Siri Hustvedt: The Summer Without Men

Siri Hustvedt’s recently-published novel The Summer Without Men (Henry Holt, Sceptre, hardback, also Kindle) tells the story of the survival of a 30-year-old marriage through a brief and sudden experience of loss and breakdown which leads to a realization of personal integrity. This happens not only in terms of individual experience but also in a broader context that encompasses the generations, from childhood to extreme old age. It’s a moving narrative that is unpretentious in its determination to get to the truth. The style is episodic, at times impressionistic, occasionally making a transition to poetry. It has a place for humour, irony and dry observation, yet also carries a voice that is straightforward and sincere. The evocation of Norwegian-American Minnesota, with it communities, its libraries, its care homes for the elderly and its study groups for children, is delicately and skilfully done. The central theme is the interweaving of life and art, of reality and fiction. At a book club discussion, the participants don’t distinguish between them, regarding “the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outside books. The facts that the former are made of the alphabet and the latter of muscle, tissue, and bone are of little relevance.”

In a sense the book can be seen as a homage by Mia, the novel’s heroine (and by implication the author herself) to “that coy but passionate genius, the Danish philosopher who has been irking and unsettling and bewildering her for years.” As one of Mia’s anonymous correspondents writes: “Who would deny us the mere pantomime of frenzy? We, the actors who pace back and forth on a stage no one watches, our guts heaving and our fists flying?”

More on Kierkegaard

In the last post, I mentioned the unclear situation that still exists with regard to the English translation of Kierkegaard's writings. There appear to be two concurrent projects, one of which, by now virtually complete, is the 26-volume Princeton University Press series of translations by Howard and Edna Hong. The other, which is advertised as a complete edition of all the philosopher's writings, to be completed (published?) this year initially in the Danish original only by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre (SKC) at the University of Copenhagen, will comprise 55 volumes: 28 text volumes and 27 commentary volumes. The Centre's website states that

With its 55 volumes, to be completed by 2009, this is the largest comprehensive edition of Danish literature in a century, if not in all of Danish history.

This Danish edition will subsequently be translated into English, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese.

An electronic version will also be established, containing not only the full printed version, but also the collected drafts for published and unpublished works, as well as the second edition of works, which were published by Kierkegaard himself. The first electronic version was published on the web in 2007.

The site does not give a list of translators, however, and although there is copious information on scholars, researchers and other academic Kierkegaard specialists, there does not appear to be much regarding the principles underlying the translations themselves, or on how these new versions differ from those of the Hongs and earlier Kierkegaard translators.

Kierkegaard resources on the Web

Two websites give extensive access to works by Kierkegaard and secondary literature about him. SKS.DK has a large collection of the printed writings in Danish, including all of the major classics such as Enten Eller, Begrebet Angest and Opbyggelige Taler, while Kierkegaard Resources World Wide, though in need of updating (the site was established back in 2004 by Dr. Julia Watkin of the Howard and Edward Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf's College, Minnesota), has links to many monographs, research papers and other documents, including keys to the philosopher's Gothic handwriting, and to his abbreviations (pdf) and spelling (pdf).

Freely accessible online English translations of Kierkegaard are rather harder to find, though the Internet Archive has a copy of the Alexander Dru translation of the Journals, and also of L.M. Hollander's translation of several works, including Fear and Trembling, Preparation for a Christian Life and The Present Moment.

The English translation of Kierkegaard still seems to be something of a controversial area, and it may be for this reason that most of the out-of-copyright translations still apparently remain undigitized in Project Gutenberg and other online libraries. It would be interesting to know more about this, if anyone has details.

See also in this blog: Herder and Hegel