A basic problem is that he scarcely does justice to issues of translation that, even if they cannot be resolved within the compass of a work such as this, can at least be flagged. For example, I do not find anywhere a discussion of the crucial term found in Heidegger's subtitle: 'Vom Ereignis'. Powell takes the English translators' rendering 'Enownment' without further comment, but given the role of this term not only in this work but throughout Heidegger's later philosophy, this seems to miss a trick. The power of Heidegger's ruminations on language is not in his facility in conjuring of neologisms, but in the way in which he gives new meanings to old words (or, as he would have it, enables us to hear what is originally being said in a word that has become debased and overlooked in the everyday chatter of Dasein). In this case, Ereignis is not a forced piece of terminology (like 'enownment'), but a word you are likely to encounter every day in the newspaper. Moreover 'enownment' entirely obscures the normal sense of event or happening, a meaning that, semantically, points to other key Heideggerian terms and concepts, such as historicity. This link to historicity is explained on p. 66. However, it is hard to say that what is said there will be clear to a reader who does not already have a good sense for what Heidegger is about: 'Ereignis is the thinking-act of entering non-self-hood and pure life, entering the unity of things which is within, which the "personality" that writes the poetry of Hölderlin seems to do in each poem . . .' (p. 66).
