The poetics of philosophy and the philosophy of translation

This paper examines the poetics of philosophy by looking at poems by four philosophers – Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein – to explore the implications of a saying of Wittgenstein's that philosophy should probably be written as poetry. The poems are given both in the source language and in translation. The examination reveals that an awareness of the stylistics of philosophy can facilitate the reading of a source text for translation as well as its theorisation. The work of Antoine Berman is used to show that literariness cannot be divorced from philosophical enquiry. It is argued that there are three significant connections between poetry and philosophy: a poem can illustrate philosophical issues; it can be about philosophy; or it can do philosophy, which – again to follow Wittgenstein – may like poetry not be about imparting information. The translation of the work of Martin Heidegger and recent renderings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are used as examples to stress the relevance of this debate for practice, and the paper stresses that the skills of both the philosopher and the creative writer are needed to translate philosophy written like poetry. There are implications for how the philosophy of translation can be written.