A Note: Reitter Translates Marx as He Was

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.

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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>

Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis

In Defense of the Fowkes Translation of Marx’s Capital

Last fall, Princeton University Press published a new edition of Capital to nearly universal praise. In Open Letters Review, David Murphy calls it “marvelous.” In the New York Times, James Miller enthuses that…

8 days ago · 52 likes · 2 comments · Ben Burgis

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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 ©] on a sentence-by-sentence level, much of the writing is just awful…”

I reject the complaint that it is a bad thing that the Reitter translation has extensive notes—they are at the back, and unlike, say, Ernest Mandel’s interminable and mendacious introduction, do not get in the way of the reader. And they are very good and thoughtful.
The “capturing Marx’s intentions” claim is that Fowkes got it right in translating the German fourth edition, and Reitter got it wrong in translating the German second edition. The German fourth edition is what Engels thought was the best form to put Marx’s (and his) ideas in, as he tried to publish texts to spark and support the social movement that was Second Socialist International communism (1889-1914). The German second edition is Marx’s last finished ms. There is also the French edition: later than the German second, approved by Marx, but with Marx’s complaints that French was not a language in which you could say what Marx wanted and needed to say. Perhaps the German text underlying the French edition would be ideal. But we do not have it.
And so, in the end, after stripping off side-issues and absurdities, Burgis’s complaint against the “awful” writing “on a sentence-by-sentence level” is simply… weird. I cannot put it otherwise.

Burgis gives four examples in which he claims that “the quality of the writing has taken a nosedive”.

For one, Paul Reitter assures me in email that “hover” is a much better translation of the actual German than Fowkes’s “dangle”.
For a second, Burgis complains that the rhythm of a sentence is worse when Reitter writes “is a historical act” where Fowkes has “is the work of history”; I don’t see it.
For a third, Burgis objects to Reitter’s use of m-dashes and of “properties” rather than “qualities”, “wants or needs” rather than simply “needs”, “belly” rather than “stomach”, and “doesn’t matter here” rather than “makes no difference”; again, I simply do not see it.

But there is some meat in Burgis’s fourth example of “awful” writing:

Fowkes: The taste of porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place, whether it is happening under the slave-owner’s brutal lash or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus undertakes it in tilling his couple of acres, or a savage, when he lays low a wild beast with a stone.

versus:

Reitter: But how wheat tastes doesn’t tell us who grew it, and looking at the labor process in this way tells us just as little about the actual conditions in which it is carried out: whether it runs its course under the slave overseer’s brutal whip or the capitalist’s watchful eye, whether it is Cincinnatus who completes a labor process by tilling his couple of jugera or a savage who does that by slaying wild beasts with a stone.