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Contrary to received opinion, it is not lyric poetry that poses the greatest difficulties for translation, but philosophy. While the translator of poetry and literary prose has at her disposal all the resources of assonance, rhythm, image, and allusion that are condensed in the original text, the translator of philosophy is generally working with language that, in its search for discursive truth, relies far more heavily on abstract concepts. This gives the translator much less room to play. If the terminology does not go easily into the new language, options are limited. Where consistency and formal precision seem most warranted, they are most difficult to achieve.
It might, for example, seem logical to translate a foundational philosophical concept consistently by the same word. The notion that there is only one right way to translate a given word derives from Enlightenment thought with its reliance on the immediacy of intellectual cognition.1 It drew strength from systematic philosophy's search for definitional rigor and systematic coherence. But no sooner does a translator actually begin to work with these texts than the notion of conceptual consistency runs into trouble. For as Michael Spitzer observes in his introduction to this volume, concepts evolve. The philosophers considered in Music in German Philosophy wrote over a period of several centuries, continuously interpreting and reinterpreting each other. The resulting shifts in the meaning of concepts implicitly challenge notions of absolute philosophical truth.
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