Hair-splitting

In November​ 1885, Friedrich Engels published an essay in the Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself’). Engels disliked him intensely, and it didn’t help that Hyndman, hiding behind the name Broadhouse, had published selections from Capital in an uncertain English translation when Engels himself was still labouring over the first official translation. ‘Mr Broadhouse,’ Engels wrote,

is deficient in every quality required in a translator of Marx. To translate such a book, a fair knowledge of literary German is not enough. Marx uses freely expressions of everyday life and idioms of provincial dialects; he coins new words, he takes his illustrations from every branch of science, his allusions from the literatures of a dozen languages; to understand him, a man must be a master of German indeed, spoken as well as written, and must know something of German life too.

Hyndman apparently lacked any such talents. But what could one expect of a man who possessed only ‘a passable knowledge of mere book German’, yet had taken it on himself to translate the magnum opus of ‘the most untranslatable of German prose writers’?

The English translation of the first volume of Capital, overseen and edited by Engels, was published in 1887, four years after Marx’s death. By this point Capital already had a reputation, as Engels wrote in the preface, as the singular work that elaborated the ‘fundamental principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working class’ (a phrase Engels used without irony). In a letter of April 1886 to Marx’s daughter Laura, Engels confessed that ‘the English translation of Capital is awful work.’ But the work proceeded, not only in English, but across the globe. A French translation by Joseph Roy (which Marx himself had supervised and revised) had been published between 1872 and 1875.

The German word for translation, übertragen, implies that we can simply ‘carry over’ meaning from one language to another. But no two meanings are wholly alike; the act of translation seems, inevitably, to be an act of infidelity. Perhaps this is true of the translation of any text. But among scholars of Capital the question of what Marx meant is burdened with added importance: a proper translation of Capital can tell us how capital works. In this respect Engels’s comparison to the Bible was apt. When Saint Jerome produced the Vulgate, he obeyed the principle of ad fontes: he went back to the Hebrew original as the spring from which revelation flows. When Marxists wrestle over a term or phrase in Capital they honour the same philological method, treating the original as the privileged source of instruction.

Yet no translation can be definitive, for the obvious reason that language changes over time. A translation that once seemed to hit the mark will later seem stale or imprecise. What’s more, in this case, there isn’t even agreement on what should count as the original text. Marxists continue to debate whether Le Capital in the first French edition should be seen as a welcome improvement on the German edition of Das Kapital (published in Hamburg in 1867) or an unfortunate simplification.

The frontispiece of the French translation reads: ‘Traduction de M. J. Roy, entièrement révisée par l’auteur.’ In a letter to Nikolai Danielson (who translated the first volume of Capital into Russian), Marx confessed that he had felt it necessary to ‘smooth out’ (aplatir) the French version. The reprint of Das Kapital that appeared in German in 1872 incorporated revisions that Marx undertook himself. A few months later, he published a second edition, adding a postface in which he detailed ‘alterations’, especially concerning the theory of value. But he also noted that he had come to recognise the need to turn back to the original. ‘I find now, on revising the French translation which is appearing in Paris, that several parts of the German original stand in need of rather thorough reworking, while other parts require rather heavy stylistic editing, and still others require the painstaking elimination of occasional slips.’ But it was too late. He had been told in the autumn of 1871 that the German edition had already sold out; the printing of the second edition began in 1872.

Anyone who has the erudition, let alone the courage, to take on the task of translating Capital today is going to be vulnerable to criticism from a vast community of scholars. They may be praised for what they get right but they will certainly be taken to task for what they get wrong. It is a thankless business, not least because all translations eventually become obsolete. This is an insight that any historical materialist will understand, because for a Marxist the world is pure transience. ‘Capitalism’ (a word Marx never used in Capital) is less a system than an anti-system, an irrational and ever changing flux of conditions and counter-conditions that are always moving towards crisis.

Paul Reitter, a professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Ohio State University, has produced a new translation of the first volume of Capital that restores to the book a freshness it had lost in the half-century since Ben Fowkes’s 1976 translation, and which was little in evidence in the original English translation by Engels and his two colleagues, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Engels extensively revised their work). One reason to welcome a new translation is that old terms and cadences tend to petrify: repeat a phrase often enough and its meaning can harden into doctrine, the very opposite of the critical attitude Marx wanted to encourage. A successful translation of a well-known work should be intelligible, of course, but it must also strive for what Bertolt Brecht called a Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, so that the reader doesn’t get too complacent. Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists (chiefly Smith and Ricardo) had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour for the generation of profit. If the words in his book become overly familiar they lose their revelatory power and become yet another veil that purports, paradoxically, not to be a veil. This was the fate of Marxism in the Soviet Union, where a theory that was meant to expose domination became its instrument.

Reitter is an experienced translator who knows what translation can achieve and what it cannot. Recognising that Marx himself wasn’t a thinker of ‘merciless consistency’, as his Cold War critics imagined, he celebrates what he calls the ‘openness’ and ‘in-progress character’ of Marx’s work. New translations of Capital have recently appeared in Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese (Reitter also notes that Marx’s entire corpus is now being translated for the first time from German into Chinese). Marx never stopped revising his work and Reitter argues that his translators are performing similar work: translations are ‘critical sites of revision’ that embody not a doctrinaire style of thought but the ‘creativity’ Marx brought to all of his efforts.

Consider the well-known passage in which Marx introduces the idea of the commodity as a fetish. Here is the Fowkes translation:

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

And here is Reitter:

A commodity seems, at first glance, like an obvious, trivial thing. However, when we analyse it, we see that it is very intricate, full of metaphysical quibbles and theological quirks.

The differences are instructive. The first sentence of the German original lacks any term that corresponds to the Fowkes word ‘extremely’. Nor does the German really license the word ‘strange’. Marx wrote that the analysis of a commodity showed it to be ‘ein sehr vertracktes Ding’, which Reitter compresses as ‘we see that it is very intricate,’ omitting the repetition of Ding (or ‘thing’) in the original. Where Fowkes has ‘strange’, Reitter uses ‘intricate’, though he might have translated vertracktes as ‘tricky’ or even ‘baffling’, since intricacy in English sometimes implies admiration. A sample of lace might have an intricate design; the plot of a crime novel can be vertrackt, baffling or frustratingly hard to solve. More surprising, however, is the difference in the final phrase. In the original we are told that the commodity is ‘voll metaphysischer Spitzfindigkeit und theologischer Mucken’. Fowkes translates Mucken as ‘niceties’, a word which in contemporary English has degraded to an archaism. Reitter picks up on the colloquial tone of the German word and conveys it as ‘quirks’. He pairs this with ‘quibbles’, creating a strong alliteration that does not exist in the German, or in Roy’s French translation, which reads ‘pleine de subtilités métaphysiques et d’arguties théologiques’.

This, it could be argued, has the ambivalent effect of calling attention to wordplay, but it also echoes the informal quality of Marx’s German. Both of the corresponding words in the Fowkes, ‘subtleties’ and ‘niceties’, belong to a far more elevated register, so his phrase lacks the bathos of the German original. Marx, a polemicist who delighted in reducing idealist values to earthly ones, conveys the strangeness of the commodity form by using polemical couplets that contrast high with low: metaphysics with quibbles; theology with quirks. Spitzfindigkeit might also be translated as ‘hair-splitting’, which would avoid the intrusive alliteration while still capturing the sharpness of the German word Spitz (which, in colloquial use, can also refer to an uptight or sharp person). But one could make a plausible case for either word.

Paul North, a professor of German at Yale, has co-edited this new translation with Reitter. They have furnished it with a fine set of endnotes, which help to elucidate the book’s often complex terminology. In his introduction North also gives an overview of the work, and offers the unusual suggestion that, in writing Capital, Marx was motivated first and foremost by anger. The conventional understanding is that Capital is intended as a science of economic life, no less objective than physics or biology. Engels reinforced the impression that Marx was a scientist in his eulogy at Marx’s funeral, in which he drew a comparison between Marxist theory and the theory of evolution: ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’

The analogy to natural science is unfortunate, and has done a great deal of political mischief, not least because it implies that human freedom must yield to naturalistic necessity. Nor is it really defensible on philosophical grounds. Although he frequently wrote of laws, Marx did not use the term in the sense we have in mind when we say that laws govern the course of biological life or the movements of the planets. For one thing, the laws of biology and physics are not subject-dependent: the world will obey its laws whether or not we wish it to. Those laws are also unconditional: they obtain for all life and for all matter. But this isn’t what Marx had in mind when he tried to explain the laws of political economy. He knew that the economy was a human creation and therefore susceptible to historical and social change. As scholars such as Kevin Anderson and Marcello Musto have observed, in his later years Marx came to appreciate the diversity of human cultures and economic practices around the world, and whatever commitment he had to discovering necessary or universal laws in the economic sphere yielded to a far more pluralistic acknowledgment of the many paths from past to future. This shift is evident when we consider the differences between the French translation of Capital and the German original. In his preface to the first German edition, Marx had written: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’ In the French edition, he wrote: ‘The most industrially developed country only shows those that follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future.’ As Reitter and others have pointed out, this seemingly minor amendment has dramatic consequences, since it leaves history open to alternative routes that do not all climb the same ladder of Western industrialisation.

North is right, I think, to say that Capital is a book animated by anger. And here too the analogy to the natural sciences is misleading, since natural scientists need not adopt any particular ethical or critical posture towards the world they study. I might love frogs or loathe them but still be a very good student of amphibians. Marx, by contrast, was sharply critical of capitalism and wanted to see it collapse. His book is not science, but critique. Anger not only motivated Marx to write Capital; we can also detect it in the book’s phrasing:

all the means for developing production turn into different ways to dominate and exploit the producer; these means deform the worker, making him into a partial human being, leaving him degraded, a mere appendage of the machine; they also destroy the substance of labour as they recast his work as torture; they alienate the worker from the intellectual powers needed for the labour process … and they make the circumstances in which the worker works more and more abnormal, subject him to a hateful, supremely petty despotism during the labour process, turn his lifetime into labour-time, and thrust his wife and children under the wheels of the juggernaut that is capital.

Reitter’s translation of this passage conveys the anger directly, but quite often Marx’s anger is conveyed obliquely, in shifts of tone, in irony or sarcasm. He seldom if ever indulges in personal moralising: Marx means to expose capitalism as a social process that functions objectively, quite apart from the personal intentions, good or ill, of the agents who participate in it. North calls this ‘objective anger’.

Occasionally the anger turns to ridicule. In the passage I quoted about the commodity fetish, Marx describes it as a kind of magic trick. When human beings labour, we work up natural materials into use-values that reflect our purposes. Here is Reitter’s translation:

We modify the form of wood, for example, when we use it to build a table … But the moment the table begins to act as a commodity, it metamorphoses into a sensuous supersensuous thing. It doesn’t simply stand before us with its feet on the ground; rather, in its relations with all other commodities, it turns upside down and spins bizarre notions out of its blocky head, a performance far more fantastic than if it were to start dancing of its own accord.

When they are set loose in circuits of exchange objects become commodities, but in the very fact of their exchangeability they appear to possess an independent value, and the social origin that first gave them life is obscured. This is why Marx likens a commodity to a fetish, an object created by human hands which we then worship as if it possessed an independent power. In his translation, Reitter brings out the absurdity of this scenario: the commodity ‘metamorphoses into a sensuous supersensuous thing’ and spins bizarre notions out of its ‘blocky head’. Here, too, there are noteworthy differences between translations. Fowkes takes the literal route and calls it a ‘wooden head’. The German is Holzkopf, which might seem to justify his choice. But a Holzkopf is not just a head made of wood; it is also a German idiom for a ‘dummy’, or Dummkopf. In English we convey nearly the same meaning when we call someone a ‘blockhead’. I might have opted for ‘blockhead’, a simpler word that closely resembles the German original. Reitter’s two-word version, ‘blocky head’, is also interesting. It retains an echo of the usual English term, but also suggests the clumsy movements of a block that has been magically endowed with consciousness. The verb ‘metamorphoses’ anticipates the English title of Kafka’s novel, while Fowkes chooses the simpler but less accurate phrase, ‘changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness’. The German original, ‘verwandelt er sich in ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding’, does not warrant the use of the verb ‘transcends’, which could mislead readers into imagining that commodities really do rise above the material plane.

In the discussion of commodity fetishism, Marx uses ridicule to expose the illusory logic of the market. In the eighth chapter, ‘The Working Day’, his anger at the exploitative nature of the capitalist system is clear. Here, among other things, Marx provides documentation of the terrible diseases that afflict factory workers and the lengthy hours they must work in order even to survive. One paragraph deserves special notice. Here is the Fowkes version:

Centuries are required before the ‘free’ worker, owing to the greater development of the capitalist mode of production, makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.

Here is Reitter’s translation:

It took centuries for workers set ‘free’ by the advanced capitalist mode of production to get to the point where they would sell – in other words, would be forced by society to sell – the entire active period of their lives, even their very capacity to work itself, for the price of their normal means of subsistence: to get to the point where they are forced to exchange their firstborn for a bowl of lentil stew.

Fowkes’s phrase ‘compelled by social conditions’ is too weak. The German is ‘Gesellschaft gezwungen’ (‘socially forced’). Reitter better conveys the compulsion that underlies the worker’s apparently free act of selling himself as a commodity. Both translators turn ‘society’ into a substantive noun – workers are forced by society – where in the German Marx conveys the volatility of force as a social process. The difference between the two translations is most pronounced, however, in the final line: the German word Erstgeburt means ‘birthright’. But the same word can also mean a ‘first-born child’. Fowkes opts for the legal category, Reitter for the actual child. This seems to be a case in which the translator has to opt for one meaning or the other, and there is some warrant for both. Fowkes’s choice underscores the irony of a situation that only appears to be a free transaction: to sell one’s birthright is to surrender one’s agency. Because Marx puts inverted commas around the term ‘free’, he seems to mean that this freedom belongs to the realm of mere appearance. Reitter’s choice does not concern itself with the contrast between legal and human freedom, though it better illustrates the horror of a situation in which life is abandoned for the sake of life.

Fowkes’s ‘mess of pottage’ now seems antiquated and obscure. The German edition of Capital says ‘ein Gericht Linsen’ (‘a dish of lentils’). Why does this matter? In the German (Lutheran) translation of Genesis 25:31-34, Esau sells his birthright (Erstgeburt) to Jacob for a dish of lentils (Linsengericht). In the King James version, the passage reads as follows:

Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.

To illustrate the plight of industrial labour, Marx refashioned this biblical episode into a modern story of exploitation: like Esau, the modern worker sells his birthright for food. Fowkes recognises the biblical allusion, pairing ‘pottage’ with ‘birthright’, while Reitter retains an echo of the biblical source by referring to lentils. But for most readers in English these allusions will have grown faint, if they are recognised at all. At the same time, although the decision to translate ‘birthright’ as ‘firstborn’ breaks the link with the King James Bible, it picks up on another biblical theme, since Esau was the firstborn and Jacob came out second, grasping Esau’s heel. What is gained and what is lost in these translations would be hard to judge. Reitter’s choice of the literal meaning yields a sentence that many readers will find more vivid, even if they do not hear the biblical resonances that, to Marx, would have been obvious.

Reitter’s translation is rich with such examples, many of them probably of greater consequence for our understanding of Marx’s purposes. But the question remains as to the reason theorists are so preoccupied with the reconstruction of original meanings, whether in Capital or in any other work of political and social theory. We read past authors for instruction, of course, but not because their instruction is infallible. Not all Marxist theorists feel they must remain devoted to Marx the author. Many of them will think that theorising in a Marxist manner requires taking what inspiration we can from Marx’s own writings while retaining a sense of philosophical freedom and following paths of thinking that may have escaped him entirely. There is a fetishism of commodities, but there is also a fetishism of authors and original meanings. Thinking with Marx can often mean thinking against him, or even past him.