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

[Beret Griffith]

I've asked a friend. Will call him this weekend. We just got home. More
Later.

On Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 8:47 AM James Wiegel via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
wrote:

> Thanks for this.  Can anyone point me to the Kierkegaard reference for the
> statement
> “When the external situation produces an internal crisis that raises a
> life question from which we try to escape, it is at that point that the
> question of god is raised”. It would be instructive to access the original
> quote.
>
> With Respect,
> Jim Wiegel
>
> On Aug 30, 2019, at 6:38 AM, Mary Kurian D'Souza via OE <
> oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
>
> 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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