Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Martin Heidegger, "Being and Time: An Annotated Translation" (Yale UP, 2026)
Host: Stephen Dozeman
Guest: Cyril Welch (Translator, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Mount Allison University)
Date: February 23, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, Stephen Dozeman interviews Cyril Welch about his newly released annotated translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), a century after its original publication. Welch discusses his unique journey to translating the text, challenges of rendering Heidegger’s notoriously difficult German into English, pedagogical insights, and how his translation project evolved organically from decades of teaching. The conversation also explores key philosophical themes in Being and Time, Welch’s approach to annotation, phenomenology, the significance of Heidegger’s style, and the enduring relevance and incompleteness of the project.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Origins of Welch’s Translation

• Born from Classroom Teaching: Welch did not set out to produce a formal translation for publication. His project began as translations for his students, stemming from frustration with existing English versions, which he felt departed dramatically from the original German.
  • Quote: “I was startled by how much the translation seemed like a totally different book. It wasn’t the book that I read in the German originally.” – Cyril Welch [05:01]
• Process: Over the decades, as more passages were translated and revised in response to student questions, the work evolved toward a complete translation.
• Copyright Delay: Publication was delayed due to copyright extension laws in the United States (the so-called “Mickey Mouse Extension Act” [08:07]).

2. Pedagogy: Reading Philosophy with Novels

• Welch’s teaching method included reading Being and Time in parallel with a novel, most often Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, to encourage students to see philosophy as addressing concrete life, not just abstract systems.
  • Quote: “A great philosophical work... helps you understand where you are and what you’re doing. And that’s to my mind, exactly what a great novel does.” – Cyril Welch [11:25]
• Encouraged students to use philosophical insights to reflect on their own lives indirectly, via literature, to deepen understanding.

3. Heidegger’s Engagement with Ancient Greek Philosophy

• Heidegger’s method is deeply influenced by Plato and Aristotle, as evident from the opening pages of Being and Time (“You’re gonna be hit with first passage from Plato…” – Dozeman [14:25]).
• Welch emphasizes Heidegger’s mission to recover what is “alive” in Greek philosophy, moving from understanding humans “in nature” toward “in world.”
  • Quote: “Plato does not account for, but rather assumes our being in a world. He drifts immediately into what all Western philosophy has done since until Heidegger...” – Cyril Welch [17:10]

4. The “Big Crunch”: Phenomenology and the Crisis of Meaning

• Welch repeatedly references “the big crunch”—the turning point or existential crisis that philosophy, literature, and religion once centered—contrasting modern science’s focus on “nature” with older traditions’ emphasis on existential transformation.
  • Quote: “All thinking and all literature and everything before 1600 ... is always about what the big crunch in life is.” – [20:26]

5. Phenomenology and “Looking for Yourself”

• Heidegger adapts Husserl’s push to “look directly, not at academic books,” emphasizing first-person investigation and suspending received opinions.
  • Quote: “The most challenging part of phenomenology was really learn[ing] to look for yourself, suspend all of the literature that is there...” – [23:54]
• Welch likens phenomenology to an “art” or “way of life,” not a set of doctrines.

6. Everydayness and the Ordinary

• A large portion of Being and Time is devoted to “everydayness,” analyzing mundane experience (e.g., hammering nails, walking, being-in-a-room).
• Welch argues Heidegger’s originality is showing how the possibility of “the alternative”—existential transformation—emerges from the ordinary, not through escaping it.
  • Quote: “The alternative is that comes at that moment when for the first time, probably in your whole damn life, you’ve actually been able to face things and people in their terms rather than your own.” – [36:55]

7. Communal and Historical Seeing

• Heidegger’s “seeing” is always communal or historical—“we see them together.” Context, culture, and tradition shape perception.
  • Quote: “Seeing is communal ... there is a certain togetherness, a togetherness with our ancestors.” – [41:04]

8. Authenticity as Ownership

• “Authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) in Heidegger is ownership or taking one’s situation as “my own.”
  • Quote: “The fundamental act: to take it as your own or to shuffle it off onto somebody else. That’s certainly … at the root of his talk of authenticity.” – [47:24]
• Not mere individualism; it entails communal rootedness and active engagement.

9. Heidegger’s German Style and Challenges of Translation

• Welch argues Being and Time alternates between highly academic prose and moments of down-to-earth colloquialism.
• Unlike previous translators who preserved difficult German terms or constructed cumbersome neologisms, Welch leans toward English colloquialisms.
  • Quote: “When he is cutting loose ... it’s all colloquialist, he might as well be talking with a farmer.” – [53:40]
• “Dasein,” for example, is just “being there”; Welch prefers plain translation rather than mystification.
• Translation Philosophy: Strikes a balance, as Aristotle recommended, between the ordinary and special.
  • Quote: “There is a trick always in effective speaking and effective writing ... to get a mix of the old and the new, the colloquial and the special.” – [56:52]

10. The Annotated Edition and Heidegger’s Marginalia

• Welch’s edition categorizes notes into:
  • (a) Heidegger’s references
  • (b) Translator commentary
  • (c) Heidegger’s own later marginalia—brief notes or corrections Heidegger made in his own copies
• Purpose: These marginal comments show the text’s “aliveness”—Heidegger’s ongoing reconsideration and the work’s inherent ambiguity.
  • Quote: “The text is kind of vibrating a bit ... waiting for its own fulfillment.” – [65:25]

11. The Incompleteness of Being and Time

• Being and Time was intended as the first of several divisions, but only the first third was completed and published.
• Welch sees this incompleteness as intrinsic to the work. Like Proust’s claim about art, the book puts the reader “on the threshold”—completion is left to us.
  • Quote: “The incompleteness of the project ... belongs to the project. Being in Time only puts you on the threshold.” – [69:25]

12. Final Reflections and Advice to Readers

• Welch hopes readers (old and new) will approach Being and Time with “a song in their heart,” viewing it as an opportunity and relief, not a burden.
• He encourages “fresh readers” to use the text as a way to return to and appreciate their own cultural and literary traditions.
  • Quote: “It should be bright, even though it’s dark in many ways ... the whole point of the book is to give you a sigh of relief.” – [76:41]
• Points to themes like “shared lot” (Geschick)—solidarity or destiny with others—that have become more significant to him in old age.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Translation and Teaching:
  “You really learn a book when you do [translate] that.” – Cyril Welch [07:29]
• On Reading in Parallel:
  “Don’t talk about the book, for God’s sake ... The book is meaning to help you talk about something else.” – [13:09]
• On Phenomenology:
  “To be intellectually responsible is to account for things as they happen and are happening, prior to giving reasons for their happening, prior to looking behind the scenes.” – [24:13]
• On Everydayness:
  “You can spend the rest of your life actually talking with your ancestors, and making them alive.” – [35:41]
• On Authenticity:
  “You have to take it as your own. If you cannot take it as your own, you’re just taking it from somebody else ... you don’t have knowledge, even in the sciences.” – [51:48]
• On Marginalia:
  “They offer a little bit of a pause ... all those footnotes are meant to kind of give you a pause to see that the text is kind of vibrating a bit.” – [65:25]

Key Timestamps

• [03:43] – Welch’s journey into translating Being and Time
• [10:53] – Pedagogy: reading Heidegger with novels
• [14:58] – Heidegger on Greek philosophy and phenomenology
• [32:04] – The philosophical significance of everydayness
• [40:57] – Context, history, and communal seeing
• [44:47] – Heidegger’s concept of authenticity
• [52:45] – Heidegger’s style and translation choices
• [62:27] – The role of marginalia/commentary in the edition
• [68:48] – The incompleteness of Being and Time
• [76:31] – Final reflections: advice for readers

Overall Tone and Style

Welch’s tone is warm, reflective, and anecdotal, often meandering but rich with personal insight and humor. He intersperses references to literary and philosophical figures (Chesterton, Faulkner, Proust, Aristotle) and draws on decades of teaching and translating. The conversation is intellectually rigorous yet grounded in everyday experience, mirroring, in spirit, the very themes he identifies in Heidegger.

Recommended For

• First-time and returning readers of Being and Time
• Students and teachers of philosophy
• Anyone interested in translation, phenomenology, or existentialism
• Readers seeking to understand philosophical texts in relation to lived experience

“It’s not there to give you a system that blanks out other things. It’s meant to be an opening.” – Cyril Welch [80:54]