- [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*