This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… A Note: Reitter Translates Marx as He WasTranslation is intellectual engineering: accuracy and consistency are key: choose fidelity. Reading Marx without apocalyptic filters imposed because who he was does not suit present-day purposes…
Translation is intellectual engineering: accuracy and consistency are key: choose fidelity. Reading Marx without apocalyptic filters imposed because who he was does not suit present-day purposes…Ben Burgis attacks Paul Reitter’s new translation of Capital as clunky and misguided. But what “clunk” there is Marx’s own 1800s-era machinery, and Reitter’s sin is keeping it intact. If you want to think with Marx, you need his gears—not some modernized vibe chosen to mesh with present-day imaginings about political purposes.
Procrastinating on the Day Job this AM, by going back to Ben Burgis’s hatchet job on the new Reitter translation of Marx’s Capital, vol. 1… Burgis’s claim: “if this really does replace the 1976 Ben Fowkes translation (used in the Penguin edition) as the “standard” English-language Capital, Marx’s English-language readers will be vastly worse off”… <https://benburgis.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-the-fowkes-translation>  Why? Burgis’s complaints against Reitter are: “[(a)] the extra material isn’t all it’s cracked up to be… [(b)] this translation does a worse job than the Fowkes of capturing Marx’s intentions… [and (c)] on a sentence-by-sentence level, much of the writing is just awful…”
Burgis gives four examples in which he claims that “the quality of the writing has taken a nosedive”.
But there is some meat in Burgis’s fourth example of “awful” writing:
versus:
With Burgis commenting: “There is, I’m sorry, no excuse for that…” No excuse for what? And I think. And I think I get it. Paul Reitter makes Karl Marx a voice from the 1800s: an old text by a dead man, a man who likes to show off his learned classical education by name-checking Roman Republic-politician Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (cos. suff. -460, dic. -458 & -438). And a man who then does more: dropping into Latin in the belief that the readers he wants will understand him when he talks about how L. Quinctius Cincinnatus plowed his iugera rather than his “couple of acres”. And that is something the Burgis cannot cope with. But there is a problem: Marx is a voice from the 1800s. It is an old text by a dead man, talking about human society in a time now long gone. Marx did like to show off his learned classical education. He does like to name-check Roman Republic-politician Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (cos. suff. -460, dic. -458 & -438). And he would rather drop into Latin to write iugera rather than acres. Thus Burgis’s complaint is not against Reitter. It is against Marx. It is against Mar having been who he was. And against Marx for having written the book that he did. And for Reitter for having tried to translate it faithfully. But I do need to note, here, the side issues. I mean the:... Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
|
A Note: Reitter Translates Marx as He Was
Monday, 10 November 2025
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment