Studia Phaenomenologica

Volume 5, 2005

Translating Heidegger's Sein und Zeit

Heidegger’s language and the problems of translation

The article tells the detailed story of the first translation of Sein und Zeit in English, i.e. the way a Scottish pastor and an American scholar joined their efforts to find a suitable path of breaking the “myth of untranslatability” which surrounded at the time Sein und Zeit. The story also covers their method of translation, the obstacles they encountered, while covering in depth the different types of “linguistic oddities” of the Heideggerian idiom which often puzzles the translators: new or compound words, etymologies, grouping words in “constellations” which stem from the same root.