A friend has mentioned the legend that German students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read Norman Kemp Smith's translation of The Critique of Pure Reason. Last week, in reading Foucault's Discourse on Language, I encountered the paragraph
First, Hyppolite took the trouble to give some presence to this great, slightly phantomlike shadow that was Hegel, prowling through the nineteenth century, with whom men struggled in the dark. He gave Hegel this presence with his translation of the Phenomenology of the mind; proof of the extent to which Hegel came to light in this text was the number of Germans who came to consult this text in order to understand what, for a moment at least, had become the German version.
Perhaps; but I don't think I will be ordering La Phénoménologie de l'esprit anytime soon. It is not clear from the Albertine website that one can conveniently order Hyppolite's version.
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