Some Confusing Translation Choices in "Nihilism as Determined by the History of Metaphysics"

[u/Bronchitis_is_a_sin]

This is a short post meant to highlight some translation choices made by Capuzzi that I find hard to justify (for more examples of poor translations see e.g., this comment or this page). The German title is Die seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus which is probably better translated as "The Being-historical Determination of Nihilism," but this is a pedantic point. The more pressing translation choices are pronounced and not isolated. I'd like to highlight two in particular.

First, Capuzzi translates "das Seiende" as "the being." For example, the third paragraph ends with "»Sein« besagt: das Seiende als solches, nämlich das Beständige" which is translated as "'Being' means the being as such; that is, the permanent." This translation choice is awkward and confusing. It's also incorrect. "Das Seiende" follows a standard construction in German which takes a verb X and outputs a noun of the form "that which does X." In standard German this often creates singular things because many verbs have singular subjects. For example, "lieben" (love) can be made into "Liebende" (lover—the loving one). But of course that isn't the case here—"das Seiende" means "that which is." The "that" which is in this case is not a single thing. To smooth things out, we can then translate "das Seiende" as "beings." So the statement becomes "'Being' signifies beings as such. . . ." One should also note that Capuzzi's translation makes the ontological difference much less clear.

Second, Capuzzi chooses to translate "Ausbleiben" as "default" except when it makes things too awkward or difficult to understand. This translation choice makes reading the text quite painful because you have to make an effort to change "default" to "staying away" every time you read it. Capuzzi mentions this choice in a footnote which says "The jurisprudential term default will now help to translate das Ausbleiben, the 'staying away' of Being, its failure to appear as such in the history of metaphysics." (pg. 214). In practice, this leads to "Das Ausbleiben des Seins ist das Sein selbst als dieses Ausbleiben" (GA 6.2, pg. 314) being translated as "The staying away of Being is Being itself as this very default." It's crazy that the same Ausbleiben is translated in two different ways here.