Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 39: January 2000

Style in the Translation of Kierkegaard

by

Alastair Hannay

We sometimes think of a writer’s style as a kind of signature, a mark that makes that writer’s work immediately recognizable. Not all writers have a style in this sense, not even all great writers in the “canon”, and even when they do, often it takes an expert to point out just what features make up a writer’s special mark or signature. Given the diversity of styles often said to be represented in his writings, as well as the special sort of secrecy which he seems to preserve concerning his own personal attitudes to what he wrote, one might think that Kierkegaard’s writings had no style in this sense, that is, that they lack a signature. And yet how often don’t we hear people say that for all the diversity of genres in the works, the lyrical, the dialectical, the edifying, and so on, as well as the distance-creating pseudonymity, they bear unmistakably the stamp of being written by this single individual and no other?

In an age so used to hearing of the death of the author, this notion of a signature will raise some suspicions. Whatever else the notion of a signature means, it surely cannot, must not, mean that the author himself is still somehow present in his work? But it isn’t always quite clear what those who proclaim the death of the author are really denying. If it is simply to insist that an author’s writings can be judged independently of whatever particular designs and intentions may have inspired them, then at least the notion of a signature should not disturb them, for the signature in our sense is a character of the texts themselves, a feature bestowed by the author on the very words before our eyes, just as much as any ordinary signature. There is, on the other hand, and as I shall argue, a sense of style as form in which in judging, and interpreting, Kierkegaard’s works his designs and intentions do indeed have to be taken account of, though it is another question whether and in what sense this implies that the author is still alive in his works.

We may not unfittingly seek guidance here in the works of perhaps the most influential proclaimer of the death of the author himself, the French critic, Roland Barthes. Barthes see the 1850’s, Kierkegaard’s time, as a time of literary crisis. This post-1848 period of upheaval and deracination in Europe saw the beginning of modern capitalism and the splitting of the society Barthes was most interested in, that of France, into sharply defined classes. Literature, and Barthes is thinking of French literature in particular, suddenly found inself having to justify its own existence. The focal concepts for Barthes are form and style. Hitherto form was not something writers had to take into account other than by demonstrating an ability to conform with certain self-evident norms of “conciseness,” “order” and “grace.” Otherwise a writer’s form was little more than a “ready-made instrument…the working of which was handed down unchanged without anyone being obsessed with novelty” (Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) (trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Writing Degree Zero, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 62). But now, from about 1850, style became the focus, so that from this time on “writing [was] to be saved not by virtue of what it exists for, but thanks to the work it has cost” (p. 63). The image of the writer now becomes that of, as Barthes puts it, a “craftsman who shuts himself away in some legendary place, like a workman operating alone, and who roughs out, cuts, polishes and sets his form exactly as a jeweller extracts art from his material, devoting to his work regular hours of solitary effort” (ibid.).

Few will disagree that the description fits Kierkegaard, an extraordinarily versatile craftsman for whom style, though a “later task” to be looked after once the thoughts had acquired their own form (see Papirer XI 1 A 214), was an essential ingredient in his work. And few will disagree that, in a quite straightforward sense, the value of Kierkegaard’s work lies in what it cost him as a writer. But the costs by which Kierkegaard’s works are to be valued are not exactly those Barthes has in mind; they are the costs of personal self-development in which the reader too is meant to be involved. However, there is indeed that aspect of style which is due to the craftsman’s labour over regular hours and solitary effort, and the relevance of this for the lonely efforts of translators is obvious enough, so I shall begin with these.

How can we hope to reproduce the craftsmanship of the original without also being a craftsman of the same calibre in our own languages? And without having spent at least as many solitary hours on developing our styles? Even if a translator perhaps never really can reproduce the signature of the original, partly because–as I shall suggest–signatures are too deeply embedded in the craftsman’s own language for that, what must none the less be possible is to “do justice” in one way or another to that style. By that I mean, at least negatively, that the translation does not impose a style that is inappropriate, so that an absence of style might be more fitting if there is no other way doing justice to the original. Naturally, no word-by-word translation will do that, for style is not carried on the backs of words, and the fatal hazard of translation lies exactly in the way or ways in which style and eloquence get lost on the way.

I have spoken here for convenience of a writer’s signature, something which we can call an author’s personal style. But there are further sides to this notion which complicate the translator’s task further. For after all, the most natural way of describing this signature is to say that it is this or that individual’s own way with his or her language–not with language as such, which is too abstract a notion to capture what we mean here, but with the language which the author is at home in, in this case Kierkegaard’s Danish, a language which he said he loved. A style in this sense, where we find it–and if Barthes is right then in all major authors at least from the last one hundred and fifty years we do find it–is the individual mark of the writer. Let us call this the singular end of the scale of style. By that I mean that style in this sense can pertain to other things too, to features of writing identificable not so much in the work of individual writers as in the linguistic practices of the language community within which they write. But by “style” we can also refer to the way of writing characteristic of one or another genre, one or another use of language–in the law court, speeches, at ceremonies, and all the way down to instruction manuals. Especially in this latter instance style, as also “genre,” need not be tied to a given language community or to any one given natural language.

But the notion of a linguistic community can be extended further to embrace all in a position to understand a certain discourse, for instance the discourse of computer instruction books in whatever language. Style in this sense is a manner of writing adapted to an end. Unlike literature, in Barthes’s terms, there is quite obviously something the writing is for, and even if the fulfilment of the purpose of, say, a repair manual, calls for a certain craftsmanship on the part of the writer, it is not the kind of craftsmanship out of which a writer develops a personal style. On the contrary, the stylistic rule here is to abide by certain standards, if not of grace, at least of conciseness and order.

Since we are talking of manuals, and for the benefit of those who may be unfamiliar with his work, I would like to refer here to Barthes’s Elements of Semiology. This itself is in effect a manual. In it, for our instruction, Barthes locates “style” in relation to the well-known Saussurean langue/parole distinction. Much of the history of Frence semiology can be read as a series of attempts to make the refinements necessary for this distinction to have some empirical application. Barthes’ contribution to this enterprise is to distinguish degrees of “idiolecticity” (my term), the term “idiolect” being one that had been introduced to the discussion by Roman Jakobson (“Deux aspects du langage et deux types d’aphasies,’ Essais de Linguistiques générales, ´ Éditions de Minuit, 1963, p. 54). As the etymology suggests “idio-lect” means something like language as used by the individual–not necessarily, and perhaps not possibly a language which only one individual can use, that is to say entirely private, but individual all the same. We can see that, because they have to do with use, idiolects lie on the side of language (langue) rather than parole (speech), and yet they tend in the direction of the latter. Indeed, if you allow the notion of an idiolect to stretch far enough, the idea of langue seems almost to vanish from signt and acquire the status of an abstraction.

What has this to do with style? Well, Barthes locates style somewhere between the total idiosyncracy of aphasia on the one hand, where language-use includes no assimilation at all of the verbal patterns of a langue (therefore, as he points out, a “pure” idiolect in Jakobson’s sense) and, on the other, the notion of the language of a linguistic community, a community which, just because we so describe or delimit it, exists inside a set of shared, mutually available, verbal patterns, This is of course still not language or langue as such; it is the notion of a language-group whose members “read” each other without difficulty because they are always in a position to read each other in the same way. For Barthes, then, style in his sense is the individual writer’s own way with words where the words are nevertheless verbal patterns belonging to, and partly defining, a community and its tradition (see Elements of Semiology, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 21).

This sounds painfully obvious, but it contains an important point all the same. The language in which our singular stylist writes has itself the quality of an idiolect. By the language I am not referring here, in the first instance, to Danish as such, or to any time-slice of that language; I am referring to something smaller and more local than either, namely to the community of educated Danes for whom Kierkegaard wrote. There is, I think, in any locally defined language something we might call the characteristic feel and manner of its everyday usuage and use, perhaps particularaly among a certain group, e.g. the group of talkative, educated coffee-bar frequenters and coterie members in mid-nineteenth century Danmark. If we can refer to this community as a linguistic one in something like Barthes’s sense, that is, by virtue of a mutual understanding based on community tradition and shared patterns of words, then the problem of translation can be expressed as a challenge measured in terms of the idiolectic distance a translator must traverse in order to render what is characteristically colloquial in one language to another language–to another language which may not be characteristically colloquial at all. Some translators will be faced with greater distances than others, not because they lack synonyms in their own language for the words of the original, though that can also be true, but because their idiolect differs more rather than less from that of the community from within which the translated author, in our case Kierkegaard, wrote.

But now let us push this notion of idiolectic distance even further to reach the Danish language as such. The reason I suggest we do this is my own experience on first hearing Kierkegaard’s text spoken in Danish. It seemed “infinitely” (as Kierkegaard would say) much more natural than any translated version I had heard or read aloud to myself including especially–even though the languages are superficially very similar–Norwegian, which I myself have used a great deal in my teaching. And the same no doubt applies to Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese, The Danish language has a special quality at least as much among Scandinavian languages as in its relation to other languages, or at least those with which I am acquainted.

I don’t quite know how to express the elusive feature that characterizes Danish as such, if indeed there is such a feature. One way of trying to get at it might be to say that Danish, at least to me, and I make this distinction partly through a comparison with Norwegian, is a talker’s language, even a language that, to put it a little whimsically, likes to be talked. Of course all natural languages are to be talked, but some talker’s languages are the product of people who enjoy talking, delight in talking, the result of an emphasis on talking and articulate sociality, abrasive, or harmonious, amusing or challenging as the case may be. Danish can be compared in this way with Irish and also the English spoken by the Irish, as against the English spoken by the English themselves which, in its cultivated forms is not an enthusiastic talker’s language. That at least is my own impression. And for the translator, unless he or she is fortunate enough to be an Irish English-speaker or some other equivalent, it poses a major problem and challenge, namely that of reproducing this feature in a language which lacks the essential orality of Danish.

In one way, this may set a limit to a translation. Just as an author’s eloquence easily gets lost in translation, so too may the natural feel or style of the language he or she writes in. These things may, in some cases, simply have to be left behind. That would be the case if the only way of reproducing them would be to do so in a style which in the translating language would be unnatural, eccentric, or some cheapened version of what counts as characteristic of that language, so that the dignity of the original would be lost. This is simply because the characters of languages do significantly differ. I am not sure how great a problem this actually is for translators of Kierkegaard, bu t I am suggesting that the problem is there to consider at the outset in any case of translation where style is important. What it means in effect is that we should perhaps resign ourselves to the fact that translation, even good translation, of Kierkegaard, even the best, if some measure of optimality were at all available, will give us something we might call another Kierkegaard, a Kierkegaard substitute but not a repetition, or to avoid complications with that Kierkegaardian concept I should perhaps say, not a “repeat” of the original.

Whatever we think of this idea of Danish itself as an idiolect whose idiosyncrasy is to be a talker’s language, it is clear that Kierkegaard regarded his own writings as distinctively oral in character. Kierkegaard tells us himself that he prepared much of what he wrote by reciting it over and over again as he walked the streets of Copenhagen. Writings that are prepared by internal recitation in this way should be read at least half aloud, in the way one would speak it. As we know, Kierkegaard says in his journals that the point of his special punctuation was to give the reader clear indications as to how accents should fall; and in this connection we should perhaps not forget Kierkegaard’s enduring interest in and constant references to the theatre.

The challenge here, then, for the translator is to be able, over and above the task of reproducing what might be abstractly called the literal content of the text, to find a rhythm and in a general style that bears and indeed invites recitation rather than silent reading, at least where that is clearly appropriate. One should recognize and bear in mind that Kierkegaard’s writings, in spite of their admired literary qualities, are not literary in the ceremonious sense that they are appealing first of all to the reader’s sense of style, form, use of terms etc. Although Kierkegaard was no doubt a self-conscious stylist, there isn’t a crumb of the portentous in his writings; there is movement and purpose and stimulation at every step. This might even be called part of his “signature,” but if so not in the sense referred to above that defines style as what a writer makes of hisown language, for these characteristics can be found in any language’s literature. What it means in practice is that in translating Kierkegaard we have to try to provide our sentences with a rhythm that conveys the movement and purpose of the Danish.

Danish, as many other languages, particularly in their parole character, makes use of many small words whose place and sometimes very presence are due to the requirements of rhythm. This can become merely a bad habit of speech, but even written Danish contains a host of “vels,” “jos,” “dogs,” netops” and the like, which if you carry them over into the translation with “indeeds,” “neverthelesses,” “precisely” and so on, because of the totally different phonetic structures of these latter, altogether destroy the rhythm. In English, at least, the semantic functions, or perhaps better “forces,” of these words can often be rendered in other ways which make translation redundant, though of course well placed “howevers” and “indeeds” may (indeed!) play their rhythmic role.

Kierkegaard’s texts, as I read them, are therefore talking, even talkative, texts, though the style (in the sense of what is appropriate to a genre, what I think Barthes would call an écriture) can veer towards solemnity in certain cases, as is proper to certain forms of utterance, for instance in a church, and in others to plain garrulousness–though there are passages and even whole works in which the expression of thought is reduced to almost telegrammatic bareness, with telling effect, as it can be in speech itself, as we all know. Think of the opening of SUD, and indeed of that work as a whole, particularly Part One.

Ideally, a translation aims to sound as though it were the original version of the work. As we all know, that is a goal which can very rarely be achieved. I myself did once almost achieve it, but the example provides a timely warning. Early in my translating career I wrote a translation which was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, and the reviewer praised the translation by saying there was little or no sign that the book had not been written originally in English. The work in question was an elementary introduction to semantics, used in an obligatory propaedeutic course at Norwegian universities, the so-called “examen philosophicum.” It was in fact my first translation. At the time I knew virtually no Norwegian, so of course if there were any niceties of style in the original I was unable to detect them. Apart from the drudgery of looking up words, the translation was easy, really. With enough words in my mind at a time, enough for a whole thought, say) the task was simply to make nice-sounding English sentences; nothing else stood in the way, no style, not even the Germanic syntax of Scandinavian. The words simply reassembled themselves in my mind in an English way, expressing what I took the original to be saying. This was possible because the genre, or the écriture, was one with which I, as a philosophy graduate, was already familiar, and for which I already had a “ready-made instrument.”

The instrument was the style appropriate to this kind of work for those whom I had been educated; so the translation looked like a reasonably fluent, English-style textbook. But of course this was my style, not the author’s; or rather, it was the way I would naturally write within that genre. In Norway that genre could have quite another style, and the author might have had his own signature within that style–though as I was to learn later the original had lost any signature it may once have had by being tampered with over seven editions by the author’s assistants. The translation gave it a style where it had none, but this style was that of a craft I had learned elsewhere. Since then all the difficulties a translator faces have gradually become clear to me, as I learned to appreciate the styles and rhythms of Norwegian and its character (or characters) as a language. Necessarily, as matters of syntax, style, eloquence and the rest gradually came to view and posed their challenge, things have become increasingly difficult. And then, of course, I had to overcome the convenient illusion that Norwegian and Danish are pretty much the same except for the sounds.

In a very obvious sense, this translation of mine was a bad one. However, not all translations require to be good in the sense in which this one was bad. Introductions to semantics and to logic do not need a style, any more than do manuals for operating personal computers or repairing tractors. These may and do have (though they often conspicuously fail to exemplify) their appropriate écritures, but the writing here is not one in which eloquence or style play a part. The translator therefore does not have to reproduce such a style. Not that there are not other problems facing a translator of manuals, for example the expertise required of those who write in that genre.

But Kierkegaard’s works are not instructional. Nor, indeed, are the majority of the texts that have generally been called philosophical. There are interesting differences, however, which also throw some light on translating Kierkegaard, who as we all appreciate is not a philosopher in any straightforward sense. This is a significant fact for the present discussion. It really means that in Kierkegaard’s time–the time of transition to which Barthes refers–there was no genre to which Kierkegaard could attach himself, no ready-made instrument to employ (though he had his models, as for instance in the writings of Poul Møller). But when he died Kierkegaard could well be said to have created not only an entirely new genre–a new écriture, perhaps several, or a style that allowed for a proliferation of sub-styles. The question is, in contrast to the instructional text whose style is to lack style, in what way the element of style does enter these new genres.

The fact that there are big differences in the degree of dependence of style on content and vice versa is obvious, both in literature and philosophy, and in combinations of these–which is perhaps where we should be looking for Kierkegaard’s special écriture. This can be illustrated with examples from antiquity. It is commonly held, for instance, that Aristotle is more translatable than Plato, and Euripides than Aeschylus. Why? Both Plato and Aeschylus employ poetic forms of expression, indulge in word-play, use allusions, write rhythmically, and make studied use of cadence and dramatic effect. Aristotle, on the other hand, left us only lecture notes, the style, if any, being in the manner of Aristotle’s delivery. Euripides presented situations, placements of characters, with the dramatic or tragic relations clearly revealed, there is no attempt to entrance the audience with the language itself, as one might be tempted to say was the case even with Plato–though the Plato we learn is more often presented in the stylelessness of the tractor repair manual.

But how, it might be asked, could Plato’s style add more to the theory of forms than we are told in a good summary from a respectable textbook? That is another question. It is the question of whether style is something the translator must convey in the translation, if the text is to do the job its author intended. It is, to put it in another way, the question of whether style, in this sense, whatever that might be once we had spelled the notion out in all its complexity, may not be, rather, an essential part of what the author is trying to convey. We can also put this in another and perhaps more telling way by asking, Might not what we are calling style here be essential to how the author intends the reader to apprehend what his texts conveys? Might it not be essential to, let us say, the attitude we are to take to the content, or to the “message” as one says, or as Climacus calls it, the “what”? That might be true even if the attitude we were supposed to take was one of doubt, or initial distance of irony for example, even doubt as to what attitude (other than doubt) we were to take to it at all, that being left to us, the reader, the single individual.

Thus, in the word that has come naturally to the surface here, might not an “ironical” style be intended by the author to make the author treat with scepticism or at least a spirit of questioning but also receptiveness what is conveyed in the letter of the text? Even more, might not the style, in this sense, be the important thing just because it is the attitude (or doubt about attitude) that matters most, the “how” (in terms of Climacus’s distinction) being the paramount thing, not the “what” of the “message”? Might we not even go so far as to see some light cast on the matter by the McLuhanism “the medium (the style in this case) is the message”? For the translator, of course, he “what” must also be dutifully rendered and put across, but the style would be crucial and indispensable and an inability to capture it a serious and indeed fatal failure.

I don’t want to press these questions more here because they involve issues of interpretation which take us far beyond the problems we have come here to discuss. They are intended merely as a kind of frame for a discussion of style, though I’m sure the frame itself could benefit from some discussion. At least we can appreciate that on the scale that begins with operating instructions, repair manuals, and logic primers, and goes through Aristotle and on up to Plato, there is a distinct possibility that although Kierkegaard must obviously be placed closer to Plato than to Aristotle (and to Aeschylus than to Euripides), quite probably he lies even further away from the repair manual than does Plato, Which, if true, means that in Kierkegaard’s case capturing the style is not just a professional duty on the part of the translator, it is essential to rendering what Kierkegaard is actually putting across, what he wants us to have in our minds, what our attitudes are to be, when we read and grasp his text.

As I noted at the beginning, Barthes identifies the period around 1850 as a critical time for literature. He describes this in terms of form and the new cultivation of literature as craftsmanship. As I said, no one will deny that the picture fits Kierkegaard as far as the form of the craftsman is concerned. I also pointed out that the costs for Kierkegaard were not limited to the production of style. The notion of form is interesting here because it lets us see in what way Kierkegaard’s writings do not fit Barthes’s dichotomy. For Kierkegaard himself saw the value of his works in their use, not in the cost of his own labour. What is important for him is not the signature but the expression of what Kierkegaard calls the “idea” (also a problem for English translators of the philosophical terminology used by Kierkegaard, which is alien to most Anglo-”Saxophone” philosophers). For Kierkegaard the notion of the idea is in fact linked to that of form. Consider, relevantly enough in this context, his use of both notions in his Literary Review. Generally, form is opposed to rawness. The individual is contrasted with the crowd by virtue of the presence of form in the former but not the latter. The crowd is raw because no idea enforms it–on the Aristotelian analogy it is mere matter, or stuffness. Form is bestowed by the idea. It can take the shape of a group as against the crowd, for a group may be formed by individuals who share an idea, as was characteristic of the revolutionary age which Kierkegaard contrasts with “the present”. But Kierkegaard uses the contrast here to indicate that the genuine or authentic appropriation of the idea is in the way it enforms the single individual’s will, the Idea itself coming to its own finally and not before in a way that guarantees that it is the will of a single individual.

Generalizing, we can say that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings present a variety of Ideas in their appropriately living forms. We could also say that the characteristically Kierkegaardian addition to the Aristotelian notion, in which individuation is simply being another piece of matter, is to make individuation in the personal case of matter of the way in which an idea is appropriated and put into action. If Aristotelian soul is the human form of the body, Kierkegaardian spirit is the individual manner of the human being’s appropriation of its Idea. The writings are designed to engage the reader in a process of self-reflection which leads to what in his own life Kierkegaard has come to believe is the proper way could then be said to correspond in a certain way to different styles, different écritures, and the pseudonyms to represent different outlooks with their corresponding styles, all of which in the case of an ideal translation need to be detected and reproduced.

And yet there is a danger in going too far in this direction. As I noted at the beginning, for all the variety of écritures in Kierkegaard these are not the works of different personalities in any literal sense. Kierkegaard was no schizophrenic; nor did his sufferings include multiple-personality disorder. It is even less true that he is anywhere in the neighbourhood of that all-purpose literary hack, the master all styles who is himself present in none. So as translators, for all the variety of styles we have to contend with, we are not freed from the task of finding Kierkegaard’s own distinctive voice. The texts are to be treated neither in isolation from each other nor in isolation from their author.

But then we return to where we began and the problem of reproducing the work of a craftsman with his unmistakable style. And on top of that we now have the complex problems arising from the fact that Kierkegaard’s craftsmanship was in the service of an entirely new kind of writing, a writing that fits neither of the alternatives of Barthes’s dichotomy. Certainly it is a novel way of writing, but part of its novelty is that it derives its value from its use. Therefore it is not a writing whose value is to be assessed simply by the work that has gone into it. We can say that the style of craftsmanship plays an essential part in this purpose; but then we must remember that the craftsmanship in question is that of a master of a language which possesses its own distinctive character, a language which anyone with a sense for Kierkegaard’s work and not born to Danish must forever regret is not his or her own.