[np] Found in Translation

[Mark Kohut]

In my limited but perhaps typical therefore generalizable circumstances when young,
heidegger in English was hugely influential in some philosophy circles---and beyond.
Many intellectual Catholic academics, among others, had embraced his overturning approach.....
 
And I might say that the reason his second major work has hardly been translated migiht be
because of the unearthing of his character faults----and subsequent diminishing of the felt need
to read him.....

From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Saturday, August 3, 2013 5:29 AM
Subject: [np] Found in Translation



http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/found-in-translation/?_r=2&

We all need translations, and it's good someone defends them in 
principle. Hamid Dabashi's first example, however, is not unproblematic:

"Consider Heidegger. Had it not been for his French translators and 
commentators, German philosophy of his time would have remained an 
obscure metaphysical thicket. And it was not until Derrida’s own take on 
Heidegger found an English readership in the United States and Britain 
that the whole Heidegger-Derridian undermining of metaphysics began to 
shake the foundations of the Greek philosophical heritage. One can in 
fact argue that much of contemporary Continental philosophy originates 
in German with significant French and Italian glosses before it is 
globalized in the dominant American English and assumes a whole new 
global readership and reality. This has nothing to do with the 
philosophical wherewithal of German, French or English. It is entirely a 
function of the imperial power and reach of one language as opposed to 
others."

Three points:

Derrida's project was an application of Heidegger, right, and US decon 
is based on Derrida; the three approaches are nevertheless not one and 
the same, as Derrida himself did put out several times.

What's left out here is the Asian Heidegger reception: Already in the 
1920s students from India and Japan came to Marburg and Freiburg to 
study under the Black Forest Wizard, and by now there are seven Japanese 
translations of 'Sein und Zeit' (Being and Time). In China and Korea 
they read Heidegger too.

What makes Heidegger difficult to translate is neither the grammar nor 
the length of sentences. It's the vocabulary which consists of old words 
like 'Sorge', 'Gestell' or 'Gelassenheit' that, though put in a 
philosophical context, are still radiating traditional meanings which 
Heidegger unearths by means of etymology. There are also neologisms, 
words crossed out, or divided (Dasein ---> Da-sein). This seems very 
hard to translate to me, and in Heidegger's case definitely much more 
gets lost in translation than in the cases of Nietzsche or Marx. How 
difficult it is to translate Heidegger into English you can see from the 
fact that his second opus magnum 'Vom Ereignis (Beiträge zur 
Philosophie)', written secretly in the late 1930s and posthumously 
published in 1989, found two translations in just 13 years. Here's a 
review of the second one which appeared last year:

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/32043-contributions-to-philosophy-of-the-event/

I sympathize with Dabashi's idea of a mind "beyond East and West", but 
each time I'm trying to read Nishida Kitaro I realize that it's 
difficult when you're not able to read Japanese.
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