[np] Found in Translation

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 > 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.....<

No, you got that wrong. It has been translated even twice!  (Do see 
again below, including the link with the review). There is certainly no 
lack of interest in 'Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)' in the 
anglophone world,  --- some people even learn German to read it in the 
original.

Nevertheless, let me say something about the "diminishing of the felt 
need to read him" because of real or imagined "character faults" which 
seems to describe your own situation. Of course you do what you do. And 
of course I'd also prefer all my favorite philosophers and artists to be 
goody-goodies dressed in white. But to boycott great artistic and 
philosophical works out of moral disgust was never an option for me. Do 
you really want to kick out Céline, Pound, Eliot, Heidegger or Schmitt 
(and then think of all the Stalin supporters!) to gain a politically 
correct reading experience?


On 04.08.2013 15:21, Mark Kohut wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>