Translator’S Note
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The following translation is based on the third edition of Kierkegaard’s Samlede Vœrker, ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange (Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 1963), which first appeared in 1901–06 and was revised in 1962. A new edition, Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Vœrker, ed. N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen (The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre and Gads Forlag, Copenhagen), is in progress. Several drafts of parts of the Review are to be found in Kierkegaard’s Papirer (a selection of which is published in Penguin Classics as Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. A. Hannay (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1998)), some dating from before the completion of the manuscript of Concluding Unscientific Postscript and probably written just after the publication of Two Ages in October 1845. For reasons of a mainly stylistic nature, some of this material was not incorporated in the final version. Part of A Literary Review was translated by Alexander Dru as The Present Age (Oxford University Press, London, New York and Toronto, 1940), and a complete translation by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, with copious annotation, has been published as Two Ages (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1978). The present English translation is the first to appear under a rendition of the original title.
I am most grateful to Jon Stewart for important matters of detail, to Laura Barber for good advice on drafting this introduction, and to Sue Phillpott for many linguistic, stylistic and other improvements throughout.