J: That can hardly be said of your thoughts on language.
I: True, less so, for it was all of twenty years after my doctoral dissertation that I dared discuss in a class the question of language. It was at that same time that I, in class, made public my first interpretations of Hölderlin's hymns. In the summer semester of 1934, I offered a lecture series under the title "Logic." In fact, however, it was a reflection on the logos, in which I was trying to find the nature of language. Yet it took nearly another ten years before I was able to say what I was thinking-the fitting word is still lacking even today. The prospect of the thinking that labors to answer to the nature of language is still veiled, in all its vastness. This is why I do not yet see whether what I am trying to think of as the nature of language is also adequate for the nature of the Eastasian language; whether in the end-which would also be the beginning-a nature of language can reach the thinking experience, a nature which would offer the assurance that European-Western saying and Eastasian saying will enter into dialogue such that in it there sings something that wells up from a single source.
J: But a source that would then still remain concealed from both language worlds.
I: That is what I mean. This is why your visit is especially welcome to me. Since you have already translated into Japanese a few of Kleist's plays, and some of my lectures on Hölderlin, you have a keener rar for the questions that I addressed to your compatriots almost thirty-five years ago.
J: You must not overestimate my abilities, especially since I, coming from Japanese poetry, still find it difficult to respond to European poetry in a way that does justice to its essential nature.
I: Even though the danger remains that is necessarily implied in our using the German language for our dialogue, I believe that I have meanwhile learned a little more, w that now I can ask questions better than several decades ago.