sleep

A reader sends the following:

“In search of my next Heidegger read, I found a book titled : Heidegger, Language and World-Disclosure. It looked intriguing, so I ordered it. It arrived today. Unbeknownst to me when I ordered it, it was translated by Graham Harman, which raises the question : Do you ever sleep?”

In fact, I slept much better in those days. The book is by Cristina Lafont, a native of Spain (though the book was originally in German), who was then and now a member of the Philosophy faculty at Northwestern. (As I remember the story, Tom McCarthy told her that the best place to find a translator for a Heidegger book in Chicago would probably be DePaul, and someone apparently recommended me. I simply received a call from the blue one night, while living in Iowa City.)

Though the book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000, the translation was actually done during the fall of 1996, more than two years before my dissertation was defended. (It slowed me down on the dissertation for a semester, but I don’t think I was ready to finish it yet at that point. Too much was going on, and without my knowing it, a brief sportswriting career was about to begin.)

That translation was my first philosophy-related publication, and the book was widely read and reviewed (and still is, I believe). Lafont’s intellectual orientation is different enough from mine that I profited a lot from working closely in that book. I also had the chance to meet Lafont’s mentor Jürgen Habermas, who struck me as quite a nice and generous man, though at the time I was a relative youngster afraid to say much to him.

[ADDENDUM: However, I have never actually been able to get myself to read the book in English… In fact, I have not read the printed version of any of the three books I’ve translated from German. I have this fear that a flood of translation stress will come back and overwhelm my mind if I go back and read them. So I know them only from memory, and from the original-language texts. Maybe in old age I will read them, by way of reminiscence.]