Martin Heidegger

Heidegger's philosophical work Being and Time (1927) is considered to be the forerunner of deconstruction. In this work he was questioning the conditions for existence or being. Heidegger's theory was that being is not something that can be conceived of as an entity that is external to the being that questions, or the place from which that question arises. Being is not an entity or idea that can be understood or represented. Heidegger's interrogation of being also led him on to question the accepted belief of the reliability language. Language is the force that constitutes the knowing being.Gentzler explains: “Translation is viewed as an action, an operation of thought, a translation of our selves into the thought of the other language, and not a linguistic, scientific transfer from something into the present” (155). Thus, man is the subject of language and disappears in it. Heidegger wanted language to speak for itself without any metaphysical abstractions.

How is all of this related to translation theory? Translation, in as much as it is a language-oriented activity, is also a return to the originary experience of language. Heidegger explained his concepts of translation through the essay “The Anaximander Fragment” in his book Early Greek Thinking . He compares two translations of this ancient Greek text – one by Nietzsche in 1873 and another by Herman Diels in 1903. He argues that both are firmly rooted in the western philosophical tradition and are bound to translate the text very much in those terms. He attempted to step outside of this epistemological framework, as it were, and approached the text from another perspective, which was dissociated from place and time. He allowed the language to speak to him without the weight of years or place to hinder him. This could be made possible by listening to the silences in the text or the unsaid things rather than the said. This was to pave the way for Derrida's concept of language later on.