[Oe List ...] How Writing of Kierkegaard was Translated into English

[Beret Griffith]

   - [image: Howard Vincent Hong]

Howard Hong and his wife Edna spent much of their lives translating the
writings of Kierkegaard into English. He taught at St. Olaf College, my
alma mater. I met Howard only a couple of times. His son Erik and his wife
Carol are friends of Paul and myself.

I'm sending along a part of the story of Howard and Edna because we owe our
opportunity to read and reflect on Kierkegaard as a result of their
translation work  which set the context for  the way they walked their talk
in the world. I took these bits and pieces from his obituary.

Howard entered St. Olaf College in 1930 and graduated in 1934. He studied
English  and.... found himself reading Ibsen, whose volumes he had seen in
his father's library. He learned from a biography that Ibsen had been
influenced by Kierkegaard. *The name registered because his father had
spoken of a farmer he knew who owned books by Kierkegaard. He then began to
read Kierkegaard, what little there was of his work in English at the
time.* Howard
was a graduate student in English at the University of Minnesota from 1934
to 1938, when the university awarded him the doctorate. While at Minnesota,
he took a course with the Kierkegaard scholar David F. Swenson. After
graduating, he and his new bride Edna Hatlestad went to Copenhagen, learned
Danish, and translated Kierkegaard's *For Self- Examination* into English.

Their life- work as Kierkegaard translators had begun. It was to include a
six-volume edition of Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers (Indiana University
Press) and the twenty-five volumes of Kierkegaard's Writings (Princeton
University Press). Howard and Edna Hongs were celebrated and honored for
their work as translators. In 1968, they won a National Book Award for
their translation of the first volume of the Journals and Papers; in 1998,
when the Princeton edition reached its conclusion, the Times Literary
Supplement (London) said of it:

* "All honour to the Hongs: Kierkegaard's Writings is one of the
outstanding achievements in the history of philosophical translation." *

Howard Hong taught philosophy at St. Olaf until he retired in 1978.

Howard was appointed to the faculty in 1938, but Howard  won a scholarship
and the Hongs spent that school year in Copenhagen. He taught at St. Olaf
from 1939 to 1941  then left college to work with prisoners of war in this
country during World War II. Then he and Edna worked with refugees in
Germany from 1946 to 1948.

In Germany, with his young family, he was both the director of the Lutheran
World Federation Service to Refugees and the senior field officer of the
Refugee Division of the World Council of Churches. Back in Northfield, he
helped resettle over 250 refugees, chiefly from Latvia. In the refugee
camps, the Hongs saw squalor and lives torn apart by war,  yet they
believed with Kierkegaard's *Works of Love* that "love builds up by
presupposing that love is present in the ground" or basis of human lives,
even under the most desperate circumstances. This book inspired the Hongs
in their work with refugees, and it became their first post-war translation
project.

Howard and Edna also established the Kierkegaard Library, which is housed
at the college and bears their name. This library was originally their
private collection. The core of the Kierkegaard Library is a substantial
reconstruction of Kierkegaard's own library, in the same editions he owned.
The Hongs gave their library to St. Olaf in 1976 and it has become an
internationally renowned center of Kierkegaard research.

 During summer Howard and his family lived at Hovland, next to Lake
Superior, near the Canadian border. He bought many tracts of land around
Hovland, logged over by timber companies and sold for taxes, which he
restored largely at his own expense and according to a plan devised by him
and an experienced forester. The restoration work was officially recognized
and in 2001, he and Edna were given the Minnesota Outstanding
Conservationist Award by the Minnesota Association of Soil and Water
Conservation Districts. The eminent Kierkegaard scholar, Howard  came to
enjoy introducing himself as a "forester".

*Excerpted from Howard Hong's obituary published in the Northfield News on
March 18, 2010*


*NOTE:  When John and Lynda Cock came to Northfield to teach The Faith
Journey Retreat (RS-1 where 30+ people attended) they visited the
Kierkegaard Library and discovered a coincidence....they have to tell that
story.  *

*Beret*
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