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

[Mary Kurian D'Souza]

Thank you dear Beret for this vignette.
Mary

On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 1:06 PM Beret Griffith via OE <
oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

>
>    - [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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