not only is this invaluable to the person who is beginning to take an interest in Kierkegaard's Danish, it also helps the Kierkegaard scholar move back and forth between the Danish critical edition and the English translation. I hope more translators of Kierkegaard's works follow this precedent in the future.
I do have a question, though. What is the best way to interpret Kierkegaard's historical and literary references? Do we actually know what they are? Or do we merely infer them? If this is the case, what might we be missing? We all have had the experience of reading a text whose allusions are outdated. Many of us have had the experience of explaining such an allusion to students who have nothing in their experience to give it context. The classic example of such a phrase whose context has been long lost is Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” We simply don't know what he meant. Any culture that might have explained this phrase is long gone. Similarly, where de Silentio writes “der har tømt Giftbægeret” in Forelobig Expectoration while talking about the knight of resignation (SKS 136), the cup or chalice refers to the nature of the knight’s love, but what he means by that is ambiguous. Kirmmse agrees with the traditional interpretation: the phrase alludes to the death of Socrates in the Phaedo, where Socrates is given a cup of hemlock to drink as a means of execution (156). Jech gives us a different interpretation (49). He relates it to the story of Tristan and Isolde from Wagner’s opera of the same name. The lovers agree to drink a cup of poison together, which Tristan believes might kill him; however, Isolde’s maid has substituted a love potion. Nonetheless, in the end, both lovers die. It seems Tristan was right.
One can dither about all day talking about picayune differences in translation. It is said that a difference that makes no difference is merely a distinction. A translator can wonder whether the choice of a particular word moves the translation in a different theological or philosophical direction. Does it alter too drastically the “feeling tone” that Kierkegaard is trying to create? These are all valid academic concerns, but they are not relevant to the non-Kierkegaard scholar. They are not relevant to the person picking up Kierkegaard for the first time. Given this, I can recommend both translations highly—with the caveat that they are directed at different audiences. Kirmmse’s is a more personal book. Jech’s text is to be used in teaching. Depending on what you want, decide for yourself which text to read.