In this paper I try to underline both the positive and negative circumstances in which I began translating Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in Greek. In 1971 I started, as a young student of philosophy, to study and translate this book, although I misunderstood it and considered it a paradigm of “existentiale”, not existential philosophy. I benefited essentially from both the English and the French translations and I’ve also received great help from my Greek mentor, E. N. Platis. I published my translation in two volumes, one in 1978 and the other in 1985 and the critics have been very positive. At the beginning, I gave extended explanations about the translation problems and my solutions in a paper published in 1974. In the following years, I wrote articles about the Heideggerian concepts, in order to facilitate a better understanding of his philosophy.

In the past 20 years, 7 Romanian translations from Heidegger’s Complete Works have been published. They can be grouped in 3 phases: 1. the introductory phase (The Origin of the Work of Art, Path marks, Introduction to Metaphysics), creating a horizon for Heidegger’s thinking, almost unknown to the Romanian audience beforehand; 2) the etymological phase (Parmenide), trying to revive the Romanian linguistic and philosophical equivalences: 3) and the technical-systematic phase (Being and Time, Concept of Time, History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena), creating a mature Romanian phenomenological language.

There are two main tendencies regarding the recent Italian translations from Heidegger: on the one hand there is a tendency of making his thought comprehensible to the Italian public by any means; on the other hand there is the determination to render the text so faithfully as to risk stretching the limits of the Italian language – and having to resort to references to the glossary, as is the case of the latest translation of Holzwege. The admirable thinking efforts that also laybehind the attempts in the latter tendency can be better supported by hypertextual electronic publishing.

I have first translated Sein und Zeit in Japanese in 1971 in collaboration with my elder colleague Prof. Hara in Tokyo. But in 1976 both he and Martin Heidegger died, and in 1977 a new edition of Sein und Zeit was published as part of Heidegger’s complete works. This new edition included many marginal notes of Heidegger’s and many textual revisions made by Heidegger himself. Therefore, I have published in 2003, based on the old version of my Japanese translation, a totally revised Japanese translation of Sein und Zeit, in which, as translator, I have written a new introduction, many explicatory notes about Heidegger’s marginal notes and textual modifications and a chronological detailed record of Heidegger’s career. Out of this experience, I would like to detail upon two aspects: first, any nowadays reader of this work must study not only the original text itself, but also, by all means, Heidegger’s marginal notes, in order to correctly grasp a development of his thought on Being. Secondary, a reader must especially pay attention to the difficult problem of the relationship between authenticity and inauthenticity of the Being-in-the-world, because here is the most basic problem of the existence of Dasein and it is here the place where the turning point in Heidegger’s later thought on Being has its origin.

In this article, the author begins by noticing a statistical fact: from the seven Japanese translations of Being and Time, in five cases the German word Sein has been translated as sonzai, and in two cases as u. This fact invites the author to a discussion about the Japanese understanding of “Being”, which is developed on three levels: the question of language, the question of historical-cultural world, and the question of the “European”, understood as a Western principle, depictingthis “Abend-land” as a region threatened by night.

The article starts off with some meditations on the question of the much-debated “non-translatibility of German philosophy”, which, in the particular case of Martin Heidegger, proves to be even more acute. Nevertheless, the conclusion of these thoughts is that, on the contrary, a translation of a philosophical text is meant finally not only to mediate between two languages, but also to be for itself a necessary step in a more profound understanding of an original text. Following this logic, the article presents in details the decisions taken by the Romanian translators in rendering the concept most difficult to translate from Being and Time: Bewandtnis.

The present text discusses the problems concerning the translation and the non- translation of the thinking word Dasein in Sein und Zeit. Assuming that for Heidegger Dasein is transcendence and this as an in-finitive trans-lation from a substantive and substantial meaning of being to a verbal one, it becomes necessary to translate the word Dasein in Sein und Zeit above all within the German language itself. The task of translating the thinking word Dasein is therefore the one of making possible the work of thought in which the destruction of the substantialistic meaning of being can take place always anew. Showing the verbal temporality of the thinking word Dasein as the internal and aspectual temporality of a Währenden, the article explains the translating choices made in my translation of Sein und Zeit into Portuguese.

The following article presents how the first Czech phenomenologist Jan Patoèka became a student of Edmund Husserl and how he motivated in the 70s a small group of Czech phenomenologists to begin the translation of Sein und Zeit, which started after his death in 1977. The article then describes how this translation was secretly “published” in the 80s, under the circumstances of the communist totalitarian regime, as successive installments. It then discusses examples of how the linguistic translation difficulties were solved and how the entire book was finally and officially published in the middle of the 90s.

The philosophical translation should be considered as a special usage of language. The author reflects upon the spiritual, historical and intercultural roles of translation and its significance for the philosophical experience of Slovenian language, a very important one in the case of translating Being and Time. The problem is how to turn this hermeneutic experience into a concrete translation.

The translation of Being and time is in different ways connected with the understanding of Heidegger’s hermeneutical destruction of the basic philosophic concepts. The translator of Being and Time is further faced with complex theoretical questions, such as the relation between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. The article aims to recognize the importance of Husserl’s phenomenological investigations for the genesis of several central concepts in Being in Time.

The following paper discusses from the point of view of the translator the obstacles, both institutional and linguistic, encountered during the introduction of Heidegger’s book Being and Time in the Bulgarian socio-cultural context. In particular some basic terms, which compose the core of Heidegger’s book, have been thoroughly analyzed. These include terms and categories such as: Dasein, Geschichte / Historie, Zeitigkeit / Zeitlichkeit, Gegenwart / Gegen-wart, Zukunft / Zukommen, Gewärtigen, Vergangenheit, Man / Manselbst, Bewandtnis and others. Concrete arguments have been given in order to prove that direct borrowing of some of those terms, existing in translations from Russian and other languages, is not feasible.

The author, as the leader of the team that translated Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit into Hungarian, tells the story of the translation. The members of this team were anything else but experts in Heidegger. Belonging to the so-called “democratic opposition” at the beginning of the ‘80s, they asked the author, a dissent himself, to hold for them a private seminar on modern phenomenology. It is here where they read Husserl, Scheler, and wanted to read Heidegger as well. Their German, however, was not good enough to understand Being and Time in the original. That’s why they decided to translate it into Hungarian. In a few years the translation was ready – three years ago, in 2001, it was even published its second, revised edition. In the second part of this short essay, the author deals with those Heideggerian words that have proven to present the most serious difficulties at that time, and explains the nature of their difficulties in some cases: Sein, Seiendes, Dasein, Da, Bewandtnis, Zuhanden, Vorhanden, das Man, Befindlichkeit, Angst, Eigentlichkeit, Unheimlichkeit, Platz, Ort.

Selfhood, personal identity and singularity are philosophical concepts which undergo a profound change in Levinas, who is led by three main propositions to transform them. The first of these propositions could hardly be simpler: I am myself and no other. The second proposition is more surprising, but it can lay just as well a claim to self-evidence: I remain myself without becoming another even if I do not remain the same as I were. Finally, the third proposition is not only baffling, but almost scandalous: The fact that I am myself and no other cannot be deduced from my identity with myself; it is rather the outcome of my relationshipwith the Other or, more precisely a consequence of what is described by Levinas as my substitution for the Other. These three propositions are inquired into and commented upon in the paper. It is shown, thereby, how a singularity without identity is conceived of by Levinas.

This paper aims to offer a new and alternative perspective on the basic idea of Levinas’s philosophy. My claim is that the latter can be more appropriately understood not as a contribution to a new way of thinking about ethics or the realm of the ethical as such, but rather toward the theory of normativity. The goal of Levinas’s reflections on alterity is to exhibit the normativity that is in play in all modes of understanding. Levinas tries to understand how intentional beings are normatively bound by one another. This paper tries to give answers to the questions of (1) why Levinas addresses questions of alterity, (2) what is distinctive about these questions according to his way of thinking, and (3) why one should consider Levinas’ thought from the perspective of the articulation of a theory of normativity.

According to Henry, in Husserl’s analysis of time the retentional intentionality of the “now” implies that you cannot have the sensation of its pure reality. This inner-phenomenological criticism can be generally transferred to the relationship between time and life, since temporality, as the most inner structure of the world of becoming-outsideitself, does not allow any affective self-appearance of life. Finally, this aspect has critical consequences for the existential structure of care, which must be suspended as “transcendental illusion” of the ego, in order to do justice to the immediacy of an immemorial birth in life.

Although Levinas’ “il y a” does not directly correspond to Heidegger’s conception of being, his criticism of Heidegger’s temporal ontology is nevertheless justified. With the reduction of every meaning (and being) to its temporal constitution, Heidegger excludes any possibility of transcendence beyond time. The problem of overcoming the radical finitude and historicity of meaning, which is ethically motivated, brings Levinas to the age-old question of metaphysics. However, taking Heidegger’s thought seriously, Levinas is forced to look for an entirely new understanding of the metaphysical quest.

This paper attempts a new interpretation of Heidegger’s existential analysis of the phenomena of fear and anxiety. Heidegger is shown to analyze both phenomena as basic states-of-mind (Grundbefindlichkeiten). Basic states-of-mind are taken to differ from other states-of mind in that they are formal phenomena, i.e. phenomena that are not apparent or experienced themselves, but only concretize in apparent and experienced phenomena. As an instance of phenomena, in which the formal phenomena of fear and anxiety concretize, the paper presents hüzün, a collective mood described by Orhan Pamuk in his latest novel.

Théophile Gautier, French romanticist writer, visits Russia twice in 1858/61. His Voyage en Russie (1866) is not just a travelogue, but rather an intrinsically philosophical text about travelling, about the perception of the own and the other, suggesting “(self)alienation”, “bracketing” of the world and one’s own experience as a means of aesthetic pleasure and intellectual penetration; a reflection on the “gift of the visible”; on the mutual in- and superscriptions of reality, imagination and art – in one word: a “phenomenological” experiment avant la lettre. This paper proposes a reading of Voyage en Russie through the prism of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, in particular of vision.

The phenomena of reading and hearing were among the fundamental themes of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics during the final decades of his life and scientific work. This assertion seems to be strange, especially if we pay attention to the fact that about the same time he worked on transforming his initial project of philosophical hermeneutics into the more ambi­tious hermeneutical philosophy. However, the universality of the phenomena of reading and hearing, which Gadamer defends in his last works, not only confirms but also concretizes the universality of the language dimension of all human experience. This concretization becomes apparent by explaining the structural correlation between hearing, understanding, and seeing. In view of these circumstances emerges the necessity of looking at the history of the “phenomenological movement” through the prism of the phenomenon of reading, which from the very outset was the implicit aim of phenomenological explanations.

The repetition of life is being examined on the basis of Henry’s analysis of life as a performance beyond habitualization as sedimentation in Husserl’s approach, as well as a difference in immanent conceptualization on the premise of the coveting organless body according to Deleuze. In contrast to this “nomadic thinking,” which always remains non-subjective, the emphasis in the original reciprocity of life and body is put on the basic transcendentality of the effective repetition of life in the bodily memorial of the radical phenomenological habitualization.