Both Graham Harman and Peter Gratton have posts up reporting on the news that there will be a new translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. This is a revision of the Joan Stambaugh translation that SUNY published, done by Dennis Schmitt.

Both Graham and Peter speak in praise of the first English translation by Macquarrie and Robinson instead, and I completely agree. That was my first Heidegger experience, and one of the things I liked about that book was that it made me realise just how much was going in both in the text, and in the translation. There are long footnotes which include lots of German to help orientate readers. The Stambaugh has much less of that, which makes it seem more readable. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. With the M&R version you can see the gears and cogs, but I felt that I needed it.

Peter also reports that reading B&T changed his outlook forever. I’d agree with that too – B&T was a hugely important book for me. I was early in my PhD, working on Nietzsche and Foucault and their concepts of space and history. After reading B&T, and a lot more, Heidegger became the key focus. In B&T the brief discussion of Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation and the stuff on spatiality were really important things. It was also quite possibly the first book that I knew that I didn’t understand and would have to work incredibly hard to get any kind of handle on. I think the M&R translation helped me realise that, and I’m not sure the Stambaugh would have.

But Dennis Schmitt is a fine scholar, and the Stambaugh does have Heidegger’s marginal notes – one of which, on the relation between space and place was quite useful – and a good lexicon by Theodore Kisiel. There was talk of Dennis heading a retranslation of the Beiträge – the story going that von Herrmann was persuaded that the Emad and Maly one was terrible when they retranslated some of its sentences back into German. That would be something. The Beiträge is not to everyone’s tastes, and not nearly as important as it was portrayed, but it’s a fascinating text and not nearly as daft as the English makes it out to be.