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understand Kaufman’s motive. Such choices provide
the possibility of multiple translations. Another
example of choice is provided by the word “Bann,”
which can be an excommunication or a spell, so that
both Smith and Spears have support for their readings,
although I like Smith’s better. From these few
examples, however, it should be clear that it would be
extremely unlikely for two people to come up with
exactly the same translation for a source text longer
than a sentence or two. But one hopes to find in every
translation a refined degree of accuracy, coherence,
depth, and resemblance of style to the original; in
short, a living work. Such translations are a benefit
even to those who can read the original source
language but want to speak and work in the target
language. For the struggle to carry meanings across
the incorrigible incongruities between languages
exposes more layers of embedded meanings than any
simple and single reading itself could ever uncover.
As Pierre Joris, translator of the German poet Paul
Celan, has said, “translation…[is] the most demanding
and active reading to which we can submit ourselves.”
Notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis
Golfing (New York: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956).
2 Golfing, p. 19.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (München:
Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1966), p. 22.
4 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft ( Hamburg:
Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1956), (A 31ff) p. 74.
5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 33.
6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald
Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.
14.
7 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (B 69ff) p. 90.
8 R. B. Farrell, A Dictionary of German Synonyms
(Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1963), p. 26.
Farrell regards Schein as appearance, not as illusion, as
does The Oxford Duden. However, Warig Deutsches
Wörterbuch includes Sinnestäuschung and Trugbild toward
the end of a list of synonyms of Schein. The meaning,
which obviously could be either, must be judged from the
context.
9 Golfing, p. 38.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie
(München: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1966), p.42
11 See note 15.
12 Kaufman, p. 49.
13 Speirs, p. 30.
14 Smith, p. 35.
15 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: P Dover
Books, 1969), Vol. I, p. 257.
16 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübigen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 17, 234, 304f, 343, 385f, etc. The
word “repetition” (Wiederholung) is mostly maintained in
the John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), which indexes many
more instances than I have listed. In the more readable, but
in this case less philosophically useful, Joan Stambaugh
translation (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996), “repetition” is systematically converted to “retrieve,”
thus obscuring for the English reader an important
contribution to contemporary issues of identity and
difference in “repetition” and the historical engagement
with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This example supports the
necessity and usefulness of reading more than one
translation.
17 Gilles Deleuze, Difference et Repetition, trans. Paul
Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
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