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Glossary entry

Spanish term or phrase:

desalejador

English translation:

de-severant / de-distancing

Added to glossary by Charles Davis
May 3, 2013 21:24
11 yrs ago
Spanish term

desalejador

Spanish to English Other Philosophy
I suspect that this is the Spanish translation of a German term but I cannot find how it has been translated into English:

Heidegger sostuvo que el existente humano –el tan traído y llevado Dasein– es esencialmente “desalejador”.

Thanks!
Proposed translations (English)
4 de-severant
Change log

May 5, 2013 18:50: Charles Davis changed "Edited KOG entry" from "<a href="/profile/28228">Wendy Gosselin's</a> old entry - "desalejador"" to ""de-severant""

Discussion

Charles Davis May 5, 2013:
Well, the hyphen was put there by Macquarrie and Robinson, and most people who use that term reproduce it, but I don't think it's crucial. They may have included it to reflect Heidegger's deliberate hyphen in the original German term "ent-fernend".

Frankly I think Stambaugh's "de-distancing" is preferable, and actually more people use that nowadays. For over thirty years after Macquarrie & Robinson's translation first appeared, in 1962, it was the only English version of Being and Time available, so naturally their terminology tended to be used by English-speaking Heidegger scholars. But since 1996 Stambaugh's version has offered an alternative. Joan Stambaugh, Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, is a great scholar and America's leading Heidegger specialist. Her translation is a superb achievement.
Rob James May 5, 2013:
OK, I see your point here. May have gotten stuck on the word "de-severant" itself, it seems like a lot more sources actually use "desevering" or "de-severing" (and a few spell it out as "removing distance" or something more literal) but something along those lines is indeed correct. If deseverant is used, though, I think it should be without a hyphen.
Charles Davis May 4, 2013:
@ Rob Heidegger discusses many concepts in Being and Time. He often invents new German words to express them. Probably the most famous is what he calls "Dasein", which is virtually impossible to translate and is usually left in German by philosophers discussing Heideggerian thought in English. "Being-in-the-world" is another; he calls this "In der Welt sein".

"Ent-fernung", adjective "ent-fernend", is another of his concepts and coinages. As you can see from the source text, it is a property of Dasein. Needless to say, it is not the same as "being-in-the-world".

Your reference to "a handful of translations" makes no sense at all. There are precisely two published translations of Being and Time, one by Macquarrie & Robinson and the other by Stambaugh. They render the term "ent-fernend" in the ways I have stated. All those who discuss Heidegger in English use one or other of these English equivalents for this term, which is rendered as "desalojador" in Spanish (another invented word, of course). Most certainly they are established technical terms. When people say "being-in-the-world" they are referring to something different.

Proposed translations

10 mins
Selected

de-severant

This is the term used in the English translation of Being and Time. It will take me a few minutes to find you the proper references. For the moment, here are a couple:

"Deseverance
[...] Dasein is essentially de-severant: it lets any entity be encountered close by as the entity which it is."
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/b_and_t_glossary....

"El Dasein es esencialmente desalejador [...]"
http://books.google.es/books?id=OdKXD-3fLAAC&pg=PA266&lpg=PA...

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Note added at 20 mins (2013-05-03 21:44:59 GMT)
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Some Heideggerians say "de-distancing".

Heidegger's original German is "Dasein ist wesenhaft ent-fernend".
http://books.google.es/books?id=OD6X3JRikYwC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA5...

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Note added at 24 mins (2013-05-03 21:48:30 GMT)
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"De-severant" is the word used in the classic English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Being-Time-Martin-Heidegger/dp/06311...

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Note added at 2 hrs (2013-05-03 23:47:46 GMT)
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The quotation is near the beginning of §23 of Being and Time, "Die Räumlichkeit des In-der-Welt-seins" ("The spatiality of Being-in-the-world", "La espacialidad de estar en el mundo").
Here it is in German (p. 105, lines 10-11):
http://christianebailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Sein-...

See here for the Spanish version (p. 111, lines 9-10, tr. Jorge Eduardo Rivera):
http://issuu.com/marcasate/docs/heidegger-martin---ser-y-tie...

And in English here (p. 139, line 9, tr. Macquarrie & Robinson; p. 68 of this file):
http://es.scribd.com/doc/42700894/Martin-Heidegger-Being-and...

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Note added at 2 hrs (2013-05-03 23:58:30 GMT)
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However, if you prefer "de-distancing" (which is perhaps a little easier to understand), this is how Joan Stambaugh rendered "ent-fernend" in her translation (Albany: SUNY, 1996), p. 97:

http://books.google.es/books?id=9oc2BnZMCZgC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA9...

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Note added at 22 hrs (2013-05-04 19:29:21 GMT)
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It is not necessarily the case that "desalejador" could not be properly expressed by any other English term, but given the extraordinary difficulty of the concepts Heidegger is discussing and his well known propensity for inventing new words to express them, I think it would be very unwise, unless one possesses professional expertise in this area of philosophy, to use a term different from those which appear in the published English translations of this text, which are those used by English-speaking philosophers when discussing Heidegger.
Peer comment(s):
neutral Rob James : Except that neither are actual English words, but rather words which were "made up" to try to translate this concept. They only time they appear is in translations of this text.
20 hrs
Well, of course! That's the point. "Ent-fernend", with a hyphen, is not standard German either. Heidegger is expressing a concept for which no existing term is adequate, and therefore existing terms falsify it.
Something went wrong...
4 KudoZ points awarded for this answer. Comment: "YES!!! (though in here http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/b_and_t_glossary.html#d it appears as one word)"
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