Translation as Creation. Hegel in Italy

Going from Germany to Italy, at first sight, may seem like a return to a lost paradise. While the land that gave birth to Kant and Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche has been eliminating philosophy, step by step, since 1810 – first from school (the last year of Gymnasium now has 2 optional hours) and then from university – the nation of opera lirica and sexy comedy insists on teaching Philosophy to every kid who attends their ‘better’ High School, the Liceo. Five hours a week, as one of the main subjects.

That means that, at Italian universities, you may mention Kant or Aristotle or Leibniz and between 50 and 90% of your students will immediately know what you are talking about. Try naming Leibniz in German universities: 70% of students will get anxious, not knowing why you are talking about biscuits. Maybe this is modernization. Surely it has a price. German sociologists discuss endlessly about whether they can really really know reality and physicists reflect about the existence of causality as if not only Kant, no: not even Plato had ever existed. Between virtual worlds and globalization and Mother Earth everybody now, in Germany as in the Anglo-Saxon world, is thinking at the level of the Presocratics. People are simply wasting a lot of time by ignoring what others have thought in the last three thousand years. So, when Italian politicians today want to abolish their Philosophy teaching at school as utterly outdated, they will probably eliminate what is best about Italy: culture. Great Italians, I mean the ones who write and invent and translate and do research at the southern border of Europe did, as adolescents, five hours of Ancient Greek, five of Latin, five of Philosophy a week for three entire years. That's why they do it better.

You might object that Philosophy can not be taught. And talking about thruth and beauty five hours a week may seem like a great bore to the majority of students? True. But what Italian professori teach is not exactly Philosophy, it is History of Philosophy, presented in enormous text books, giant compilations of human thought. Students read excerpts, extracts, study resumes, short syntheses, formulae. Lucky are the authors with clear and handy concepts: thesis – antithesis – synthesis! Übermensch! Exploitation! Unlucky are the others who, like Kierkegaard, are trying to escape this kind of thinking in keywords. He finds himself strangled in a three step scheme that ends in religion and that he will never escape. Nobody will really read his books, not even professional thinkers: their work is to renew the known, not to rise up against it. That's why Italian editions of philosophers often contain only parts of the original text and nobody seems to care. Why read the whole thing when you already know from your textbook what the author says? Mondadori's “Aut aut” (Enten eller) without any note gives only the last chapter of the Danish book, Rousseau's Émile in most cases will be reduced from a 600 page brick to a 200 page leaflet. And the translations may be unreadable. Publishers know nobody cares. They let graduate students translate from any language they pretend to know under one condition: they have to do it for free. Then an aspiring professor will write a more or less brilliant introduction where he explains what the author wanted to say. That's how they give birth to monumental volumes like “Bompiani classici”. Obviously, Italian Philosophy is a thing of its own. It moves by repetition and explanation of formulas. Even if they are free of any invention, they will survive if they sound good.

Take the Hegel’s criticism of the traditional way of treating History of Philosophy. In Italian, he criticises: “A history conceived like a nursery rhyme of different opinions becomes an idle curiosity” (“Una storia, concepita in tal modo come una filastrocca di opinioni diverse, diventa curiosità oziosa”). Sounds great, implying that this way of writing History of Philosophy would be apt to sedating small, tired children. Obviously, this citation is ideal for short and memorable summaries. If you google “Hegel storia filosofia filastrocca” you will get 7970 results (15/08/2015). That is less than you will get with moving questions like “Kant gay?” (286000), but it is quite a lot – given that the formulation we find repeated nearly 8000 times (text books, presentations, conferences) is freely, though ingenuously, invented by the Italian translator. In the original German text Hegel writes about “This History, as a pointless narration of many different opinions” (“Diese Geschichte, so als eine Hererzählung von vielerlei Meinungen”). That is the creative power of a tradition of thought I propose to call Manualism. Usually its scholars will only recount others’ thoughts, but at times they create new, astonishing expressions, good for being repeated and for keeping alive what somehow still survives in the neighborhood of Philosophy.