Monday, June 27, 2005
(8:40 AM) | The Young Hegelian:
nur ein biβchen
I’ve always wondered why it is that some books of continental philosophy get translated into English and others don’t, or more accurately, how the decision is made on what to translate of a particular author’s oeuvre and what it is felt the English-speaking world can survive without. In one respect it’s a good thing that not everything by a particular philosopher does get translated, as it encourages the English-speaking student of continental philosophy to learn the respective language of his chosen subject. It was beginning to be a formal requirement back when I was studying, and I’m glad to hear that from what Adam has said it is even more so now. Good in another respect too, in that it leaves a space for the really diligent student to seek out an as-yet untranslated text and write a chapter of her thesis on it, thus fulfilling the Ph. D. requirement of making ‘an original contribution to research’. Learning German was for me actually one of the more enjoyable parts of writing a thesis on a German philosopher (though I still have to apologise for having nur ein biβchen) and having our very own native speaker (writing on Ernst Bloch, incidentally – more on whom below) to teach us philosophical German was an added bonus. Germanists were well catered for in our department; less so those who chose Kierkegaard as their topic, or Emil Cioran. I felt a bit sorry for them – Danish and Romanian looked even more fiendish than the Muttersprache.During the heyday of continental philosophy in England and America (the early- to mid-1990s) we students had a belief that soon enough everything would be translated into English. So it seemed to be proceeding with Derrida, for whom translators must have waited like paparazzi as the books fell hot off the press at Seuil. Things proceeded more slowly with Heidegger, perhaps because of the difficulty of his prose, those tortuous neologisms. So it is that there are still some very notable omissions from the translated Gesamtausgabe (correct me if I’m wrong on this): the essay on Hölderlin’s Andenken, and the lectures on Germanien and Der Rhein. In the same vein, the Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin translated almost all but not quite everything he had written, but with some seemingly arbitrary omissions (a Collected Works would have been just a few hundred pages longer). And though Ernst Bloch had briefly caught the spotlight at that time with translations of Spirit of Utopia and Essays on Literature, strangely no one jumped to translate Spuren (Traces) or Thomas Munzer als Theologian der Revolution, nor his book on Hegel, Subjekt-Objeckt.
I’m sure you can think of other omissions (Alfred Döblin’s book of philosophy, Unser Dasein is one more that springs to mind). Maybe we can put some pressure on publishers like Meridian to complete the noble work they started.
