I was tempted to say, about learning to read German in order to read Heidegger, "As soon as I have a free afternoon I'll get right to it." But then I was distracted by the thought of philosophers who cannot be translated. Poets, yes -- the poetry, they say, is the part you can't translate. But the presumption of philosophy seems to be against all that sort of stuck-in-the-contextual-mud, Blut-und-Boden stuff. From the sages compounding aspirate-afflicted polysyllables in the Indus Valley three thousand years ago, straight through to Heidegger, there is a claim or an implication of universality, is there not? A floating on the air, out into space, up into the Empyrean and the abode of the gods. I cannot imagine the high gods being required to speak German.