Philosophical Tradition in Translation

Abstract

While reflecting upon the intrinsically multilingual and translational history of philosophy, philosophers and philosophy scholars frequently argue metaphorically in terms of a tradition. The perspectives vary in emphasizing either the tradition’s continuance or its transition, whereas translation is perceived of as the central or an auxiliary force in both processes. Four approaches where a philosophical tradition is differently poeticized are discussed in the paper. They reveal specific operations of transfer and transformation which are claimed to be supported or accelerated by/in translation. Such tradition-related operations appear to qualify for being traced and pinned down in a given philosophical translation. The paper seeks to work out this heuristic potential within the selected poetics of tradition and draws upon the paratextual comments on the first Russian translation of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” to eventually illustrate the translation-induced shifts of whatever might be called a philosophical tradition.

Keywords

• tradition of thought
• history of philosophy
• poetics
• paratext
• philosopher-translator
• Heidegger