Responses to Matthew Eshleman and Adrian van den Hoven

Abstract

I am so grateful to Matthew Eshleman and Adrian van den Hoven for their generous, insightful comments. Translating can be a lonely activity, especially when the text is as lengthy as BN. At the end of hours of involvement with Sartre’s French – perched, as it were, on the edge of his mind – I often felt in need of other, auxiliary minds to re-centre me, to save me from toppling over completely into Sartre’s consciousness and drowning. In these moments, I usually turned to dictionaries and other internet resources to bolster my critical distance; more rarely, I would email fellow translators or philosophers for help. But I have had very little of the attentive, fine-grained dialogue offered here, and I have immensely enjoyed, and benefited from, this exchange. Hopefully, SSI readers will also find it of interest.