As a young undergraduate, I had the good fortune not to humiliate myself by bringing a copy of Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad to our very first humanities seminar. In a time long before Emily Wilson had become the Homeric translator du jour, the only translations of the Iliad that any respectable aspiring intellectual would dare to be seen with were those of Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald. Praised for its accuracy, Lattimore’s appealed to those for whom a good translation consisted in mirroring the ancient Greek as closely as possible. Praised for its style, Fitzgerald’s translation appealed to those for whom a good translation consisted in manifesting the lyrical beauty and poetic vivacity of Homer.
The logic was fairly simple: A good translation consisted in overcoming the unsophisticated English language in order to bring the reader into an encounter with the original Greek text as much as possible, whereas a bad translation consisted in tying itself to the conventions and inadequacies of English in order to obscure the original text and the reader’s ability to interpret it for herself. Since the Fagles translation appealed to those for whom a good translation consisted in readability and ease of understanding, with minor concern for Homer’s dactylic hexameter, it was a decidedly bad translation.
To what extent did this logic—and splendid hubris of youth—rightly grasp the nature of translation? Is translation the art of mirroring another language as closely as possible in style and substance? Is it the art of overcoming the distortive poverties of one language in order to meet with the original richness of another?
Such questions bear not only on translations of literature but perhaps even more decisively on translations of great works of philosophy. One thinker who wrestled directly with that challenge was the German-Jewish philosopher Edith Stein (1891–1942). In the introduction to Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to Ascend to the Meaning of Being, Stein tackled the question of linguistic translation precisely in order to address one of the major barriers facing methodological “translation” in modern philosophy.