Paul Reitter - podcast
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Paul Reitter: Marx says, let's listen to the capitalist, and then he ventriloquizes a capitalist. Let's listen to the worker. He ventriloquizes a worker. Let's listen to the commodity. He ventriloquizes a commodity, a commodity. And sometimes he has, them hold monologues and 

and 

sometimes he uses a very sophisticated imitative technique that you really don't otherwise see in German letters until Kafka, where he's imitating someone but in the third person, so they're not speaking directly. He tells you what they're thinking and then you kind of slide into their perspective. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and [00:01:00] Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the College always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: I am pleased to welcome back to the ASC Marketing and Communications Studio, Paul Reitter, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. His scholarship focuses primarily in two areas, German Jewish culture and the history of higher education, but he is also a practicing translator and is interested in the field of translation studies, about which we'll be talking about today. Dr. Reitter, welcome to Voices. 

Paul Reitter: David, thank you so much for having me. 

David Staley: You have recently translated Volume 1 of Karl Marx's _Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy,_ and I want to talk about this act of translating it, but first of all, remind us what Marx was arguing in this first volume of _Das Kapital_, or_ Capital_ in English. 

Paul Reitter: So, _Das Kapital_ came out in 1876. It's the first volume of a [00:02:00] multi volume work or a planned multi volume work, it's actually the only volume that Marx managed to see through to publication.

He was constantly revising his work; according to one scholar, the first volume of _Capital_, the volume that Marx actually published, represents 172nd of the project that he had in mind. 

David Staley: Because it's a thick book. It's a big book. 

Paul Reitter: It's a big book, it's about three hundred thousand words. 

David Staley: Yeah. 

Paul Reitter: Yeah. It has two subtitles, and one of them after "Critique of Political Economy" is "Capital's Production Process", so it's about the production process under capitalism and how that works, the second volume, published after Marx's death, pieced together by his friend, Friedrich Engels, and writing partner, from unpublished manuscripts, is about the circulation process. And the third volume, also pieced together by Engels, but less pieced together because it's based mostly on one manuscript that was [00:03:00] pretty close to being ready for publication; the third volume is about the total process. The production process, describes what Marx is discussing in _Capital_, Volume One, to some extent, not so much. He is trying to tell you there how value works under capitalism and that is, to some extent, at the heart of it, although there are people when they read _Capital_, bracket this whole theory of value saying it doesn't work and that there are other insights about the internal contradictions of capitalism that are the really relevant things. One thing that Marx talks about in _Capital,_ Volume One, is how competition under capitalism drives capitalists to automate more and more, and that then leaves capitalism vulnerable to crises of, among other things, underconsumption, because [00:04:00] obviously if the machines are doing the work and workers aren't getting wages because they're unemployed, then, you know, who's going to buy the stuff that the machines make?

David Staley: It's a question we're wrestling with today. 

Paul Reitter: Yes, we're absolutely wrestling with this today and there are people who say that _Capital_ is more relevant now than it was in the 1970s, because in some ways, after thirty years of neoliberalism or forty years of neoliberalism, where we are now is closer to the 1840s than the 1970s were.

So, that gives you some sense of what Marx is trying to do in _Capital_. The subtitle is "Critique of Political Economy", which has a couple of meanings: one meaning is critique in the sense of, Kantian critique, he is trying to understand political economy in the way that Kant was trying to understand pure reason, but he is also delivering a critique of political economy, a critique of classical economics, [00:05:00] Smith and Ricardo, and there's a lot of engagement with that. Another central concern is to show how complicated and misleading capitalism is. One significant difference between the _Communist Manifesto_ and _Capital_ is that in the _Communist Manifesto_, Marx says that capitalism is clarifying. The history of human society has been a history of class struggle, but we haven't seen that up until now because society has been very complex and all of these different gradations of hierarchy under feudalism: capitalism has cleared that away, and you see two classes squaring off, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and only now can we recognize what's been going on all along.

His position in _Capital_ is absolutely different. In _Capital_, he is very concerned to show how little people understand capitalism, not because they're dumb or willfully naive, but because there are ways in which capitalism is [00:06:00] fundamentally misleading. There's a whole section in the first chapter about how value is expressed under capitalism, and it really plays up the convolutedness of it all, and that has two functions: one is to show people how profoundly unnatural capitalism is but it's also to show how difficult capitalism is to really understand, and he's presenting himself as the first person to really understand it.

David Staley: The book says that this is the first new English translation of _Das Kapital_ in fifty years. Why did you make the decision to translate this, or what was the process for deciding to translate _Das Kapital_? 

Paul Reitter: I had been thinking about translating it for quite a while before I actually started.

David Staley: So, you weren't approached by somebody, this was your idea to do this?

Paul Reitter: Yeah. It's all self inflicted, and I've been teaching the book for twenty years, and teaching it in basically two different translations: the original Samuel Moore, [00:07:00] Edward Aveling translation from 1887, and then also the Penguin Edition from 1976. While I respect the work of both translators, there were things neither one preserves that I wanted students to be able to have access to, and so that was powerful motivation for translating the work. I'm really a retranslator more than a translator, and all my retranslation projects have begun in the classroom, with the experience of wanting students to be able to have access to something that the existing English translations don't give them access to. 

David Staley: Is that what you mean by retranslation? Someone's already done it? 

Paul Reitter: Yes. 

David Staley: And now you're doing it again. 

Paul Reitter: And now you're doing it again, yes. 

And then, there were external things that happened in the world that gave me additional motivation; the economic crisis of 2008, the resurgence of interest in Marx that followed that. So, those things definitely played a role as well, when I began [00:08:00] thinking about translating Marx, I hadn't actually translated anything, and I thought, okay, well, I'm not going to start here, that would be really crazy. So, after I had made it through the promotion process and felt that I had freedom to devote myself to translating without slowing myself down in that process because of how translation is regarded in many humanities promotion processes, I started to devote myself to translation, and did a number of translation projects, collaboratively with really interesting people.

I had incredible experiences. I got to work with Jonathan Franzen. I got to work with Louis Menand. I got to work with Damion Searls, who's an amazing translator, and I enjoy this work very much, I learned a lot, and at a certain point, I felt not really ready to give _Capital_ a try because, you know, whoever feels ready, but I felt as though it was the right time and if I waited, it wouldn't get any easier ~because, you know, I would just have less energy.~

~That's the way it goes in life, ~[00:09:00] so I should go ahead and see what happens. 

David Staley: So, what would we read in your translation that is different, from these other translations? What's new about this translation? 

Paul Reitter: I feel as though, of course, the reader is the best person to answer this question.

I can tell you what I think the reader might feel, what impression they might have, but hopefully readers will see for themselves at some point. So, there are some things that I think are pretty profoundly different. I mentioned value. 

David Staley: The economic concept.

Paul Reitter: Yes. Economic concept of value.

Marx's understanding of value as being at the center of things. You would think that translators of _Capital_ would put a lot of themselves into translating the language that Marx creates to express what he thinks value under capitalism is, but that's not quite the case for different reasons.

So with the first translation, the more availing translation, which was [00:10:00] done under Engels supervision. He was the editor for the project and he did a lot of revising. They were dealing with classic first translation pressures there. So Marx in 1887 was fairly well known, but not that well known.

And people, readers, didn't have the same motivation that readers have now that the book is an established classic. They also didn't have the resources readers have now. There are lots of commentaries on _Capital_. There are YouTube episodes you can watch, podcasts. Lots and lots of great resources that you can turn to for assistance.

The first translators, pushed by Engels, who had very high standards when it came to Marx translation, spent a lot of time complaining about Marx translations being, you know, insufficiently rigorous and used very strong language talked about how they castrated Marxist style or emasculated Marxist style. But then, at the end of the day [00:11:00] when he oversaw this major Marx translation project, he did a lot of the things that he had criticized others for doing and it was painful for him. There's a letter where he's writing to one of Marx's daughters, Laura, and he starts out the letter, there's no warm up or anything.

He starts out the letter by saying, the English translation of _Capital _is awful work. And I think that what he was talking about there was this process of violating his own standards for the most part. There were other things that were getting him down. Marx thinks, he's very convinced that he's the first to really understand what value is under capitalism, how it works under capitalism, and he sees it as a social substance, something that's not a physical thing, but it's also not an idea either.

It's almost a quasi metaphysical substance, and it's a hard thing to grasp, and so he tries to create a new language, for expressing what it is and how it works. There are a lot of neologisms around new words, new words, [00:12:00] yes, around value in capital. This first translation gets rid of most of these neologisms.

So Marx will use a word that's very unusual. a new word in German. A word like Wertgegenständlichkeit, a big, forbidding word, and the first translation will translate that with an everyday word like value or reality. And so the neologism gets lost.

You could make the case that what Marx is really talking about, gets lost too, and the whole argument about value then becomes much harder to follow. So that's a way in which ~ ~the first translation tries to make Marxist text less strange, so as not to scare readers away.

Interestingly, it makes Marxist text less strange in the opposite way as well. So there's a paradox with natural language in _Capital_. Natural language, conversational language is in certain, [00:13:00] contexts, not so natural in scholarly writing. Marx uses a lot of very natural language in _Capital_, a book whose scholarliness he keeps emphasizing and it therefore starts to feel at some point a little unnatural, unexpected. And so another thing, then, that these original translators do is they make Marx's language a little fancier, a little more scholarly than it is in the German.

They take some strange neologisms and translate them as everyday words and then take some everyday words and they translate them as elevated, scholarly words. I can give you what I think is a great example of this. Toward the end of chapter 24 in my edition the most revolutionary passage in the text where Marx is talking about capitalism collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, monopoly capital gets bigger and bigger and it starts to stifle the forces of production the circumstances are ripe under [00:14:00] Marx's theory of historical materialism for dramatic change. He says that the concentration of the forces of production and the socialization of labor reach the point where these processes are no longer compatible with their capitalist integument that's in the original translation and the German word is Höhle, which means shell or husk.

And so this often happens in German to English philosophical translation. The writing gets more technical. Freud is really the most famous example where, ego in Freud is just I and id is just the German word for it. They picked, I think, some awkward moments to translate everyday words as recondite, elevated, scholarly seeming words, the second translator, despite the fact that in his preface, he kind of dismisses this first translation as unrigorous and also as failing to preserve the vivid literary qualities of the language.

He follows that translation quite a bit. He does so [00:15:00] with Integument, for example. Even though he is trying to be more technical and that translation does sound more technical. And in the first translation he actually also loses a lot of neologisms. For a lot of Marxists who were, interested in promoting revolution the intricacies of Marx's argument about value just weren't that important.

They didn't think that that's where the revolutionary potential of the book lay. And so they kind of went past that stuff pretty fast. So I think my translation is much more precise and rigorous around the value form argument about how value is expressed and what value is.

I think it's pretty clear that Fowkes the 1976 translator gets turned around in a number of places and he describes as physical what's not actually physical and this makes it very difficult to follow the argument. If you're reading closely in Fowkes's edition, you might think that Marx [00:16:00] has made a mistake or contradicted himself at the same time~ I, ~unlike the other translators, I come to this project from literary studies, from German Jewish literature, as you heard, and certain aspects of the literary side of Capital I hear differently because of my different background. So, for example one thing that I have worked on a lot in my career is how stereotypes about German Jewish cultural production affected German Jewish cultural producers.

There was a very influential network of stereotypes in late 19th century, early 20th century Germany and Austria having to do with the Jews lack of true, authentic creativity and their corresponding outsized capacity for mimetic and imitative writing. Some of the writers that [00:17:00] I'm really interested in, leaned into this network of stereotypes and they cultivated mimetic and imitative techniques to the point where people had to realize that they were doing something, ~ ~quite amazing, and this also shows up in their reception.

This is why for example some of the more important commentators on German Jewish culture, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Franz Kafka, thought that the writing of Karl Krauss~ ~someone who really excelled in mimetic writing, famously so, was the most Jewish writing in the German language, even though Krauss had a somewhat tortured and distant relationship with his Jewish heritage.

This network of stereotypes really came together in Marx's day. The most important formulation of it is Richard Wagner's essay, Jewishness in Music, published in 1850. Marx's friend, Heinrich Heine figures centrally in this essay. Marx really admired Heine a great deal. In fact, [00:18:00] probably the best biggest compliment he pays to anyone.

He pays to Heine in the footnotes of Capital. This is very unusual for Marx, who was kind of a big ego guy. He says in one of the footnotes, if I had the courage of my friend Heine, I would have done things like this. And so it's pretty clear that Marx, would have taken notice of these things.

I'm not saying that he was self consciously responding to this discursive formation I'm talking about. Maybe he was doing it, behind his own back, so to speak. But I do think that there's a kind of over determined investment in capital in mimetic, imitative writing. And that's something that I put a lot of energy into rendering.

Marx, says, let's listen to the capitalist. And then he, ventriloquizes a capitalist. Let's listen to the worker. He ventriloquizes a worker. Let's listen to the commodity. He ventriloquizes a commodity, a commodity. And sometimes he has, them hold monologues, and sometimes he uses a very sophisticated imitative technique that you really [00:19:00] don't otherwise see in German letters until Kafka, where he's imitating someone ~But ~in the third person, so they're not speaking directly. he tells you what they're thinking and then you kind of slide into their perspective.

But he can slide out easily and comment on what the person is saying. So, I think that I was probably, because of my background, more sensitive. to this kind of thing than the other translators and put more of myself into translating.

David Staley: So you've anticipated my question. 

As we read this book, how much of what we're reading is Karl Marx and how much is Paul Reitter? 

Paul Reitter: Well, you know, I really hope that I'm not one of those translators who makes everyone sound the same. In other words, I hope that in this translation, the writing is quite different from how it is in my other translations.

Frankly, I don't think that that's always the case with translators. But, of course, I have my priorities. I have the [00:20:00] things that interest me based on my constellation of intellectual affinities. And I did try my best to honor every line and not just kind of, you know, go quickly until I got to something that I really prioritized.

But I would say that reading this translation, you could see that I put, again, more energy into certain literary techniques than the other translators, the movement of the text, I think, it interests me more, perhaps, the movement of the prose does as well. Sometimes there's, I think, performative writing, where the syntax mimics the kind of motion that Marx is talking about.

He's always talking about motion. In fact, he says that the goal of the book is to understand capitals, Laws of motion, and that's very important, and there's a lot of very stylized writing where Marx is talking about circuits of exchange, where the sentences have a kind of circularity to them that's not [00:21:00] necessary for explaining how that stuff works, but Marx wants to evoke the process through the actual syntax, and I think that was more alive to that as well.

David Staley: And you're sort of demonstrating that translation isn't just simply taking a word in German and finding the English equivalent, you know, doing that, you know, for every word. You're doing much, much more than that. 

Paul Reitter: Yeah, definitely. I mean, that can be much of what you're doing. 

David Staley: But that's not very good translation, I would think. 

Paul Reitter: Well, I like to think that I have a very open mind about translation. So I think that there's a place for what you're talking about, which would be formal equivalence.

Of course there are situations where there isn't a good match and you have to come up with a more creative solution, but if you go along trying to reproduce the German syntax as much as you can, the structure of the sentences, you're going to lose things. You're going to lose, you know, the rhetorical force.

You're going to make it very [00:22:00] difficult for people to appreciate Marx's humor, because the English is going to feel stiff. Marx is always changing registers, and instead of the register change being experienced as a refreshing change from something technical to something kind of funny and sarcastic, it's going to seem like a crazy stylistic lurch.

So you're going to lose a lot, but you are also going to give readers a clear sense of how the German looks. And maybe for some readers, that's important. Probably there are a lot of people who have German that's good enough for them to be able to tell based on that kind of translation, what's going on in the German, but their German isn't quite good enough for them to be able to read the text on its own.

And so that kind of formal equivalence translation might serve those readers really well. 

David Staley: You had alluded to this earlier, and I wanted to come back to it. You talked about making it through the promotion process, and then you could turn to [00:23:00] translation. I get the sense maybe that translation is not as highly valued as we might think.

Is that true? Are there literary prizes, for instance, for translation? 

Paul Reitter: There are literary prizes for translation. Translation has historically been you know, kicked around a bit. It says something that one of the most famous definitions of translation is a definition of something else wrapped in an insult, right?

This line that Robert Frost is supposed to have said poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~ ~. There is this clear hierarchy of the original source text versus the translation and the translator can only ever fail, you know, to do justice to the source text and all of that.

Translators also don't get paid particularly well. So, you know, it's not valued in the starkest material terms. I will say, however, that in the last, 10, 15 years the status of [00:24:00] translation ~has, ~has risen a bit if you're, you know, paying attention.

There have been a lot of books about translation general interest books that have found a wide audience. David Bellows book from 2011 maybe sort of kicked this off a bit, _Is That a Fish in Your Ear?,_ really brilliant guy. Very witty and an accessible book that gets into basic problems of translation extremely deftly.

In 2016, the very prestigious international Booker Prize for International Literature was reconfigured so that it's now given to the translator and the author. They split the money and the honor evenly translator memoirs this genre has kind of blown up to the point where the journal life writing did a special issue on translators memoirs, I think just last year, 2023.

So you know, from my perspective, these are all felicitous developments. Translation studies is [00:25:00] growing in the academy which is an exciting thing. I mean, there are reasons for that that maybe aren't so exciting. One of them being that it's an area of the humanities where people can get, you know, vocational training.

David Staley: We need translators. 

Paul Reitter: Yes, we need translators, we need interpreters. And so deans, I think, like the practical vocational side. It answers the what can I do with that question very clearly. But these programs tend to go beyond vocational training. And they have a theoretical side. People giving talks about what literary translation is, generally the kinds of decisions literary translators make, which is, I suppose, to some extent a craft talk but it's philosophical craft talk very often.

And so, you know, that is nice. Maybe it also has something to do with the way in which translation feels or the way in which it feels like translation is being threatened more [00:26:00] than other areas by AI. And there's a lot of use of Google Translate now.

And so, perhaps this is something that's driving appreciation for human translation. 

David Staley: Well, I was, just about to ask that question. What do we need human translators for when I can just simply ask Google Translate to do this? And obviously I'm setting you up here.

Paul Reitter: Yeah. Yeah. Well. It doesn't do a very good job with complex texts. I never experimented or played around with Google Translate and Capital, but I don't imagine that the results would be good. 

David Staley: I have a Facebook friend, an old buddy from college who lives in Athens.

He's Greek. I will go to Google Translate on his birthday and I say, tell me what happy birthday is in Greek. And I will put that on his Facebook page. And he writes back, he says, boy, your Greek is so good, David, because I can say happy birthday. But I wouldn't want to do, I don't know, Homer or something like that through Google Translate.

Paul Reitter: Yeah. You know, people in other countries very often have extremely low expectations for Americans in foreign languages, [00:27:00] and I profited from this ~ ~when I lived in Germany and I made a real effort to learn German. I got a lot of appreciation. But there was also something kind of condescending about the appreciation as well.

The people were looking at me like I was a talking animal, basically. 

David Staley: So are you working on any other translations? What's next now that you've translated _Das Kapital_? 

Paul Reitter: Volumes two and three. 

David Staley: You're working on these?

Paul Reitter: Yes, yes. 

David Staley: I was going to ask you this question. So you said that volume one was like 300, 000 words, I think you said, and volume two and three are maybe just as large.

How long has this process taken you? 

Paul Reitter: Well, volume one the, translation part of it the first draft of the translation took a few years. Then we had to produce annotations and front matter. Checking the translation against the original text, you know, just making sure that I hadn't dropped words or skipped lines.

I took, two full, [00:28:00] slow passes through the original text. It took a year. It was not, you know, the fun part of the project but it had to be done. And so, yeah, it was it was a journey, as they say. The other volumes the challenges are a little different. Volume one is often talked about as this literary masterpiece.

And as I mentioned, there are changes of register, sophisticated mimetic techniques, and performative writing, and lots of humor. Volumes two and three have less of that. Volume one has a number of, I thought, very interesting philological challenges that took quite a bit of time to attend to. 

David Staley: Philology meaning?

Paul Reitter: Meaning like looking at Marx's sources carefully and seeing what he does with his sources. He does a lot of quoting in the book. The first volume of Capital, much of what he cites comes from [00:29:00] English factory inspectors reports. If there are heroes in Capital, it's the English factory inspectors.

He really praises them in a very unqualified way in the preface. Just plug in the, source material if you want, but if you do that, you won't really be matching what Marx gave his readers. There are a number of reasons for that. One of them is that he does some strange things, like he'll put in an ellipsis, even though he hasn't dropped any words or phrases, and sometimes he'll drop words and phrases and he won't put in an ellipsis to mark what he's done.

He was a very freewheeling translator. But he also paraphrased and sometimes reordered material. And it can be quite difficult to draw the line and say, you know, where the paraphrase begins and the translation ends. And so another difference between my edition and the other editions is we have much more extensive annotations where we provide commentary on difficult concepts.

And we also try to make transparent [00:30:00] for readers what's going on with these quotations? And the other translations, sometimes they just give you the original~ ~English source text. Sometimes they try to match what Marx is doing, but they don't tell you when they're doing the one thing and when they're doing the other thing.

And we tell you when we've had to do something significant with the source material in order to match Marx's translation or paraphrase or whatever it is. There are some moments where you have, I think, again, interesting questions. I can give you an example. So Marx sometimes puts ~ ~his finger on the scale and massages the evidence a little bit.

You know, these factory inspectors are talking about terrible industrial conditions. And Marx will make them sound a little bit more terrible. But sometimes, It's hard to say whether he's doing that or just translating in a freewheeling way. There's a passage where the factory inspector says, The smell was almost unbearable.

And in Marx's translation, he drops almost. So, now the smell is unbearable. That's what the German reader is getting. If you were to back translate into [00:31:00] English, what Marx gives his German reader, you would have the smell was unbearable. So what is Marx doing? Is that an amplifying translation where he's making the conditions sound worse than the factory inspector made them out to be?

Maybe, but maybe Marx is thinking, okay, this almost, this is like a little bit of British understatement and it doesn't carry over well into English. So the best way to translate this is just to drop the word. That certainly seems plausible. He could also have just made a mistake. You know, sometimes he translated a bit quickly.

So there I wanted to alert the reader to these different possibilities and note the difference between the source text and what Marx gives his reader in the German and that, you know, took a lot of time as well. That's one kind of philological challenge. I can see from your demeanor that we're out of time.

I want to talk about the philological challenges in volume two, but maybe when volume two is done, I can come back and we can do that then. 

David Staley: Definitely want you here when volume two is done and appreciative of the amount of time and effort [00:32:00] it takes to translate, to do this. Paul Reitter, thank you.

Paul Reitter: Thank you, David. Always a pleasure being here, really. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio.

More podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.