In producing the first translation of Karl Marx’s Capital in 50 years, Paul Reitter took inspiration from an unusual source: the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, who believed that true translation is focused on the poetic rhythms of speech.
Painting of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (ullstein bild via Getty Images)
One of the least controversial things you can say about the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx’s sprawling, neologizing, polymathic masterpiece, is that it poses significant translation challenges. Over the years, some of the challenges have gotten much more attention than others. We should expect this to be so. Capital is at bottom a work of social and economic theory. It makes arguments, and it therefore stands to reason that when critics discuss the existing translations, they focus on translation decisions that directly affect how Marx’s arguments will be — or have been — read.
Seven years ago, an essay-cum-manifesto by the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “On the Need for a New English Translation of Marx’s Capital,” dealt exclusively with this issue. Its sole concern was to show how individual word choices in two major English translations — Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s (1887) and Ben Fowkes’s (1976) — have led to “shifts of meaning,” or interpretations that move away from the meaning of the German text.
Haug’s predecessors in this include Friedrich Engels, which may seem odd, given how much Engels valued the brilliance of Marx’s style. But in the essay “How Not to Translate Marx” (1885), where he responds to some excerpts from Capital that a British socialist had translated and published, Engels says little about the difficulty of bringing the “concision and vigor” of Marx’s prose into another language. When he goes through the excerpts, Engels addresses only lapses that could cause people to misunderstand the theoretical content of Marx’s work, such as imprecise translations of the terms “labor-time” and “magnitude of value.”
During the five or so years I spent translating Capital into English, I devoted a great deal of time to the task of re-rendering Marx’s conceptual vocabulary. Some of his key terms are built from words that lack good matches in English, and I kept trying out different things and rejecting what I had come up with. In a few cases, this process of trial and self-rejection became all-consuming.
I’m usually able to set aside and come back to stubborn translation problems; but here I got stuck again and again. So you can see why I took particular pleasure in translating a different feature of Marx’s prose, one that has been ignored in discussions of Capital translations, even though the writing in the book is in fact characterized by it: mobility. Marx ventriloquizes rapid-fire capitalist apologetics and the aporetic reasoning of political economists, evokes, through his syntax, the circular path of commodity exchange, builds up again and again to the crescendo of a big reveal — say, how surplus-value is produced — and so on.
If engaging with the mobility of Marx’s prose brought a certain relief, rendering it into English came with its own challenges. Looking around for conceptual resources and sources of inspiration, I turned to Karl Kraus, a fin de siècle Viennese critic who shared with Marx — a “non-Jewish Jew,” in Isaac Deutscher’s well-known phrase — a difficult, complex relationship with his cultural-religious heritage. Having secretly joined the Catholic Church in 1911, Kraus left it a decade later, he half-joked, “out of antisemitism.” He was outraged because the Church-affiliated Salzburg Theater Festival had handed the reins to a Jewish director whose work he hated.
But Kraus also leaned into a network of stereotypes about the Jews’ special capacities for mimicry, citation, and other supposedly non-original modes of expression, becoming famous — and feared — for the skills he developed in precisely these areas. This network of stereotypes took shape in Marx’s time. In 1850, Richard Wagner wrote his seminal polemic “Jewishness in Music,” and it was here that he claimed that Jewish artists and intellectuals, even when they appeared to be producing original works, were only capable of imitation, “nachsprechen” and “nachkünsteln,” which they executed with deceptive accuracy.
Unsurprisingly, then, Kraus was drawn to the notion of “Nachdichtung,” a term that resembles the ones Wagner mobilized his essay. In the nineteenth century, the word denoted “creative reimagining” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s retelling of the story of Iphigenia was a “Nachdichtung.” But “Nachdichtung” could also signify “translation,” and it was this meaning that Kraus focused on. While Kraus’s own translations, which he described as “Nachdichtungen,” weren’t translations in the conventional sense, since he didn’t always know the language of his source texts, he made it clear that “Nachdichtung” referred to translation in general, or rather, to what he saw as “true translation” — “wahres Über-setzen.”
This Kraus defined as “a creative substitution” of language, or a “schöpferisches Ersetzen,” that involves the “transposition,” or “Versetzen,” of intellectual and emotional experience from one language to another. Stressing the idea of “placing” (“setzen”) in the German word for translation (“übersetzen”), Kraus made translation out to be a process that involves not simply multiple mental capacities (imagination, intuition), but also multiple forms of interpretive movement.
When carried out with enough thought and attentiveness to the “individual lives of both languages,” such a process can amount, he suggested, to “a creative writing after” in terms of space as much as time: the German preposition “nach” has both meanings. In his fullest statement on the topic, Kraus sets his notion of “Nachdichtung” against the ornate “Umdichtung,” or “creative rewriting,” practiced by the German nationalist poet Stefan George, indicating that someone engaged in the former pursuit doesn’t seek to preserve the “identity” of individual terms, which is a futile undertaking, given how language systems differ from one another. Rather, she will try to retain the workings of spatial configurations, or more specifically, the essential things “between the words” — the “breath” or “the fullness of life” there.
It hardly seems coincidental that Kraus’s own prose features an extreme, dissonance-evoking, singularity-asserting mobility, which resembles the one we find in Capital as closely as any writer’s does.
It hardly seems coincidental that Kraus’s own prose features an extreme, dissonance-evoking, singularity-asserting mobility, which resembles the one we find in Capital as closely as any writer’s does. For all the dissimilarities between Kraus, who drifted toward the Right late in life, and the Marx of Capital, both authors move easily among a variety of registers.
Aphoristic expression, innovative imitation and expansive citation, arresting clarity, sentences designed to defy easy consumption, the most intricate and relentlessly logical criticism, wry asides and wordplay, sober attempts to document injustice, rollicking accounts of horrible yet also absurd situations, furious lamentations, and artful invocations of the Western literary canon that illustrate claims and signal an unconventional attachment to the classics often follow one another in quick succession.
“Nachdichtung,” as Kraus used the term, is more a call to be sensitive to this kind of movement (and to avoid certain pitfalls) than it is a practical translation strategy, such as, say, following the structure of German sentences as much as you can and almost always translating nouns with nouns. These approaches have their merits: at their best they result in a translation that tells you a lot about the syntactical and lexical design of the source text. But they aren’t very effective for matching the way Marx’s prose moves. In Fowkes’s translation, we can see how well the second approach fares because it is often employed there.
Marx’s Rhythms
At the end of the chapter that explains the concept of “relative surplus value,” Marx ridicules the benightedness and bad logic of certain political economists, and this moment of sardonicism sets up a change of register and a forceful concluding statement. John Ramsay McColluch and theorists of his ilk hold, according to Marx, that when capitalist production increases labor’s productive power, this is meant to make the lives of workers easier.
In McColluch’s view, the appropriate expression of gratitude would be for workers to put in longer hours or, in other words, to cancel out much of what they stand to gain as a result of their increased productive power. After mocking this position, Marx delivers a sentence that has a certain gravity. The difference between the tones does a lot of things — for example, it makes the serious tone more resonant than it would otherwise be. But the difference, or movement here, has to be the right one in order for this to work. The second sentence has to stride with purpose.
Fowkes’s translation of the sentence reads as follows:
The objective of the development of the productivity of labour within the context of capitalist production is the shortening of that part of the working day in which the worker must work for himself, and the lengthening, thereby, of the other part of the day, in which he is free to work for nothing for the capitalist.
From Fowkes’s choices, particularly his decision to set the nouns in a long string of prepositional phrases, you wouldn’t imagine that the author of the source text cared much about rhythm and cadence. But while the double genitive construction at the beginning of the German sentence is a mouthful, Marx quickly enlivens the prose by making the noun “development” (“Entwicklung”) into an active subject, something that is hard to retain in English. Then we have tight parallel clauses, which creates a moment of anticipation, since the parallel structure tells you what is coming, and when it is coming, before you get to the key term at the very end, namely, “to lengthen” — “verlängern.”
My version tries to keep the parallel structure in the foreground and also preserve something of the emphasis that “verkürzen” and “verlängern” get in the original text, where they are set off nearly on their own in infinitival clauses. Instead of employing what are perhaps the most direct English matches for these terms, “shorten” for “verkürzen” and “lengthen” for “verlängern,” in this particular case I use words that, for me, draw more attention to themselves. Here is how I translated the sentence:
Under capitalist production, the purpose of developing labor’s productive power is to compress the part of the workday when a worker has to work for himself and thereby enlarge the part when he can work for the capitalist for free.
Of course, with sentences like this one, as with individual concepts and theoretical terms, the ultimate effect of translation choices arises from how they relate to other choices. This is especially true for Capital, the text being conceived, as Marx once said, as a thoroughly integrated “whole.” To keep this point in view as I encountered one challenge after another was the biggest translation challenge of all.