Acknowledgments and Notes
Acknowledgments and Notes
In presenting these parables, I wish to express special gratitude to W.B.J. Martin, who conceived the idea of this collection with me in 1959; to the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the Association of Theological Schools, who provided supportive grants for this project; to the University of Texas and the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary for many resources extended to facilitate its accomplishment; to Clayton Meyer, Randall Berkey, and Lloyd Parrill for valuable research assistance; to Dean Bard Thompson and Dean James E. Kirby of Drew University for their constant encouragement; to the many bright students in my Kierkegaard seminars at Drew, and the seminaries at Princeton, Claremont, and Phillips; and above all to my principal mentors in Kierkegaard studies, the late H. Richard Niebuhr of Yale and the late Will Herberg of Drew.
I express special thanks to the Princeton University Press not only for their wise counsel in the development of this project, grounded in their long term interest in Kierkegaard in English translation, but also for allowing me a certain editorial freedom to make modest stylistic revisions [in brackets] in the translations, and in the case of certain parables to change Walter Lowrie’s translation of “Du” from “thee” to “you,” and to modernize usages like “wouldst.”
The following parables are used by permission of the Augsburg Publishing House: The Silenced Petition, Solomon’s Dream, The Storm, The Untouched Food, and The Diagnosis. The parables entitled Boredom, The Wager, The Jewel on Thin Ice, The Swindler and the Widow’s Mite, The Button, The August Holiday, and The Imagined Rebellion are by permission of Oxford University Press. The Confessor and the Penitent, The Self-assured Policeman, The Interrupted Wise Man, The Two Artists, The Costume of the Actor, The Man Who Walked Backwards, The Prompter, The Dangerous Instrument, and The Needlewoman are by permission of Harper and Row and William Collins & Co., Ltd. The parable in the Introduction, p. x, is by permission of A. & C. Black, Ltd. The remainder of the parables are by permission of Princeton University Press.
With the exception of two parables, all parables in this collection are from English translations of Kierkegaard’s Samlede Vaerker (hereafter SV), the preferred English translations being indicated in the Bibliography. Copious parabolic materials from the Papirer, although excellent in quality in many cases, were not included in this selection on the grounds that (a) they would be so extensive as to justify separate treatment, perhaps in a subsequent volume, and (b) they were written, for the most part, not for publication, but as parts of a private journal or recollection, and thus constitute a distinguishable type of writing requiring special treatment beyond the range and space limitations of this volume.
The parable title and the lead question that introduce each parable in this collection are not found directly in the text but are in most cases unmistakably derived from the text or its context. They will assist the reader in locating quickly the issue or dilemma to which the parable speaks as a metaphorical response. The format I have chosen bears certain similarities to the tradition of the rabbinic mashalim, which focus on a single theme, begin with a dilemma or paradox, and are referred to by definite titles.
In this edition, following Hong and Hong’s format in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, a series of five periods ( ..........) indicates a break or pause point (sometimes a dash or colon) found in the Danish text and in the English translation, whereas three dots (...) indicates an omission I have made in editing the text to eliminate excursi or extraneous materials.
Finally, I have scrupulously honored Kierkegaard’s specific request in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “A First and Last Declaration,” that “if it might occur to anyone to quote a particular saying from the [pseudonymous] books, he would do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonymous author...