> Locke Breaux writes:
> 
> Each successive sphere contains the previous;
> the ethical contains the aesthetic, religiousness A
> contains the ethical and the aesthetic; religiousness B,
> that very strange place SK brought us, contains everything.
> Also, be aware, SK often said that what he wrote was not life. 
> Again and again he said that life is truly not factorable
> into neat systems, even his own.  How can it be when truth
> is subjectivity? He only attempted to bring an element of
> discipline to what he perceived as insufferable sloppiness
> on the part of his contemporaries regarding their thinking
> habits.  To an aesthete, the regalia of the church has
> only an aesthetic beauty; something produced by a poet
> which moved into the religious would not appear religious
> to someone ethical; it may very well not appear that way
> to the poet.  However, someone (if it's possible) in
> religiousness B would see each element -- the aesthetic,
> the ethical, and the immanently religious.  Also be aware
> the irony constitutes the borderland between the aesthetic
> and the ethical, and humor is the religious shield --
> the religious incognito.
> 
> I think a poet may be SK's category of a person
> who has the personality and the passion to remain somewhat
> aloof from a very strict categorical adherence... 
> I think also it was his way of being able to say
> anything he wanted about anything he wanted in any way
> he wanted without having to take any existential
> responsiblity for it regarding his own categories --
> he was simply a poet, who had a taste of the religion
> of immanence, the non-Christian religion, the religion
> of the great pagans whom he admired and loved so dearly. 
> From this perspective he was able to dissect Christianity
> into ridiculousness.
> 
> God, I hope we can at last start to have a dialog
> about the down and dirty nitty gritty of SK. 
> Translator schmanslator, what was the man trying
> to say in human terms?

Ernst Meyer's reply:

> Locke Breaux prayed:
> 
> > God, I hope we can at last start to have a dialog
> > about the down and dirty nitty gritty of SK.
> 
> and Eric Goodfield answered his prayer:
> 
> > give those alienated elitist sensitive
> > bastard intellectuals hell Locke! 
> > ...the displaced masses
> > and the budget cutting fascists
> > are right behind you!!!
> > vive le apocalypse!!!!!
> 
> If that ain't about the down and dirty nitty gritty,
> I don't know what is. Nice going, fellas.

To which Locke Breaux is quoted as having replied:
(an original did not appear in my electronic mailbox)

> Now Mr. Meyer, you know that's not what I meant.  And I wasn't praying...
> well, maybe sort of.  Eric's obviously young and full of stuff.  No problem
> with me.  I just seem to continually see dialog moving off of SK into
> questionable alleyways.  I would like to talk about SK.  I notice not one
> word about what I said concerning SK; you chose to spotlight the sensational
> and the somewhat obviously half-in-jest.
> 

Dear Locke Breaux

I very much agree that it is better to talk about Kierkegaard
than about each other, or for that matter, about ourselves.
I failed to comment on your discussion because I could not
identify the texts to which you referred, and because my own
conclusions regarding issues of aesthetics and ethics are too
tentative to warrant independent expressions of opinion.

There are three elements of your letter with which I found 
myself in disagreement. The first is its implicit denial of
Kierkegaard's conventional religiousness. I believe your statement
"... he was able to dissect Christianity into ridiculousness."
to be incorrect. It is, of course, the prerogative of any reader
of Kierkegaard to consider Christianity ridiculous, to consider
Kierkegaard ridiculous, and/or to deny Kierkegaard's patent
Christianity.

You write: "Translator schmanslator, what was the man trying
to say in human terms?" Your words are poetic.  You underscore
your explicit disdain of language by defacing it.  It is a
mystery to me, how you expect to apprehend "what the man (is)
trying to say in human terms," except with reference to the
words that the man actually wrote, and the meaning that those
words had for him and for those who read them.

I have spent a lifetime (fifty-seven of my sixty-six years, to be
exact) living two languages (German and English), embarrassed,
and sometimes pained by my inability (and that of everyone else)
to translate between them.

I am, of course, very much aware that virtually all contemporary
Old Testament theology (including my own) relies on translations.
I recognize that translations are sometimes works of art in their
own right, viz. Jowett's Plato, Tieck and Schlegel's Shakespeare.
But Jowett's Plato is not Plato. Tieck and Schlegel wrote marvelous
German plays; but they are not Shakespeare. I have tried many times
to translate Rilke or Hoelderlin or Hofmannthal, but I cannot do it,
and in my estimation neither can anyone else. I conclude that what
we read as Kierkegaard are the works of art, such as they may be,
of our translators.  They are not Kierkegaard.  The readiness with
which we are prepared to confuse the translator's words with those
of the original. bespeaks nothing so much as the shallowness of our
considerations.

I have not seen the Hong translation of Kierkegaard. I have among
my books various volumes of the Swenson/Lowrie translation,
and the German Gesammelte Werke edited by Emanuel Hirsch. Both
texts contain many passages that are obscure to me. I suspect
that at least some of these were obscure to the translators as
well, and that in the translation of them, the translators colluded
with one another to publish in their respective languages the same
plausible nonsense.  One translates not only words; one translates
meaning; one cannot translate meaning which one does not comprehend,
and the presumption so to translate is literary fraud.

In the appendix to The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, Volume 5,
there is a biographical dictionary, and on page 511, I find
the following entry:

     "Hirsch, Emanuel, (1888-1972); Dt. Theologe; weitgespannte
theologisch-philosophische Interessen, insbesondere auch fuer Luther
und Kierkegaard;  1921-1945 (Pensionierung) Professor fuer Kirchen-
geschichte, seit 1936 auch fuer Systematische Theologie in Goettingen;
1933 foerderndes Mitglied der SS; Naehe zu den Deutschen Christen;
1937 Mitglied der NSDAP ..."

By accident of alphabetization, the next entry in the dictionary
is "Hitler, Adolf."

The editor and a translator schmanslator of my Kierkegaard edition
was also one "Emanuel Hirsch." I wish I could convince myself
that there might have been two.  Meanwhile, whenever I come up
against a passage in "Philosophische Brocken" that perplexes me,
I see a black shirt and a swastika blocking my view. And then
I must ask myself the ultimate question: if Kierkegaard had
been a contemporary of his translator, would he also have joined
the party and become a "sustaining member" (foerderndes Mitglied)
of the SS? I wish I knew.

My third comment addresses "the down and dirty nitty gritty"
about which you desire a dialogue, an aesthetic category
not obvious in Kierkegaard's work, at least not to me; but
readily apparent, if I interpret it correctly in some of
the contributions to this list:

> ... his elitist intellectual scientism sucks...
> read some Lukacs ... and get outta town
> with your philosophical fanfare from on high. 
> 
> Lyle Bate for president
> (and he didn't even mention GOD once!!!!!).
> weeeeeeee
> 
> give those alienated elitist sensitive
> bastard intellectuals hell Locke! 
> ...the displaced masses
> and the budget cutting fascists
> are right behind you!!!
> vive le apocalypse!!!!!

If it were not for the political persuasions of my
Kierkegaard translator, I might dismiss these pseudo-intellectual
graffiti and their incitement to emotional violence as
innocuous amateur Internet vandalism, and perhaps I should
do so anyway, and it is perhaps foolish to take them seriously.
But words, like the medications which a physician prescribes,
may cause unpredictable and sometimes very forceful reactions.
and when I read these replies, I am transported back in memory
to November 13, 1938, and the walk that my sister and I
took that sunny Sunday morning through the Kannengiesserstrasse
in Braunschweig on our way to church. It was four days after
the Kristallnacht. The meticulous Germans had long since swept
their streets free of the shattered glass, and the pavement
had been washed clean of blood. But the boarded-up windows
and the deep fissures in the panes that remained told the story.
"vive le apocalypse!!!!!" writes our correspondent.
So far as I am concerned: One apocalypse is enough.

The Kristallnacht, as is well known, was prepared by a calculated
campaign of verbal violence against its victims.

> give those alienated elitist sensitive
> bastard intellectuals hell 

urges our correspondent. Only an explicit allusion
to the Jews is required to make the exhortation suitable
copy for Julius Streicher's "Der Stuermer".

The thugs of the political left seek to justify themselves
by their virtue visavis the political right, and vice versa.
But I myself don't see the difference, calumny is calumny,
violence is violence, and destruction is destruction,
no matter what its professed political justification.
Subsequent to the "liberation" of Buchenwald, the Communists
established there a concentration camp for *their* enemies,
and demonstrated themselves no less beastly than their
predecessors in violence.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com