Abstract
This chapter offers an account of the Heidegger translations published by Harper & Row, now HarperCollins, during the three decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It emphasizes the Early Greek Thinking, Basic Writings, and Nietzsche projects, in which the author was principally involved.
Copyright © 2017, 2021 by David Farrell Krell. An expanded version of this text is to appear in my forthcoming memoir, Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida (Indiana University Press, 2023).
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Notes
- 1.
At some point in the 1990s or early 2000s HarperCollins released the World Rights in English of Early Greek Thinking to me, and Indiana University Press immediately attempted to do a reprint; this was blocked by the Klostermann firm, which argued that Heidegger had insisted on the publication of Holzwege and Vorträge und Aufsätze as complete entities. They took this to mean that he did not approve of Early Greek Thinking, which is of course nonsense. He was happy to have these essays in English and was grateful for the little book, which I handed over to him during one of my visits.
- 2.
That is, Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1950), 310–11; and Early Greek Thinking, second ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 26.
- 3.
“Hölderlin’s ‘Hymn to Serenity’: A Newly Discovered Poem,” translated, with introduction and commentary, by David Farrell Krell, in The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (New School for Social Research), XI, 1 (1986), 3–15.
- 4.
For an account of these “Work Sessions with Martin Heidegger,” written many years ago now, see Philosophy Today, XXVI, 2 (Summer 1982), 126–138, or, preferably, see chapter 5 of my forthcoming Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida.
- 5.
See ch. 5 of Derrida and Our Animal Others (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 2013). Why mention Lacan in a book on Derrida and animals? Because Lacan translates Heidegger’s Versammlung, which for Derrida is the bête noire of Heidegger’s thought, not as “gathering” but as “distribution” or even “dispersion,” répartir. An excellent account of Lacan’s translation is Hans-Dieter Gondek, “Logos und Übersetzung: Heidegger als Übersetzer Heraklits—Lacan als Übersetzer Heideggers,” in Übersetzung und Dekonstruktion, ed. Alfred Hirsch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 263–348. (I am grateful to Gerhard Richter of Brown University for the reference to Gondek’s fine essay.) Lacan’s outrageous translation of Versammlung is no Freudian slip on Lacan’s part, nor even a Lacanian lapsus. Rather, it is the mark of the subject rent by desire; it is the mark of the phallus as signifier, which works its effects only in and through dispersion and absence. Following Elisabeth Roudenesco, Gondek affirms that Lacan’s “translator-boldness” is Mallarméan in its inspiration and strategic in its procedure. For it is the infinite—and infinitely dispersing—domination of the signifier over the signified that makes it so. Lacan’s translation, devoted to the truth of desire, if not of being, thus challenges Heidegger’s confidence in his own reception of the call from being (303). Lacan’s inspiration for répartition arguably has to do with the insights of Heidegger’s “Moira”; that is, it pays heed to the endless process of allotment and apportioning in revealing/concealing, to the ceaseless cycles of the ontological difference. Gondek concludes: “That Lacan here no longer speaks of ‘gathering’ could readily be explained by the fact that signifiers, which stand in a relation of absolute difference to one another, cannot ‘gather’; they cannot form a whole, a unity, or a totality, but can only perform a ‘distribution [‘Verteilung’]. A supremely transitory one. In which difference, as an ‘apportioning judgment, is endlessly in process” (306–7).
- 6.
I discuss them in greater detail and with a broader range of topics in “A Smile and a Sense of Tragedy: Letters from J. Glenn Gray,” Philosophy Today, XXV, 2 (Summer 1981), 95–113.
- 7.
A first draft of “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics” was also prepared by my colleague and friend Bruce Pye, of Mannheim University. I was uncertain at that time about whether Frank Capuzzi was working on that essay, and Bruce translated the entire essay for me. He never received credit for it, nor certainly payment, and I have always felt wretched about that. Clearly, I was stretched beyond my limit, working in Germany and publishing in the United States, casting about for help and desperate to find it. After all these decades have passed, I still must repeat my apology to him.
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Krell, D.F. (2022). Heidegger Translation in the 1970s. In: Rogove, J., D’Oriano, P. (eds) Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_1
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