Translaboration as legitimation of philosophical translation

Abstract

Abstract Even highly regarded translators cannot escape the common suspicion that philosophical ideas are not communicable in foreign languages – a suspicion that plagues philosophical translation. Translators effectively counter this distrust of translation when they explicitly claim to have collaborated with the author. This paper focuses on the Italian translation of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (first published in 1927; Heidegger 1986a), titled Essere e tempo (Heidegger 2006, trans. Marini), whose translator, Alfredo Marini, took particularly interesting measures to legitimate his work. This case is especially intriguing because Pietro Chiodi’s earlier translation (Heidegger 1953, 1976, 2005) is still popular in Italy despite Chiodi’s own complaints that the German text is untranslatable. The widespread acceptance of the earlier Italian translation presents a considerable problem of legitimation for Marini, who counters Chiodi’s views by arguing for the translatability of the text and supports his argument through a rhetorically constructed scene of collaborative translation. I begin this paper by retracing Marini’s strategy for presenting Essere e tempo (Heidegger 2006, trans. Marini) as a ‘translaboration’ (a collaborative translation), before addressing concerns that collaborative translation could hinder the translator’s creativity. I show that Marini’s translation achieves its most creative, and at times eccentric, effects through his close collaboration with the (deceased) philosopher, Martin Heidegger.