Fear and Trembling (review)

Kierkegaard's Frygt og Bæven, the author's meditation on the Genesis 22 narrative, has now been translated into English six times. Several years after the work's original publication, Kierkegaard proposed that, being widely read and translated into foreign languages, the text would become something of a modern classic. Hindsight fully establishes the merit of this forecast. In addition to being far and away the most translated of Kierkegaard's texts, Fear and Trembling continues to be the text through which a disproportionate number of readers are introduced to Kierkegaard, as well the text about which a disproportionate amount of scholarly literature has been and continues to be written. Fear and Trembling is also the first of Kierkegaard's works to merit inclusion in the series of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy.

Structurally, this latest edition of Fear and Trembling compares favorably with previous editions. The editor's introduction—although it, like those of previous editions, bears the unmistakable mark of its author in a number of places—is really the first to do justice to the manifold of openings that precede the advent of the three Problemata (problems regarding the teleological suspension of the ethical, the absolute duty to God, and the ethical defensibility of Abraham's silence, respectively). Calling attention to the peculiar problems attested already in the subtitle of the work, the name of the pseudonymous author, the motto, the preface, the attunement, the tribute to Abraham, and the preliminary expectoration, Evans succeeds in bringing the reader much closer to the point at which a reading of Fear and Trembling may verily be said to begin. Additionally—and while the supplied chronology and suggestions for further reading are merely adequate—the running footnotes and appended index are quite simply superb, and manage to facilitate the entire range of readings to which earlier editions had been variously catered.

As to the translation itself, the translator would presumably call the reader's attention to the work's subtitle, according to which the text is a "dialectical lyric." Such a qualification borders on the oxymoronic and subsequently appeals to two divergent sensibilities on the part of any would-be translator: the technical and the poetic. Add to this the advent of the ostensive problem of (Abraham's) "translatability" in the text itself and one has all the makings of a translator's nightmare. Accordingly, one may as well amend Kierkegaard's forecast to say not only that Fear and Trembling will be translated into, e.g., English (by Payne, 1939), but that it will be translated again (by Lowrie, 1941), and again (by Lowrie, 1954), and again (by Hong and Hong, 1983), and again (by Hannay, 1985), and then, now, again. Admittedly borne upon the successes and failures of these precedent endeavors, as well as the wealth of subsequent commentary and the newly designed Danish edition, the translation supplied by Walsh is arguably the best yet—so long as this qualification is not taken to imply the ideal of the eventual "impeccable" translation daringly anticipated by Lowrie on the occasion of his significantly revised second translation. Indeed, although progressing at a markedly and appropriately slower pace than the commentary thereupon, it would seem that the translation of Frygt og Bæven is a comparably interminable endeavor. Suffice it to say, however, that the reader who thinks to wait for the next "better" edition and translation of this remarkable text will almost certainly be waiting for quite some time.