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… Value-Thing, Not Vibes: Defending Reitter’s Translation of Marx (& Brown's Introduction) Against Troglodyte LoyalistsWhat the point of an introduction is: to get you to the book. Brown’s concise roadmap versus Mandel’s interminable self-centered polemic. Clarity matters more than sectarian score-settling. And the...
What the point of an introduction is: to get you to the book. Brown’s concise roadmap versus Mandel’s interminable self-centered polemic. Clarity matters more than sectarian score-settling. And the point of a translation and an introduction is to translate and situate a book, not to create a new version of a 100%-correct religious totem for today. Preserve the working of Marx’s intellectual and analytical gears, restore his strangeness, and so sharpen the potential focuses of productive critique…Marx, Karl. [1867] 2024. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. Paul Reitter, ed. Paul North, fore. Wendy Brown, after. William Clare Roberts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital>. Paul Reitter undertook the labor of giving us a new English translation of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (if only of volume 1). I liked it.
I very much liked it. This was, I think, worth doing. Previous translations aimed not so much as translating the book as a political-economic meme source that could spark a social movement, a social movement that would do for its day what Capital did back in western Europe over 1867-1914. What did Capital do in its own day back then? It became a holy totem for the apocalyptic cult that became the world religion that was the inevitable-revolution wing of the 1889-1914 social movement that was Second International Socialism. By contrast, Reitter’s translation is from the perspective of trying to give a good translation of the book actually written by Karl Marx, nineteenth-century intellectual, alternately German-style neo-Hegelian philosopher, French-style revolutionary political activist, British-style classical economist, and apocalyptic prophet of one of the stranger versions of the New Jerusalem. Thus I was pleased with Paul Reitter’s taking on the task. Now, however, a correspondent sends me to Ben Burgis of the Jacobin affinity. And Burgis now comes to slag it. In particular, he slags the introduction by Wendy Brown in a drive-by. God knows why he thinks this is a thing to do, or thinks this is a thing that will somehow burnish his reputation:
That is all he says about Brown’s intro. It’s a drive-by. It’s unfair—to Brown and to Reitter. I see Brown’s introduction as useful and effective. And so I let myself get sucked into Twitter defending what Wendy Brown was trying to do and did in her introduction. Probably a mistake. But I did it. And so I am going to collect what I wrote, and extend it a little. To begin, I see Reitter’s translation as quite successful:
Is it a better translation? Here we need to get into the weeds of George Steiner (1975) and figure out how a good translation balances fidelity and renewal, and what kind of fidelity, and what kind of renewal. And that is above my pay grade. Devin Goure thinks that Burgis’s energy comes precisely from the fact that he believes that translators should not translate the book that Marx wrote, that:
He may be right. Do note that Burgis’s strong negative judgment is exceptional. And do note that the general judgment is that Reitter is quite successful. His translation has drawn strong praise for philological rigor and readability, with major reviews noting the apparatus and conceptual fidelity. I do endorse Jim Miller’s praise of it and its:
But let me now focus on Wendy Brown’s intro. But let me put it here for those who want, for some reason, to become like me in knowing too much about the apocalyptic western Marxism cults of the 19xx years. I will pull it back above the paywall in a week or so: I am right now starting to experiment what to do with this SubStack, after all: First, about Burgis’s claim that the better introduction than Brown’s was written 75 years ago by “Mandel… a serious Marxist thinker”. I think he is kidding. Ernest Mandel’s introduction to the 1976 Fowkes translation is a dense 80-page screed. It is dense: it took me half an hour and it takes typical readers more than an hour to read, unless they skim and suffer from YEGO. It thus keeps readers far from the book. It is about how Marx, properly interpreted, is 100% right. It is about how all the Marxist and non-Marxist interpreters of Capital except for him are wrong. Plus there are things like Mandel’s strident declaration—back in 1975—that “capitalism’s heyday is over” and that it is unlikely to survive fifty more years. Why? Because:
Thus it is crystal clear, Mandel says, that “for over a decade now the system has appeared if anything more crisis-ridden than when Marx wrote…”. Mandel is just embarrassing: the guy is that guy on top of the hill at midnight waving tablets from heaven that tell him that tomorrow will for certain be the Last Day. If you want Marx to spark ideas today, you need an introduction that explains how the argument works and how it is relevant, not just how you feel that it is 100% correct if properly interpreted, that your interpretation of it is 100% correct, all while making firm predictions half a century ago that capitalism would have disappeared by now. The point of translation, I think, is to move the intellectual orrery from one language to another while preserving the gears, not sanding them down, or replacing them with your own. Brown, by contrast, I think, does a pretty good job at her introduction. First, it is only one-sixth the length of Mandel. Thus people can actually get to the book in less than an hour. And do so without being told over and over again about how Marx is right, about how the Marxian apocalyptic revolution is imminent, about how Trotsky is the true prophet and heir, and about how Mandel won every interpretive dispute with others he has ever had. By contrast, Brown uses her one-sixth the length pages to outline the possible value of Marx in our world today of critical theory, focusing on:
There is, in my view, something very intellectually wrong with someone who prefers Mandel’s introduction to Brown’s. I really should return to finishing my half-written appreciation of the Reitter translation, shouldn’t I? And to my piece about why I do not find the first four chapters of Capital—the ones that are usually seen as incredibly opaque and hard to get through—unusually difficult to read. And to what, exactly, I see as wrong with Burgis (and Mandel!) here. But: ars longa, vita brevis. References:
If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…#value-thing-not-vibes |
| ||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment