Abstract
For me, the issue of a “transformed relationship” to the words and language that we have, given to us as a given, arose as soon as I opened William J. Richardson’s book Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963) for the first time in 1966. I was struck by two things: (1) the fact that all over and on almost every page Heidegger’s German appears, either in parentheses or at the bottom of the page, and (2) that the book uses a lot of hyphenating — what Richardson humorously calls “chronic hyphenitis.”1
Dieses mehrfältige Denken verlangt zwar keine neue Sprache, aber ein gewandeltes Verhalten zum Wesen der alten.
This manifold thinking does not require a new language, but rather a transformed relationship to the Wesen of the old one.
Martin Heidegger
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Notes
William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p. xxviii.
Ibid., p. xxii—xxiii.
In his 1993 essay Richardson speaks of how a translation works or “doesn’t quite work in English” and how one translation “would work visually,” whereas another “works better in oral presentation.” Cf. William J. Richardson,“Dasein and the Ground of Negativity: A Note on the Fourth Movement in the Beiträge-Symphony,” Heidegger Studies, 9 (1993), 39 and 36.
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” ed. W. Biemel, Gesamtausgabe 53 ( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984 ), p. 80.
Cf. ibid., p. 75 for Heidegger’s reflections on this issue. For a full and well-rounded discussion of this whole issue of translation, see Parvis Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation: Essential Translation and the Unfolding of Language,” in John Sallis (ed.), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993 ), pp. 323–340.
Heidegger, op. cit.,p. 75.
Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, p. 632.
Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985 ), p. 94.
Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation,” in Sallis (ed.), op. cit.,p. 329.
Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache,p. 180.
Cf. F.-W. von Herrmann, Wege ins Ereignis: Zu Heideggers Beiträge zur Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), pp. 40–63, 70–73, and 100–109.
Gail Stenstad, “The Last God — A Reading,” Research in Phenomenology,23 (1993), 174. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis),ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), pp. 57–58, 173, 286–287, 342, 381.
Richardson, op. cit., p. 526.
There are by now many places in the literature where the translation of this word Wesen has been taken up seriously. Already in 1971, in my translation of Heidegger’s essay Die Kehre, I outlined some of the ambiguity in the word and the difficulty of translating it — cf. my translation of Martin Heidegger, “The Turning,” Research in Phenomenology, 1 (1971), 3.
I initiated a pattern of translating Wesen as root-unfolding in my essay “Imaging Hinting Showing Placing the Work of Art,” in W. Biemel and F.-W. von Herrmann (eds.), Kunst und Technik: Gedächtnisschrift zum 100. Geburtstag von Martin Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), p. 195. Further discussion of the word appears at the beginning of my translation of Hanspeter Padrutt, “Heidegger and Ecology,” in L. McWhorter (ed.), Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Kirksville: The Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1992), p. 12.
Parvis Emad discusses the same issue in his “Introduction” to his and my translation of H.W. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929–1976 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. xvii; in “Thinking Deeply into the Question of Translation,” in Sallis (ed.), op. cit.,p. 338, n. 1; and at the beginning of his translation of Walter Biemel, “Marginal Notes on Sallis’s Peculiar Interpretation of Heidegger’s `Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in K. Maly (ed.), The Path of Archaic Thinking: Unfolding the Work of John Sallis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 221–222.
Gail Stenstad addresses this issue in her essay “Attuning and Transformation,” Heidegger Studies,7 (1991), 75; and in “The Last God — A Reading,” op. cit.,pp. 183–184.
Finally, William Richardson takes up the difficulty of rendering the word Wesen into English in his “Dasein and the Ground of Negativity,” Heidegger Studies,9 (1993), 35–36, n. 2. After discussing my suggestion of “unfolding” and “root-unfolding” and outlining his misgivings about this translation, he says that he prefers the word emerge.
I might add that the French have a similar problem, in that their word l’essence does not do justice to the deeper connections and the ambiguity of Heidegger’s German word Wesen.
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis),p. 270. For an orientation on this issue, see Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation,” in Sallis (ed.), op. cit.,p. 338, n. 1.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977 ), p. 56.
Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens ( Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969 ), p. 32.
This volume will appear in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe as volume 73, with the title Zum Ereignis-Denken. All quotations in the following remarks come from this text: Martin Heidegger, “Die Armut,” Heidegger Studies 10 (1994), 5–11. Cf. F.-W. von Herrmann’s editorial comments on p. 11.
It goes without saying that this title, “Das Wesen der Frage,” can in no way be translated as “The Essence of the Question”; for questioning as ongoing movement (en-ergeia) has no fixed character or “essence.”
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Maly, K. (1995). Reticence and Resonance in the Work of Translating. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Phaenomenologica, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1624-6_9
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