Translator’s Note

The English translation of the Notabene corpus printed in the present edition aims at three objectives, which the translator has weighed against one another at every passage and which the reader is asked to bear in mind in receiving the result.

First, the English should convey the period character of Notabene's prose — the long periodic sentences, the courtly mock-deference of the framing fictions, the Heibergian-Hegelian speculative vocabulary deployed at varying degrees of pastiche, the Latin tags and German loanwords sprinkled throughout — without lapsing into archaic-imitation English that would render the volume unreadable to the cultivated reader of the present hour. The translator has aimed at a register that the reader will recognise as nineteenth-century in cadence but not as a costume.

Second, the English should preserve such features of Notabene's Danish as bear philosophically rather than merely stylistically. The doctrine of Springet, the Øieblik, the Indesluttethed, and the Svimmelhed in Vol. VII; the doctrine of the Løfte and of Mediation throughout the corpus; the hiin Enkelte in Vol. II; the Selskabs-Form and the Underforeninger in Vol. V; and the Bekjendtgjørelse in Vols. I and III — these are not arbitrary lexical choices but the conceptual structure of the works. The English retains each of them in italic in the original on first occurrence, with the English rendering supplied as a gloss; subsequent occurrences appear in English alone unless the Danish term has, in the context, acquired a determination the English cannot carry.

Third, the English should not, in pursuit of either of the above, flatten the variation between the corpus's distinct voices. The mock-deferential Notabene of the Forord-volumes (Vols. I, III, IV, V, VIII) differs from the speculative-pastiche Sophiensen of Vol. VI, from the bone-tired anonymous author of Vol. II, and from the openly-signed Notabene of Vol. VII. The translator has aimed at four distinguishable English registers across these four authorial postures, in close correspondence with the four Danish registers Notabene himself deploys.

The translation rests on the principles set out in the Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscentret's Editorial Principles for Critical Editions of Danish Speculative Literature, 1995–2018 (Forskningscentret, 2018), §§ 14–22; the present Note documents the specific decisions of the Notabene case within that broader framework.

The Danish text printed on the verso of each spread is reset from the first-edition (Reitzel 1844–1847) original of each volume, in its own period orthography and typography. The reset is not a facsimile; modern typeface is used throughout, and the layout follows the conventions of the Forskningscentret series rather than reproducing the original page-design. The orthographic and typographic conventions preserved from the originals are the following.

Spelling. The period spelling aa is retained for the modern Danish å (so: Forord, Aand, Aar, Maa, Selskab, Tale; not Forord, Ånd, år, må). Capital nouns are retained where the originals capitalised them, that is, throughout — every common noun begins with a capital letter, in the German fashion that Danish orthography retained through the mid-nineteenth century and abandoned only in the orthographic reform of 1948.

The long-s (ſ) appears only in the title-page settings of the present edition, where it is preserved as a visual signal of the originals. In the body text the long-s is replaced by the modern short s; the convention is the same as that of the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter edition (Cappelørn et al., Gads Forlag, 1997–2013) and conforms to the Forskningscentret's Editorial Principles § 16.

Period diction. Notabene's Danish is the cultivated literary Danish of 1840s Copenhagen, with the period's characteristic features: the post-positive definite article (Manden "the man," Bogen "the book") in idiomatic distribution; the Holbergian and Heibergian phrasings the cultivated reader of the 1840s would have heard daily in the Christianshavn-Bredgade literary district; the German-influenced subordinate-clause constructions (idet, forsaavidt, medens) that Danish prose retained through the mid-century before the late-century turn toward more idiomatic Danish syntax; and the periodic structure that Notabene's longer sentences exhibit at every paragraph. The Danish reset retains all of these features.

Period punctuation. The originals' use of the semicolon in places where modern Danish prefers the comma or period is preserved. Em-dashes are preserved at the originals' length; periodic asides set off by em-dashes are not silently broken into separate sentences. Colons before quoted matter and before lists are retained per period practice.

Compound words. Period Danish constructs compound nouns more freely than modern Danish; the originals' compounds are preserved (Selskabs-Idee, Mediations-Læren, Total-Afholdenheds-Selskab, Indlednings-Paragraph, Aarbogs-Skriverkarl). Where the modern Danish reader would expect a different compound or no compound at all, the period form is retained without modernisation.

The following table reports the principal terms which appear in Danish in italic on first occurrence and which carry, throughout the corpus, the renderings indicated. The full lexicon is given in the electronic apparatus; the table here reports only the terms most central to the philosophical-literary argument of the corpus.

The table is not exhaustive; the complete glossary is in the electronic apparatus. Particular variant renderings in individual passages are reported in the textual apparatus to the relevant volume.

The English text retains the original Danish in italic in three circumstances:

First, in the renderings of the systematic terms reported in § III above, on first occurrence.

Second, where Notabene's Danish prose contains a specifically-cultural reference whose English equivalent would distort the original (proper names of Copenhagen streets, institutions, and customs; titles of contemporary Danish publications; honorific titles such as Etatsraad, Cancelliraad, Justitsraad which have no precise English equivalent and which carry, in the Danish, a determinate civil-administrative meaning the reader benefits from encountering directly).

Third, where the rhythm and structure of a Danish formulation depend on its original lexicon in a manner the English cannot reproduce. In such cases the Danish is given in italic in the body text with the English gloss in parentheses; subsequent occurrences appear in English alone.

The principle is consistent with the Forskningscentret's Editorial Principles § 18 ("Lexis preservation in translation: the case of philosophically-loaded original terms").

Notabene's Danish prose contains, in addition to the German loan-vocabulary discussed in § III, occasional passages in German, Latin, and Greek. The conventions of the present edition are the following.

German. Passages in German are retained in German in both the Danish reset (where Notabene himself preserved the German) and the English translation. The Danish reset prints the German as Notabene printed it (in italic where the original italicised; in roman where not). The English translation prints the German in italic on first occurrence with the English gloss in parentheses, with subsequent occurrences in italic alone. Examples: Mediation, Aufhebung, plötzlich, Sein, Nichts, Werden, Sitte der Zeit, Vollziehen.

Latin. Latin tags are retained in Latin throughout. Notabene's preferred Latin phrases (posito, salva conscientia, captatio benevolentiæ, summa summarum, in subsidio, in vacuo) appear in italic in the Danish source and are retained in italic in the English translation, with brief glosses supplied at first occurrence where the meaning is not immediately apparent to the cultivated reader. Examples: in succum et sanguinem (Vol. VII § 10) is glossed at first occurrence as "into [one's] juice and blood"; posito (Vol. VII § 5) is glossed as "given that."

Greek. Greek phrases are retained in Greek script in the Danish source and are transliterated (with diacritics, in italic) in the English translation, with English gloss at first occurrence. The single substantial Greek phrase of the corpus — sympathēsai tais astheneiais tōn anthrōpōn (Vol. VII § 10) — is rendered "to feel with the weaknesses of men" on first occurrence; subsequent occurrences appear in the transliteration in italic.

Notabene's sentences are, in the prose passages of the corpus, characteristically long: ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-line periods are common. The English translation has preserved the length wherever the period structure is integral to the rhetorical effect of the passage. The reader will accordingly find the English of the present edition more sustained than is customary in contemporary translations of nineteenth-century Continental prose; the translator has aimed at the rhythm of the original rather than at the convenience of the modern reader.

Em-dashes are preserved at the original's length. Where the original sets off a parenthetical aside by em-dashes — and the practice is frequent throughout the corpus — the English retains the dashes rather than substituting parentheses. The convention is consistent with that of the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter edition and of Hong & Hong's Kierkegaard's Writings.

Semicolons in places where modern English would prefer a comma or a period are retained where they bear the original rhythm. The translator has not modernised toward shorter sentences for the reader's convenience.

Italics in the originals are reproduced in the English translation. The original Danish texts make extensive use of italic emphasis; the English preserves it. Where the present edition supplies italic that is not in the originals — typically, for the philosophically-loaded retention of Danish or German terms — the apparatus notes the supply.

References to secondary literature within the apparatus and within the editorial introductions follow the convention of the Forskningscentret's Editorial Principles § 23: author and year (Holm 2011), with page references separated by a comma (Holm 2011, p. 145). Multi-author works are cited by first author plus "et al." (Cappelørn et al., 1997). The Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter is cited as "SKS" with volume and page (SKS 4, p. 339). Søren Kierkegaards Papirer is cited as "Pap." with the standard division (Pap. V B 49).

References to the original works of S. Kierkegaard are cited by short title and section (Begrebet Angest § II.2; Forord, Til Læseren § 3) with the SKS equivalent given parenthetically where a particular passage is at issue.

The translation has been conducted at the Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscentret during the periods 2018–2020, 2022–2023, and 2023–2024, with the institutional support of the Forskningscentret and the financial support of the Norden Foundation of Minneapolis (see the General Introduction, § VII). The translator's particular debts of consultation are to: Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, on the speculative-systematic terminology; Anders Holm, on the philological identification of Heibergian period diction; Frances K. Olafsson, on the principles of the English target register; George Pattison, on the Vigilian-Climacean termi­nological background and on the Anglophone Kierkegaardian translation conventions. The remaining infelicities of the translation are, by the customary formula, the translator's own.

The translator has, throughout the work, consulted: the Ordbog over det danske Sprog (Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 1918–1956, in 28 volumes); the Holberg-Ordbog (Aage Hansen and Sv. Eegholm-Pedersen, 1981–88); the Hegel-Lexikon (P. Cobben et al., Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006); the relevant volumes of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (Gads Forlag, 1997–2013); the Heiberg-arkivet at the Kongelige Bibliotek; and, for the Heibergian-Hegelian Danish of the 1840s specifically, J. L. Heiberg's own Logiske Propædeutik til Ungdommen (1834, 2nd ed. 1837) and the run of his Perseus (1837–38) and Intelligensbladene (1842–44). The principal lexicographical decisions reflected in § III above rest on these consultations.

The translator commits the result to the cultivated reader of the present hour, with the same modesty Notabene himself, in the closing pages of Smaastykker, committed his own works to the reader who would, in the year then beginning, take them up.

— M. F. H. Forskningscentret, December 2024