Scott McLemee
Scott McLemee interviews Paul Reitter, translator of a new English edition of Marx’s Capital.
IN EARLY 1845, a young and precariously employed holder of a Ph.D. in philosophy named Karl Marx signed a contract with a German publisher for a book, in two volumes, on political economy. He had already filled notebooks with extracts from his studies in the field, and at the time likely felt like he was already reasonably far along on the project. But his publisher canceled the contract two years later, in part on the grounds that Marx rejected the suggestion to write with an eye to avoid provoking the authorities.
The gestation of Das Kapital (1867) took another 20 years, most of them in England, where the author did research at the British Museum (a library) digesting official reports on factory conditions as well as economic and business literature in several languages. Marx also worked with British trade unionists, including many from abroad, and served as a foreign correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune. Documenting the extremes of inequality in Victorian Britain was ultimately secondary to Marx’s efforts to understand capitalism as a dynamic system—one already well along the way to instantiating itself everywhere, remaking the world in its own image.
Marx’s model of capitalism as an inherently crisis-generating system became more plausible to many readers in the wake of the global financial system’s near-collapse in 2008. Arriving 16 years later—to the month, as it turned out— Princeton University Press’s new translation of Capital arrives as a certified classic. The edition draws on generations of scholarship on Marx’s economic manuscripts, which are voluminous in mass and headache-making in penmanship. Prefatory essays by the political theorist Wendy Brown and by Paul North, a scholar of German literature, move between the 19th-century context of Marx’s writing and the 21st-century horizon of the new edition’s readers.
The translator is Paul Reitter, a professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Ohio State University. He answered a few questions about his work by email. A transcript of the discussion follows.
Q: Nobody undertakes the translation of a massive, recondite book into English for the fourth time without feeling a very clear and distinct need. What motivated you to take it on?
A: It’s true that on some level I wanted to produce a translation that conveys elements of Marx’s text that in my opinion the other English translations of Capital don’t convey so well—which isn’t to suggest that those translations are failed efforts, just that they clearly didn’t prioritize textual elements that have come to matter a lot for 21st-century readers, including me. Since I had taught both the Moore-Aveling translation (1887) and Ben Fowkes’s translation (1976), I had experienced their limitations in a very particular and highly motivating way—all my retranslation projects have begun in the classroom.
Q: What’s your personal history with Capital? What aspect(s) of its historical, theoretical or literary qualities, say, made the strongest impression?
A: I’ve connected with Capital in a number of ways—as someone who became devoted to intellectual history pretty early in life, as a student of critical theory, as a scholar of radical German-Jewish intellectuals and, not least, as someone trying to understand the workings and effects of capitalism and the persistence of market fundamentalism in the here and now.
What made the biggest impression? The scope of what Marx was trying to do is astonishing. According to one well-informed estimate, volume one represents 1/72 of the project he had in mind to carry out. But this is of course a hard question. Although Marx turns decisively away from classical political economy’s focus on the egoism of the individual, and instead wants to understand capitalism in terms of its “laws of motion,” there’s a humaneness to the project, because he keeps asking whether these laws promote human flourishing among those doing most of the work, a question most economists today neglect to pose. Also, the writing in Capital is often really brilliant. I hope my translation has managed to preserve something of that.
Q: What effect did translating Capital have on your sense of the book? Did it change anything about how you understood it?
A: I certainly think that I’ve come away from the work of translating Capital with a much keener understanding of many of the book’s most important ideas and arguments, by which I mean such things as Marx’s notions of value and commodity fetishism. You’d expect this, of course: translating entails very, very close reading, or, for example, thinking at great length about how this or that individual term is being used, and if the process of translating doesn’t leave you with the sense that you’ve truly deepened your knowledge of a text’s form and content, well, you should be surprised (and alarmed).
But the kind of poring over I just described isn’t necessarily conducive to coming up with a big new interpretation. If it were, we’d see lots of translators writing books about the texts they just translated. We don’t see so much of that, however, and keep in mind: Many of the people who retranslate classics are scholars, i.e., people who write books. On the other hand, I could imagine writing about certain impressions of the Capital that didn’t take shape until I translated it.
Here are two. First, I had seriously underappreciated the sophistication of Marx’s mimetic techniques: There are places where he pulls off a kind of free indirect imitation, essentially impersonating someone without having that person speak directly—an unusual and, I think, very effective device. Second, I had underappreciated the extent to which Marx makes an effort to locate positive possibilities in developments that in the short run cause a lot of suffering, such as the rapid development of machinery. According to Marx, this drains the content from labor and throws a lot of people out of work but increasingly necessitates that workers be retrained again and again, allowing them to cultivate an unlikely and fulfilling well-roundedness.
Q: In the spring, someone on social media predicted this would be the “definitive” translation. It came as a relief to see you don’t claim that! Marx himself might have been dubious about the idea. He prepared a second, revised German edition of Capital in 1872 and left notes for additional corrections and tweaks he did not live to make, plus he had a hand in the Russian and French translations, with the latter incorporating changes he regarded as significant for understanding his arguments. You’ve translated the second German edition. Why did that seem like the one to work on?
A: There’s really no definitive source text to work from here. Some scholars point to the authoritativeness of the first French edition of Capital (1875) because it’s the last edition of volume one whose publication Marx oversaw, and Marx himself said that the changes he made—he revised Joseph Roy’s French translation—gave it an “independent scientific value.” But it’s easy to push back against this. Marx, who didn’t have the highest opinion of the French reading public, also said that he had to smooth/flatten out/simplify the French edition, and in fact the edition drops some important formulations. Furthermore, we don’t have the manuscript of the translation by Roy that Marx worked over, so most of the time, we don’t know what’s from Marx and what’s from Roy.
We do have some lists where Marx identified passages in the French edition that should be translated into German for future German editions. But the passages that scholars dwell on when they talk about the important changes in the French edition, the ones that are supposed to reflect changes in Marx’s thinking, mostly aren’t from his list, and you can make the case that some of the passages that scholars have treated as crucial, change-reflecting “revisions” are in fact translations—I do this in my translator’s preface.
Not only that, Friedrich Engels didn’t exactly follow Marx’s instructions when he edited the third (1883) and fourth (1890) editions of volume one, and to me the formulations of his own that he inserted into the fourth edition, which are meant to clarify Marx’s arguments, sound like Engels, not Marx, and are sometimes counterproductive. That’s how we landed on using the second German edition (1872), the last German edition Marx saw through to publication, as our source text.
Although someone writing in Jacobin recently suggested otherwise, the back matter in our edition includes quite a bit of material informing readers about how the first German edition differs from the second edition and about how the French edition differs from the second German edition. Will Roberts contributed a great afterword essay on the latter topic.
Q: You are also translating the second and third volumes of Capital, left in manuscript at the time of Marx’s death and edited for publication by Engels. Is it too early to ask how that part of the project is going?
A: We are excited to be back at it and are enjoying the mix of continuity and change: Volume two has its own special translation and philological challenges. In volume one, for example, we tried to make transparent what you might call Marx’s creative practices of citation. Sometimes he reorders that material he’s citing; sometimes he paraphrases rather than translates quotations from foreign-language source material but still uses quotation marks. So where Marx cites English-language texts in his own German translations, we didn’t just plug in the original English sources; in cases where his creative citing affected the meaning of the quotations in a substantial way, we matched the quotations to what Marx gave his readers.
One thing that made this difficult—and interesting—is Marx’s translating style. When Marx translates English factory inspectors’ reports, he often drops little qualifying words, such as “almost.” Where the original text has “the smell was almost unbearable,” his German translation will say what you’d back-translate into English as “the smell was unbearable.” So what’s he doing? Is he amplifying the evidence to make working conditions out to be even worse than the factory inspector’s report indicates? Or did Marx read the “almost” as British understatement that doesn’t register well in German? In other words, it can be hard to say whether Marx was citing creatively or translating creatively.
In volume two, the challenge is to make transparent Engels’s creative editing. Volume two is actually Marx’s last word on the Capital project, based as it is on eight different manuscripts, the last of which Marx worked on into the 1880s (in contrast, he wrote the manuscript on which volume three is based in the mid-1860s).
As Engels laboriously put, or pieced, together the text of volume two, struggling with a bad back and Marx’s nearly indecipherable handwriting, he tried to make the text seem like a “finished whole.” He inserted transitional sections, evened out and to some extent formalized the style, which varies quite a bit in the manuscripts, and worked to create an impression of conceptual integration when Marx’s thinking in fact evolved considerably over the course of the eight volume-two manuscripts. Since the German critical edition of Marx’s and Engels’s works, with its 30-volume section of Capital (completed in 2012), has made available reliable versions of all the volume two manuscripts, you can now track—and, again, make transparent—Engels’s editorial interventions, something that couldn’t be done for the only English translation of volume two currently in print, David Fernbach’s edition, which was published in 1978.
Q: When I first started studying Capital—some time in the first Reagan administration—it felt very much like a Victorian text, not just because of Marx’s examples (all those waistcoats and spools of linen) but in the style. Your translator’s introduction discusses the nuances of his diction that you’ve pursued. But somehow the text reads as much more contemporary, or at least less Victorian, than the others. Any thoughts on this?
A: To respond to your specific question, Marx’s prose in Capital is often very direct, streamlined and forceful—Engels described it as the most concise and vigorous writing in German. There’s much more subject-verb-object word order than you find in most 19th-century German scholarship or “high” literature (see the first pages of chapter one), and while Marx neologizes quite a bit, he otherwise tends to avoid uncommon or recondite words: He uses a lot of colloquial and earthy expressions. It’s a scholarly prose that feels untimely in Nietzsche’s sense, or like it’s from the 19th century but not entirely of it. And in steering away from Victorian language, I wasn’t trying to make Marx sound like a contemporary author: I was trying to match what I hear when I read Capital.
There’s a saying that a classic work should be retranslated every 50 years or so. It certainly looks like Anglophone translators of Capital (volume one) took that to heart. First English translation: Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 1887. Second English translation: Eden and Cedar Paul, 1928. Third English translation: Ben Fowkes, 1976. Fourth English translation: me, 2024.
I can’t claim that the saying actually played a role in my decision to retranslate Capital, but I think it’s right, insofar as we can read its message as being that it’s good to have translations from multiple eras. Not everyone agrees. When the Pauls’ translation appeared, David Riazanov, the leading Marx scholar at the time, saw it as an affront. According to him, to produce a new English translation was to imply that the Moore-Aveling version, which Engels edited, was “useless.” And when Fowkes introduced his translation, he maintained that the Moore-Aveling edition was outdated to the point of near uselessness. For Fowkes, Moore-Aveling’s vocabulary felt wrong (e.g., because they used the term “labourer” rather than “worker”), and what he called their “watering down” of Marx’s philosophical terms no longer made sense.
In my translator’s preface, I noted some of the ways my own priorities align with the wants and needs of present-day readers and, in addition, some of the ways my translation benefited from scholarly resources that came into being only after Fowkes’s translation was published. But I tried to avoid striking an adversarial tone. Much of the time, the particular pressures under which a translator operates will be at once limiting and productive. A first translation introduces a text to an audience that hasn’t had access to it, so if the text is strange (and Capital is a strange text), there’s obviously going to be pressure to pull back on its strangeness and to draw the audience in. If the text has become a classic, you’ll have a motivated readership, which brings a certain freedom, but you’ll also have critical authorities exerting a different kind of pressure.
A new English retranslation of The Communist Manifesto is unlikely to contain a rendering that travels as far from the source text as the most iconic line from Samuel Moore’s early English translation: “All that is solid melts into air.” So, different “epochs of translation,” to speak with Goethe, have different advantages. Ideally, then, readers committed to a classic text they gain access to through translation will engage with different translations and try to profit from their different strengths.
Inside Higher Ed, September 27, 2024
Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.