Acknowledgments
Thomasine Gyllembourgâs Two Ages was one of the first texts I sought contact with when I began to learn Danish in the summer of 2014 with Jeanette Bresson Ladegaard Knox at the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. The next year at the Library, I was able to continue my study of Two Ages with Susanne Jakobsen. It is difficult to imagine the present translation without the tutelage of these two Danish Kierkegaardians. Another Dane, my dear mentor Karin Sanders, deserves many thanks for happily agreeing to supervise my translation of Gyllembourgâs âAn Everyday Storyâ in my first semester in the Scandinavian languages and literatures PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley.
As I began to translate selections of Two Ages at Berkeley, I benefited greatly from the input and encouragement of colleagues in the Translation Studies Working Group, such as Marlena Gittleman, Sherilyn Hellberg, Dinah Lensing-Sharp, Linda Louie, Julia Nelsen, and Diana Thow. In the spring of 2017, I took the practicum âProblems in Literary Translationâ with Robert Alter. His unfailing ear for nineteenth-century English helped me to refine my voice as a translator of Gyllembourg.
I am also grateful to Claudine Davidshofer for helping me in the translation of the French passages found in Two Ages, and to Carol Gold for leading me to Grandmamas Bekiendelser, a memoir whose author served as a model for Gyllembourgâs heroine in the age of revolution, at least insofar as she donned the French Tricolor. In addition, I owe a debt of gratitude to the respective staffs of the Danish Royal Library and the Hong Kierkegaard Library for providing me with scans of the title pages of Gyllembourgâs books, which were used in the creation of the bibliography in this volume. My sincere thanks go out to Katalin Nun Stewart, who contributed to the bibliography, and to Sophie Höfer, who contributed to the index. Lastly, I must express appreciation for the anonymous reviewer who read and commented on my manuscript.
Everyone mentioned above has my warm thanks for making this translation of Two Ages and its scholarly apparatus better than they would have been otherwise. Anything inaccurate or awkward is of course my responsibility.