New translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit

Here is a link to a recent radio interview with Jean Pierre Lefebvre, whose revised French translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Flammarion, 2012) - the second of four into that language - has just been published:

www.franceculture.fr
The radio interview is from June 2012. Lefebvre has also translated the Moses and Monotheism of Freud, which he compares in the interview with the Phenomenology for its historical range. He describes the style of the Phenomenology as the spoken words of a professor with a certain poetic element, allusive and with an excessive use of pronouns that places a burden on a reader that might have been more workable for a listener. He points out that Erfahrung (Experience, as in Science of the Experience of Consciousness) comes from fahren, to journey, and thus introduces
temporality even through its etymology. He reckons he has refined previous versions rather than introduced anything radically new.


You can read the Introduction of Lefebvre to his new translation of the Phenomenology (see below) here at Amazon. It appeared in March, the original having appeared in 1991 as an alternative to Jean Hyppolite's classic annotated 1939-41 version, with later versions by Gwendoline Jarzyk and Pierre-Jean Labarriere (1993) and Bernard Bourgeois (2006).

Stephen Cowley