This short autobiographical text evokes the atmosphere of the years which marked the beginning of my friendship with Alexandru Dragomir: i.e. our student years in Bucharest, the circle of Romanian students studying in the 40s in Freiburg i. Br. and the intellectual intensity of Martin Heidegger’s seminars and courses, which influenced both of us for the rest of our lives. From the 15 members of Heidegger’s Oberseminar (dedicated in this period to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit), three were from Romania: Alexandru Dragomir, Octavian Vuia and the author of these lines. The relationship between Dragomir and I became closer as we translated “Was ist Metaphysik?” into Romanian. Alexandru Dragomir was highly appreciated by Heidegger and beloved by other students for his penetrating spirit, for his spontaneity, but also for his sense of humor. After more than 30 years in which the history thrown us in parallel worlds, we had the joy to meet again in Bucharest. His texts, now published, present him as a brilliant and original thinker.

Considering that Husserl identifies passivity as the general principle of genetic dynamics and as given prior to any intentional activity, the original condition of possibility of such passivity must be clarified. Phenomenological analysis can successfully attest the presence of a drive-habituality operating prior to the level of the I, an instinct-character, thus, that raises the question about life as auto-affective capability. In the framework of a universal monadology the latter’s teleological orientation must be questioned in order to avoid that both the limes constituted by the unconscious as well as affective being remain indeterminate and anonymous, which would not do justice to the transcendental rootedness of drive and instinct through the form of ipseity.

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.

As any science presupposes a certain “something” for its constitution as a discipline, the same applies also for philosophy and theology as discourses of a specific intentionality. However, pure phenomenological life relies on an originary self-donation, which precedes any manifestation of language or scientific knowledge, and implies a practical “original intelligibility”, pertaining to any human being as his “transcendental birth”. Relating to Michel Henry, this circumstance will be confronted with the self-revelation in Christianity, involving a discussion of the phenomenological status of the Scripture, as well as a delimitation from any Gnosis. Hence, the “word of life” (of God), preceding any manifestation of language, coincides with an immediate ethos, that can be illustrated by the “acts of compassion”. The text conceives itself as a preliminary work for a religious philosophy founded in the phenomenology of life.

Theodor Lipps’ doctrine of empathy (Einfühlung) is enjoying renewed relevance today for two reasons. On the one hand, it offers heuristic potential in researching the functionality of mirror neurons. On the other hand, as many of the early phenomenologists gained their conceptions of empathy by examining Lipps’ related works, the presently widespread interest in empathy necessitates a re‑reading of Lipps in phenomenological circles. The critiques that phenomenology launches against Lipps, however, often remain bound to the established cliché interpretations of Lipps. This article counters such shortsighted readings by differentiating four kinds of imitation in Lipps. The supposed persuasiveness of such critiques, as will be shown, is lost in light of this differentiation.