Peter E. Gordon, reviewing Paul Reitter’s Englishing of Capital in the LRB (3 April 2025; archived), provides one of those analyses of translations that give me so much pleasure and that I can’t resist passing along. After describing Engels’ irritation with the first English excerpts (“Mr Broadhouse is deficient in every quality required in a translator of Marx”) and his hard work on the first complete version, Gordon proceeds to general considerations:
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. […]
Then he gets down to business:
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.
He agrees with Paul North, who wrote the introduction, that “Capital is a book animated by anger,” and continues:
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.
I remember being excited to get the Fowkes translation in the ’70s when it came out in paperback, and mildly annoyed when I left my copy on a train (I had bigger problems at the time, like my job and my love life); if I decide to have another crack at Marx I’ll definitely give Reitter a try.
I might have opted for ‘blockhead’, a simpler word that closely resembles the German original.
Full marks.
Reitter’s two-word version, ‘blocky head’, is also interesting.
Fail. Interesting ? That’s just weird.
The essay is a good read, trotzdem.
People who do not recognize the “mess of pottage” idiom are unlikely IMHO to be impressed by a bowl of lentil stew, which will be merely puzzling without sounding archaic. (The google n-gram viewer FWIW shows “mess of pottage” holding stable since around 1980, albeit at a lower level than in earlier generations.)
More substantively, the idea that you should translate a German author’s obvious allusion to Luther’s translation of the Bible into English by just translating Luther’s German words in a vacuum rather than looking to existing English translations of the same Hebrew-or-Greek that Luther had tried to put into German seems like … a very bad one?
Although even then … I recall over 30 years ago reading an article by an Eminent American Professor who was struck by a poetic phrase used by Kant and apparently did not realize that Kant was just using a phrase from the Gospels* without bothering to add a citation because neither Kant nor his translator thought explaining the origin would be necessary. But it was particularly embarrassing (IMHO) for the Eminent American Professor because the translator of Kant into English had used the exact KJV wording rather than some other English wording which could match the German.
*I think it was “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”
That is btw the same “pottage” as in “pease pottage.” Generations of Anglophone kids have been perfectly happy with the nursery rhyme without any personal familiarity with, or even conceptual understanding of, the dish referred to.
Or perhaps Marx could be translated into Texan/Border English and speak instead of refried* beans, lentils being pretty symbolically marginal in the American imaginary.
*Pedants apparently claim that this is a mistranslation of the Spanish adjective “refrito(s),” but whatevs. It’s the English name of the dish.
There could be many regional translations. “The modern worker sells his birthright for a burrito” works for me.
It segues easily into the later “And he saddled the burrito, and set her upon it; and his son led it, and Joseph followed.” [Protoevangelium of James]
@J. W. B.
I learned that as “pease porridge”. Google ngrams proves—irrefutably!—that “pease pottage” is a misnomer now being popularized by Kids These Days.
I certainly had no familiarity with or understanding of that substance, though. In those tender years I wondered whether the mysteriously spelled “pease” had something to do with the peas I knew, and what “porridge” was and whether people liked it or just bears.
I agree with you about “refried”, and I won’t listen to any criticism of the word unless it’s combined with criticism of “recover” for not meaning “cover again”. And not even then. People who understand “re-“, represent!
refried* beans
My sister told me once that In Mexico cooked beans (say for a soup, or whatever) are fried (and mashed) when they “get rather long in the tooth”. Of course you can mash-fry them at any time, but I like the frugal miracle of resurrected frijoles.
Many Americans would, on anti-bacterial principles, shrink from eating beans snatched from the jaws of death, despite knowing that was what they had previously enjoyed. It is with beans as with seduction – best not wake the Censor until dinner is over.
As Stu indicates, using “blocky head” just sounds absurd. And “firstborn” instead of “birthright” seems practically illiterate.
Calling the book (in English) _Capital_ rather than _Das Kapital_ seems rather like calling another politically-influential German text _My Struggle_. We had a copy in the house when I was growing up, in what must have been a translation earlier than Fowkes’, since I am pretty sure it had been assigned reading for some class my father had taken, presumably subsequent to his high school graduation (1955) but before completing his M.B.A. (1964). I did not as a teenager dip into it the way I did into his old editions of James Joyce.
We were assigned to read some Marx in college in a class titled “Nineteenth-Century Philosophy,”* I think squeezed in after Hegel but before Kierkegaard as we went through the semester. But definitely not Das K., or excerpts therefrom. Maybe possibly because it’s such a massive doorstop of a book, or maybe because the academic fashion at the time was to talk up the supposedly more “humanistic” Marx of his earlier writings? The class would have been better IMHO if he had been jettisoned altogether and we’d gotten maybe Schopenhauer as a replacement Weird German Dude Inexplicably Popular With Earlier Generations.
But this does raise the question of what works by Marx are these days most commonly read in translation by curious Anglophones who do not become obsessive completists. I wonder if somewhere there’s a database of university-class syllabi that would answer that (in terms of assigned course reading)? That Marx was long ago exiled from the Economics departments to become a refugee among certain humanities types in the Anglophone academy (just as Freud was exiled from the Psychology departments to become ditto) may be relevant here in terms of which works are found more resonant or simply more easily teachable by which sorts of professor. I note without further comment that the Harvard professor who wrote the LRB piece does *not* have an appointment in the philosophy department but rather resides in the history department, perhaps because, as the saying goes, nonsense is nonsense but the history of nonsense is scholarship.** I have no idea whether the perhaps-more-commonly-assigned Marx works have currently-standard translations*** or if there are a bunch of competitors and in either case whether there is room in the capitalist marketplace for a new translation of any of them.
*The very class that convinced me in the fall of 1984 to be a linguistics major as a side effect of convincing me *not* to be a philosophy major. Taught by George Schrader (1917-1998), who was a nice enough fellow even if mixed up with phenomenology.
**Or perhaps because the history department is a more diverse or companionable place.
***Maybe we only read (selections from) the Marx that was in some readily-available cheap paperback anthology? The OUP _Selected Works_ from ’77 fits the timeline but sounds fatter in total pages than I recall. I’m pretty sure what we had included “Zur Judenfrage,” but I expect multiple anthologies do.
I might have thought all American kids knew porridge from Goldilocks.
I at one point made my signature dish of curried lentils for my not yet father- and mother-in-law. I called it a mess of pottage, and no one got the joke.
I had long thought the reason might be that Jewish translations were different. But trying to look up different translations on Bible Gateway just now, I didn’t find the phrase at all, and finally went to wiki and got this:
>Although this phrase (“mess of pottage”) is often used to describe or allude to Esau’s bargain, the phrase itself does not appear in the text of any English version of Genesis. Its first attested use, already associated with Esau’s bargain, is in the English summary of one of John Capgrave’s sermons, c. 1452
Well, I’ll be damned! Or at least won’t be blessed.
Pretty sure I first ran into the phrase in reading Joyce. I’d have said Portrait of the Artist but I don’t find it there.
“The German word for translation, übertragen…” – the English word means the same:-( And Jerome: do Vietnamese translators of Le Petit Prince work with vernacular Algerian Arabic instead of French?
Can someone who prefers the simple “blockhead” put it in the sentence? It seems to me the reason for avoiding it is to do with how the insult combines with the reference to the table’s metaphorical head, rather than calling the table a blockhead.
Agree that firstborn seems illiterate, and the commentary about picking up another biblical theme even more so. Esau being firstborn and having a birthright to sell are obviously linked, selling your firstborn is a completely different trope which doesn’t fit as well.
@drasvi: The difference might be that the etymology of übertragen is transparent to most German-speakers, but the semantics of the Latin etymology of “translate” are completely opaque to most English-speakers. Certainly old references to feast days commemorating “the translation of Saint So-and-so” (meaning the physical relocation of the saint’s relics from point A to point B) are I think confusing to casual modern readers until they get their proper-medievalist bearings. It’s not unlike the way that Anglophones who go to modern Greece are confused and then amused when they see moving trucks labeled “Metaphor” on the side.
Although even in German, this might be an instance of der etymologische Trugschluss.
Calling the book (in English) _Capital_ rather than _Das Kapital_ seems rather like calling another politically-influential German text _My Struggle_.
I thought the same, but surely both English titles are obviously the correct ones to use for translations.
@Ryan: the best Biblical phrases are perhaps those not actually found word-for-word in the actual Bible? Who says that Anglo-Protestant culture lacks a Haggadic tradition?
@Keith I.: the title of a well-known book is a sort of proper noun, and practices regarding proper nouns are variable. We don’t usually call Karl Marx himself Charlie or Chuck, do we? _Tao Te Ching_ might be another good (and non-Teutonic) example of a foreign proper-noun book title that is often left untranslated. Then you have sort of halfway cases like “Divine Comedy” that make no actual sense in English so are at best clumsy calques.
Just a week ago I enjoyed a bowl of homemade lentil soup generously prepared by a local dancing couple for a big tango “encuentro” … and couldn’t help remembering Easu’s birthright sale. Now it makes me wonder, how did all these Biblical metaphors enter the Soviet high-register Russian? Was it a stuff of caustic newspaper pieces accusing some duplicitous would-be allies? Or was it used in the actual works of fiction? Beats me.
Ngram shows declining usage in Russian in the 1960s-1970s and a resurgence more recently. Most examples are phraseological dictionaries, but political pamphlets are found too.
One other tangent, as if to suggest there must be some day-job project I’m really trying to avoid working on: Gordon says, sounding sensible enough at first blush, that: “[N]o 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.”
But German changes over time, just as English does. AFAIK no one is out there publishing a wholesale “translation” of Marx’s 19th-century German text into 21st century German. And the same is true for any number of still-significant 18th or 19th-century German texts, where some publisher will always have a marketing angle about how there is a need for a “fresh” and “up to date” and (to reveal the rapacious-capitalist angle) “not-in-the-public-domain” English translation. Now, I assume this may work in reverse as well, and that there is some demand for new “modern-sounding” German translations of 18th/19th-century English prose authors (Gibbon, Mill, Carlyle, Emerson?) because the older German translations of them perhaps now seem or can be made to seem stale or imprecise.
But if you step back, it seems a bit puzzling why a century-or-more-dead author whose style is not yet so hopelessly archaic as to be unreadable by current readers of the same language needs constant stylistic updates of translations into other languages every generation or two.
Refried beans are like redoubled efforts.
I cannot imagine now “чечевичная похлебка” meaning anything but a reference to the Jacob/Esau story. I also eat lentil soup sometimes, but no one would call it “похлебка” (unless in jest). Anyway, according to GT, this phrase entered Russian language around 1850. Presumably, before that everyone was saying “сочиво” and “варенїе сочевно” as the standard reference. But сочиво means a number of different things and not specific to lentils.
I must say that reading Marx for his prose style is a bit like reading Playboy for the articles …
Calling the book (in English) _Capital_ rather than _Das Kapital_ seems rather like calling another politically-influential German text _My Struggle_.
While that might have been an effective point half a century ago, I haven’t seen it referred to in English as anything but Capital in many a year. You’re like one of those soldiers lost in the jungle who haven’t yet heard the war is long over.
@hat: any factional victory regarding what to call the book was not so sweeping that they went into all the libraries and private bookshelves and changed the covers or spines of the older translations that were already there. The older volumes continue to exist side-by-side with newer ones that might have trendier titles. Indeed, it might be hard to convince whoever makes discretionary purchasing decisions for your less lavishly-budgeted public libraries to pay good money for a copy of the shiny new Reiter translation when there’s a perfectly good 60-or-70-year-old copy of another translation sitting right there on the shelves that gets checked out twice every three years.
My copy here at hand of _A New English Translation of the Septuagint_ has some rather eccentric titles for some of the books, but has a motivation for doing that (whether or not I agree with all of its applications), and I must say that “Supplements” instead of “Chronicles,” as an Englishing of Παραλειπομένων, is rather elegant.
I haven’t seen it referred to in English as anything but Capital in many a year
Then you didn’t read [flourish] David Brooks’ NYT op-ed last January 9. I would be interested to see which recent style guides have pronounced on the question. The advantage of Das Kapital is that it’s unambiguous in English, whereas you often have to specify “Marx’s Capital“. That’s a whole extra syllable, we’re busy people.
I wanted to write it, then nixed it but now feel compelled to do it. An old Soviet joke: “Are you counting capital? No, we are reading Kapital” (counting/reading is pun in Russian, because it is absent in English probably making/reading would be better, but no true to the source).
JWB I was thinking of the Russian word (lit. “overlead”, as in French) which is not difficult to analyse, but we don’t think what it literally means, normally.
However, I’m not sure same is true for the German word.
The Economist Style Guide 2018 edition:
@mollymooly: It had literally never occurred to me to wonder what “La Traviata” might possibly mean in English. For opera, in particular, which is famously written in Foreign in order to obscure the characteristic ridiculousness of the plot points, etc., it seemed impertinent even to ask. That said, it only takes a moment to figure out from online reference works (without actually knowing Italian …) that “The Sinner” is a pretty questionable translation. Wikipedia proposes “The Fallen Woman,” which may still be suboptimal but is better.
so чечевица must be a doublet of сочевица, but how did it emerge? I couldn’t figure out anything from wktionary…
I think names should be translated. Life would just be flat out better if, for instance, we referred to former Mexican soccer coach Ricardo La Volpe as Richie the Vixen or spoke about former Italian Prime Minister Mario Dragons.
Now, I assume this may work in reverse as well, and that there is some demand for new “modern-sounding” German translations of 18th/19th-century English prose authors
There is indeed. I regularly see new translations of older French or Russian prose authors as well.
I agree it is an odd thing to be restoring „freshness“ to a text that in the original language no longer feels particularly fresh. I can imagine a lot of German graduate students will find Reitter‘s translation easier to read than the original German.
Wiktionary following Vasmer says that чечевица comes from сочевица by means of “syllable assimilation” (what?) and Vasmer cautions against reduplication. This is very strange. Is there any other example of “syllable assimilation” in Russian? If not, then it is possible to get сочевица -> сечевица by means of normal assimilation (though it would overload words with сеч- even more) but is there any example of с -> ч change in Russian? And it can’t be a borrowing, all other Slavic languages use so- variant.
and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.
What a shame, to spoil such a distinct verse: .וַיֹּ֣אכַל וַיֵּ֔שְׁתְּ וַיָּ֖קׇם וַיֵּלַ֑ךְ וַיִּ֥בֶז עֵשָׂ֖ו אֶת־הַבְּכֹרָֽה
I’d render it something like ‘And he ate and drank and he rose and he left, and he despised the birthright.’
> lentils being pretty symbolically marginal in the American imaginary.
They’re pretty ubiquitous in parts of America with large Middle Eastern or South Asian diaspora communities — I eat lentils about as often as black or pinto beans (and much more often than peas). But those areas/communities are admittedly somewhat marginal, especially historically. And i’m just talking about what people eat, I dunno about symbolism.
> I might have thought all American kids knew porridge from Goldilocks.
I also grew up eating porridge!! Specifically Cream of Wheat (which, iirc, doesn’t use the word “porridge” on the box, but we regularly referred to it as such)
@do
I could imagine a two-stage с -> ш -> ч change. For stage two compare the ethnicity Chechen, which, acc. Vasmer, is borrowed from original šеšеn. For stage one, is there an accent that pronounces palatal s as sh? A guide from Wicklow in Dublin Castle advised visitors not to shit on the chairs…
But if you step back, it seems a bit puzzling why a century-or-more-dead author whose style is not yet so hopelessly archaic as to be unreadable by current readers of the same language needs constant stylistic updates of translations into other languages every generation or two.
You mentioned one reason yourself:
some publisher will always have a marketing angle about how there is a need for a “fresh” and “up to date” and (to reveal the rapacious-capitalist angle) “not-in-the-public-domain” English translation
I read about a case with a similar motivation a couple of years ago; the director at some major German theatre ordered a new translation of a Shakespeare play, to make it fresh and up-to-date, presumably, and the person who was paid for doing the translation was his wife.
OTOH, I assume looking at an old translation can have the effect of driving someone to put it into contemporary language; an itch that needs to be scratched.
Re übertragen : The normal word for “translate” is actually übersetzen (literally “to set/put over”). übertragen “to transfer, to convert” usually implies a higher degree of artistic licence, e.g., when translating a poem or a song, where the goal is not purely to render the meaning in the target language, but also rhyme or meter.
Ha, I had to look up the commodity quote last week for a translation job. I ended up using the Fowkes for various reasons, but it annoyingly forced me to change a word and add a note, because further along “phantasmagorische” gets translated as “fantastic.” That was just not going to work in my context, since it was in a passage about Benjamin and magic lanterns and so on. Moore and Aveling use “phantasmagorical,” and I wonder what Reitter does. I can’t say I approve of the lentil stew.
Nah, he sold his brothright. A simple case of dishlicksia (as some spell it, since he ate with such abandon). Akin to those other sibboleths we read about.
@Hans, actually, people translate already translated books even without this itch and without commerce.
@PP, “пальцы и яйца в соль не макать” (Soviet cafeteria). (that’s “don’t dip [your] fingers and eggs [or else “testicles”] in salt [here referring to the vessel with salt and ideally a tiny spoon found on every table in the cafeteria]”
@D.O., and “сочиво” would block any change of “соч” elsewhere:-/
@DO, PP, I’m thinking of analogy (but there’s also Slovak “šoš” in Vasmer)
Vasmer lists more words with чеч-, of these literary Russian has only чечётка “tap dance”.
What about reified beans?
Turns out, somebody had a blog with that title.
“lentil beans?”
Good with parmesan.
Reification is so passé(e). But people keep doing it. It helps them to think, apparently.
Lentils benefit from a splash of the best white wine vinegar you can find. Or rather I benefit.
Any factional victory regarding what to call the book was not so sweeping that they went into all the libraries and private bookshelves and changed the covers or spines of the older translations that were already there. The older volumes continue to exist side-by-side with newer ones that might have trendier titles.
Now, that’s just silly. Imagine the judge’s expression if you tried an argument like that in court.
Then you didn’t read [flourish] David Brooks’ NYT op-ed last January 9.
I make my life better in many ways by never reading David Brooks. But I should have specified “I haven’t seen it referred to in English in serious publications…”
I mean, there are still people who talk about “Peking” and “Leningrad” and even “Constantinople.” That doesn’t make those current terms. Old dog, new tricks, you know the drill.
For a legal analogy, if you were in a trademark litigation and there were still lots of earlier-model examples of a particular product around (using an earlier and different logo, for example) where consumers might see them side by side with the latest model with its latest packaging, the still-visible earlier models might indeed be relevant to how consumers did or didn’t perceive the packaging/logo of the allegedly infringing product.
If you don’t find the Economist style guide relevant to the current usage of “serious publications” (which might be fair), I offer you the drearily-serious-looking recent academic tome titled _Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology_, published in 2022 by Springer* in a drearily-serious-looking series titled _Marx, Engels, and Marxisms_.** The author is Thomas M. Kemple, “Professor of Classical Social Science and European Sociology” at the University of British Columbia. He’s a serious and up-to-date man whose university webpage says he knows about “Decolonial Approaches” and things like that.
*ETA: more precisely by Palgrave Macmillan, which is now owned by Springer due to Late Capitalism or something.
**The deliberate use of the plural is a signal that these are Serious Academics who are au courant with the jargon.
A quick google for k-Kapital shows BBC, Nature, CNN, Al Jazeeta, Reuters, the LA Times, the World Socialist Web Site, Snopes, Teen Vogue, Investopedia, the Telegraph, the Times (of London), the Intercept, LA Progressive.
A few publications have switched, and JWB’s original comment was over the top, but the idea that anyone still using Kapital is out of touch is equally indefensible.
Note the conceptual inconsistency that we in English standardly say “Divine Comedy” rather than “Divina Com[m]edia” but then refer to its component pieces as e.g. “Purgatorio” rather than “Purgatory.” Which perhaps just confirms that there can be a lot of historical fortuity/contingency in how we end up dealing with foreign-origin proper nouns in English.
there are still people who talk about “Peking” and “Leningrad”
A equal but opposite tendentious analogy would be the people who still talk about FR Yugoslavia instead of Serbia and Montenegro.
Another possibility is that a place, a person, and/or a book-or-other-artwork actually need not be uniquely named within a given language, and can concurrently have multiple names used by different people and/or in different contexts for different purposes. This is the sort of thing stylebooks may struggle with, but that just shows their lack of imagination.
I might have thought all American kids knew porridge from Goldilocks.
Depends on what you mean by “knew”. I recognized the word from the story (as I tried to suggest by mentioning bears), and I think I knew from the illustrations that you ate it from a bowl with a spoon, but what was it?
It’s probably relevant that my mother hated hot cereal as a child, and she kept her resolution that she would never torture her children with it. So I never had it till I was fourteen or so, at summer camp. Only later did I understand that “porridge” was just another word for hot cereal.
Of course I rather liked it, with enough brown sugar and raisins and cinnamon if available. The less predictable part is that my mother eventually discovered some kind of non-quick-cooking oatmeal and for many years ate it almost every day.
Thinking of German works in particular, it strikes me that there should be a market for a less stuffy-sounding title-in-translation for Kant’s _Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik usw._ than _Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics etc._. Translating German “Prolegomena” with English “prolegomena” is a lazy automatic-pilot sort of approach. Get out your thesaurus!
_Tease Trailer for All Upcoming Seasons of Metaphysics_
OK, it seems I was exaggerating. I’ll never let that happen again (he lied).
A equal but opposite tendentious analogy would be the people who still talk about FR Yugoslavia instead of Serbia and Montenegro.
Where would one find those people? I assume only in odd corners of the United States or possibly UK.
The term “mess of potage” is famously Biblical and archaic, but I do wonder how much even the word lentils forms part of American culture, at least in some regions versus others. I only started to eat them myself after moving to Europe, and the couple of times I mentioned lentils to Americans while visiting the USA, I got the impression they weren’t very familiar with the food. Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, a work that uses existent but obsolete English terms to depict its alien far-future sci-fi setting, wields lentils in one passage that made me assume that it was a food foreign to at least Wolfe’s mid-twentieth-century small-town Midwestern context.
> “at Ohio State University”
Sorry, not familiar with that one.
what works by Marx are these days most commonly read
My guess would be Eighteenth Brumaire for historiography surveys, though I don’t know that I have actual facts to back it up.
I have been eating lentils at least since my twenties, but when prompted I must confess that I’m not actually sure we had them on the menu at home in my childhood. Although lentil soup seems very non-exotic to me at this point,* I think it’s possible that when I was a boy the only legume-based soup other than split pea that my mother served was black bean. And not a Cuban-or-otherwise-Latin sort of black bean soup, but the safely WASPy sort that Campbell’s used to sell and Andy Warhol used to then depict in his visual art. If it was a Saturday lunch it was one of the soups you could tart up by pouring a little cheap sherry from a cruet into your bowl. (Is that a thing that non-WASP families do with their soup, or is it a tribal marker of sorts?)
OTOH, wikipedia advises me that the world’s leading grower of lentils is at present Canada, with most Canada-grown lentils coming from Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan is sort of aggressively non-exotic and non-ethnic when it comes to culinary stereotypes. I am separately chagrined to learn that I have to the best of my recollection never consumed the traditional Swabian dish Linsen mit Spätzle, and am making a note to try to rectify that.
*Particular lentil-based soups could be marked as “ethnic” depending on spices and extra ingredients, but not generic/prototypical lentil soup.
>> “at Ohio State University”
>Sorry, not familiar with that one.
Like a tendentious user of FR Yugoslavia, he just refuses to write “at the Ohio State University”.
Where would one find those people? — maybe nowhere, which only strengthens both the analogy and its tendentiousness.
there are still people who talk about “Peking” and “Leningrad”
Was it Dean Rusk who, many years after 1949, kept saying “Beiping”?
We ate lentil soup in our family fairly regularly in the 1970s. I’m not entirely sure if the lentils came from my mother’s italian heritage, or her exposure to trendy macrobiotic foods in the Washington DC of that era. Given that we belonged to a food-coop and she also gave us bean sprouts, wheat germ and carob bars, it is more likely to have been the latter.
On the other hand, lentil soup survived our move to New Hampshire and is still a staple in my mother’s rotation, we left the rest of the macrobiotic diet back on Capitol Hill.
There has yet been no mention of dal preparations (side, main).
Linsen mit Spätzle is fine in its way, but sambar shines.
@Stu: I eat so much dal etc. that the notion of a lentil-based Swabian dish seems exotic to me by comparison. The Swabian dish sounds decidedly non-vegan, so not good for Lent, but Lent will be over soon.
Yes, that stunned me right at the beginning.
(Übersetzen with root stress = inseparable, BTW. With prefix stress = separable it means to cross a river by boat, especially of an army or such…)
It is also used for translations of Asterix from Standard German into German dialects, to avoid the implication that these are separate languages. (…I don’t think any have been done from the original French, sadly.)
Further from the OP:
Yes, that’s the best for vertrackt.
I have to say I don’t know exactly what Marx meant by Mucken, though. I’ve only encountered that word in southern dialects, where it means “tiny insects” (or “flies” in Swabian apparently) – cognate with Standard Mücken “midges, mosquitoes”.
That’s what it means.
Can it? The only meaning I know is a breed of dog. (Also “tip, sharp point” in some dialects by gender reassignment surgery: Spitz(e f.) m., only Spitze f. in the standard.) I think Gordon is trying to commit the etymological fallacy here – and failing. What I think of when I see Spitzfindigkeit is first the adjective spitzfindig, then the adjective spitz “sharply pointed” and the verb finden; the meaning of spitzfindig is already not obvious from its components.
Yes, they do, because übersinnlich means nothing other than “spiritual”!
“Supersensuous” is either ignorance or a truly desperate attempt to translate the pun.
And “sensuous” is grammatically wrong. See that lack of gender/number/case endings on sinnlich? That’s deliberate. It’s an adverb that modifies übersinnlich.
(What the whole thing is supposed to mean I have no idea, though, because sinnlich has the same range of infuriatingly vague meanings as sensuous in English. At least nowadays.)
What the vertical gene transfer? Gesellschaft is the noun “society”, as you can see from its G and its schaft. Gesellschaft gezwungen is a meaningless sequence of two words; as long as the quote isn’t bigger, I can’t tell what it means. An adverb gesellschaftlich has existed since the 18th century.
No, it means the fact of being born first. In this case it must be the status of being born first. “Birthright” is straightforwardly Geburtsrecht.
I suppose (compare Nachgeburt “afterbirth”), but the only word I’ve seen in use for “the firstborn” is various forms of the adjective erstgeboren, most commonly the nominalization der Erstgeborene for the firstborn son. Esau isn’t selling seinen Erstgeborenen here, he’s selling seine Erstgeburt; that’s deliberate.
Too bad it’s wrong, then.
Back to the comments…
…losing the conflation of “struggle”, “fight” and, yes, “combat”.
In no small part through Stalin. You can kick the boy out of the seminary, but you can’t kick the seminary out of the boy…! Stalin kept making Biblical allusions, e.g. calling people “Judas Ischariot” (not just any old Jude, mind you).
Indeed. See above about Mucken and sinnlich übersinnliches; also, ein Gericht Linsen – I’ve never seen “a dish of” as a unit of measure before! As it happens, Luther’s Linsengericht remains unremarkable (though I’ve also seen für einen Teller Linsen “for a plate of lentils”).
They all go in that direction a bit, but o doesn’t trigger palatalization. I suspect assimilation by toddlers.
+ 1
Isn’t it just like “Christianities”, i.e. trying to portray all the diversity of Marxist sects?
Can’t imagine lentils go well with Spätzle. What I discovered only some 10 years ago is: fry onions, garlic, ginger and various spices, then add about the same amount of red lentils and water, then boil almost to a solid. Eat with… refried potatoes (abgeröstete Erdäpfel: boiled, sliced, fried in a pan).
For temporal exoticity, I see your lentils and raise you millet as a fairly common food I grew up with. Boil with salt and just enough water in a pressure cooker, eat with finely cut and boiled carrots + celeriac or, a recent discovery, onions + spring onions + garlic.
Never heard of sherry in a soup. I think there are some exotic soups with beer…?
I had a toy grocer’s shop as a young child (UK, 1950s) which included a container labelled ‘Lentils’. I had no idea what they were; my great-aunt explained that people made soup with them. It was many years later that I learned to cook with them.
>fry onions, garlic, ginger and various spices,
No one fries in the US anymore. Fried food isn’t healthy. We saute.
We also love aioli, the hot new condiment, and despise mayonnaise because it’s gross.
@jwb
Re sherry in soup, I remember that clear soups, esp. beef bouillon could have brandy/cognac added when serving, but I do not know anyone who did this for Sunday lunch (maybe dinner parties?).
@dm
I understood that the etymon *soch…, acc. to Vasmer as quoted by d.o, had already gone to s’ech…”by normal assimilation” (I suppose this is the sort of thing that happens when a non-palatal consonant is followed by a non-word-final palatal consonant, but Hans would know more about this).
I think there are some exotic soups with beer…?
Plain ol’ Biersuppe*. In 1588 made mit „zerklopften Eyerdotter, Zucker, Zimmat und Saffran“.**
*Biersuppe ist eine Suppe, die mit Bier zubereitet wird, sez the WiPe.
**Orthographie wurde nicht behutsam modernisiert.
I am intrigued by “zerklopften Eyerdotter“. Were egg yolks hard as stones in the old days ? Or is “zerklopft” meant as superfluous advice to crack the shells against something in order to get at the yolks ?
…losing the conflation of “struggle”, “fight” and, yes, “combat”.
„My Fight“ is a much better translation of „Mein Kampf“ than „my struggle“. I wonder how „Struggle“ was arrived at? It‘s almost suspiciously euphemistic.
My jihad.
—
Just to reference a similar term whose translation has been contested. Not to imply any direct correlation of meanings or appropriate translations in any given context.
@Vanya: I don’t know the let’s say pre-1923 history of usage in English, but the other “kampf” Anglophone students might have learned about in a history class touching on Germany is the Bismarck-era Kulturkampf, and wikipedia right now glosses that (suspiciously euphemistically?) as “cultural struggle.”
Or is “zerklopft” meant as superfluous advice to crack the shells against something in order to get at the yolks ?
My guess is that it means what we today call Eier schlagen, i.e., beating them into froth.
I understood that the etymon *soch…, acc. to Vasmer as quoted by d.o, had already gone to s’ech…”by normal assimilation” (I suppose this is the sort of thing that happens when a non-palatal consonant is followed by a non-word-final palatal consonant, but Hans would know more about this)
Sorry to disappoint, but all I can say that if chechevitsa goes back to sochevitsa, all developments involved are highly irregular, including the purported development “soch” -> “s’ech”. I checked Vasmer, and he just talks about assimilation of syllables, without naming any intervening steps or giving examples of intermediate forms from dialects. According to Vasmer, the other Slavic languages, including some Russian dialects, have forms in soč-, but Czech has a variant in šoč-, which would be a parallel. If čečevica really goes back to sočevica, it may be partially due to the influence of cheshuya “(fish) scales”.
On lentil soup – I didn’t like the German version (lentils from a tin, potatoes cut into cubes, bockwurst cut into pieces, all put into a pot and cooked until edible) as a child; now I’m okay with it, but still not a fan. Most people indeed add a dash of vinegar to it at the table. That is the only way of eating lentils that I knew WIWAL. Later I discovered the variety of Turkish lentil soup, and that was a revelation – a dish made of lentils that is actually tasty!
I guess that means the yolk isn’t supposed to swim in the soup undivided, but to be mixed in? But why that would be accomplished by knocking/punching is beyond me.
Edit: Hans is probably right.
Good point; that one wasn’t so big on the physical violence.
It turns out that the vogue phrase in modern American political discourse “culture war” was, per the ngram viewer, quite rare before circa 1990, and seems to have been originally popularized by a 1991 book by the sociologist James Davison Hunter that uses the phrase in its title. He may well have been deliberately calquing Kulturkampf, but if so I don’t think that backstory is transparent to most people who use the phrase.
Stalin kept making Biblical allusions, e.g. calling people “Judas Ischariot” (not just any old Jude, mind you).
It’s important not to mistake Judas Iscariot the traitor for his fellow disciple Judas Thaddeus, also known as St. Jude and in the West the patron saint of hopeless causes.
My guess is that it means what we today call Eier schlagen, i.e., beating them into froth.
I never before took cognizance that Anglophones and Teutophones send very mixed signals to eggs, sometimes whipping and beating them, then suddenly coddling them on Sundays. I feel really bad about this now as a chicken. I was one such egg once, growing up. All unhappy linguistic families are unhappy in their own way.
I grew up assuming that “porridge” was the English name of овсянка (which is actually specifically oatmeal porridge), memetically associated (in Russia) with Victorian England in general and Sherlock Holmes in particular.
So the “pease porridge” confused me too when I encountered it, though I think by then I at least knew that “pease” was an alternate spelling of “peas”.
I liked lentils basically as far back as I can recall, but most of the lentil dishes I’ve eaten weren’t really liquid enough to qualify as a soup. Porridge, yes…
I don’t know the let’s say pre-1923 history of usage in English, but the other “kampf” Anglophone students might have learned about in a history class touching on Germany is the Bismarck-era Kulturkampf, and wikipedia right now glosses that (suspiciously euphemistically?) as “cultural struggle.”
My own first association would have been Panzerkampfwagen “tank”, where the central element in “armoured-something-car” can easily mean either “war” or “fight” but hardly “struggle”. [Apparently the usual translation is “armoured fighting vehicle”.] But I think that’s post-1923 as well [EDIT: Wikipedia says 1934].
The usual Russian translation of the book’s title is Моя борьба, the second word of which can be translated into English as either “fight” or “struggle” depending on context, though I suspect that out of context the most salient meaning for modern Russians is “wrestling”.
EDIT: in retrospect I wonder whether the main distinction between a fight and a struggle is in the level of futility.
i’m with sarah on the lentils front! though with questions about whether they’re actually marginal in the u.s., or just appear in a lot of contexts so exclusively in a small number of specific dishes (particular tomato/red-lentil pasta sauces; casseroles with green lentils under mashed potatos; etc) that they don’t get thought of much by name.
they’re certainly quite normal in my own regional and social contexts – which include a lot of west and south asian communities and foodways, as well as the lentil-heavy all-american vegetarian/vegan cuisines in part inspired by them.
I must say that reading Marx for his prose style is a bit like reading Playboy for the articles …
not having any german except as bleedthrough from yiddish, i can’t speak for the originals, but the man made his living (to the extent he did) as a journalist, and made his reputation as a polemicist – both fields where style matters more than anything else.
as my myself, i’ve never felt that way, or understood that opinion of uncle charlie*. even in the rather stolid translations i first read**, his ability to turn a phrase and set a scene came through very clearly. he’s a 19th century prose writer, so definitely not going to be to everyone’s taste, but anyone who can enjoy eliot, austen, or james should find plenty to enjoy in his writing as writing. i think marshall berman zts”l had it absolutely right in saying that we miss a ton of what marx is doing if we don’t pay attention to his style, and reduce him to abstractions or alleged scientific principles (as most orthodox marxists do), and in reading him alongside goethe, baudelaire, and a whole crew of 19thC russians.
i think it’s hugely important for translations of “non-literary” writing to attend to making the style of the original as tangible as they can. there are a lot of ways to do that (and what works for one reader won’t work for all), but erasing a transparent allusion like “mess of pottage” (even if many readers in either language may miss it) makes me feel like that’s not actually this translator’s project. similarly, his not figuring out a way to work from an idiom that exists in both languages (“hair-splitting”) sets my teeth on edge about his readiness to just ignore what marx actually wrote – i kinda like “quibbles…quirks”, but it seems like an attempt to attend to style by imposing his own, rather than working with what’s on the page in front of him.
.
* i’m ambivalent about translating the names of writers who wrote when that was the standard approach – peter kropotkin is the one i always think of, having read some of his work under that name (though for him “prince pete” is right there, and much more flavorful).
** in the 1990s: my college soc intro used the Hackett Selected Writings (multiple translators); in a later seminar, michael denning taught (brilliantly) from the Penguin edition of Capital Volume 1 (translated by ben fowkes; titled Capital***), and the New World/International Press edition of The 18th Brumaire.
*** i’d be really fascinated to see a history of the use in english of Capital vs Das Kapital. i strongly suspect the latter became dominant during the cold war years, to place it in parallel to Mein Kamf as part of the (still–ongoing) attempt to equate communism and fascism. but, alternatively, it could be an attempt from the orthodox marxist side to give it even more gravitas – either way, it’s a V-effekt move at heart.
we miss a ton of what marx is doing if we don’t pay attention to his style, and reduce him to abstractions or alleged scientific principles (as most orthodox marxists do)
Agreed.
i think it’s hugely important for translations of “non-literary” writing to attend to making the style of the original as tangible as they can.
And of course I agree with that as well.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/karl-marx-capital-new-translation/ is another review of the new translation which seems largely positive although it doesn’t dig the lentil stew and points out a few other spots where sorta-famous-in-English quotations have been rendered klunkier than previous.
Re what to call it, one of the early translators Edward Aveling put out a cheat-sheet-type book in the early 1890’s titled “The Students’ Marx: An Introduction to the Study of Karl Marx’ _Capital_,” which then proceeds in the introduction to repeatedly refer to “Das Kapital.” In quotes, as in, “this volume may be of use as a brief analysis of the main facts, reasonings, and conclusions to be found in so much of ‘Das Kapital’ as is at present rendered into English.” So maybe “Das Kapital” is not the proper title of the English translation as such but rather the title of the Ding-an-sich lurking behind the scrim of translation?
but erasing a transparent allusion like “mess of pottage” (even if many readers in either language may miss it)
I imagine that a significant amount of readers would have caught the allusion to Esau selling his birthright (…there’s no good way to say “firstborn-ness” in English, or at least none that I can think of) for <some item of food> even if they were otherwise rather hazy on what specific food that was.
Selling someone’s firstborn [child] does have a rather different [TV Tropes warning] cultural connotation… associated rather with witches or fae than with anything particularly Biblical. I think a cultural translation of the original trying to be transparent to modern readers could have used either “soul” or “kidney” instead (and would probably also have insisted on a more commonly known food than “lentil stew”).
I come late to this discussion only to remark that there is a village in Sussex named Pease Pottage, renowned for its motorway service station, which is the reason I know about it.
Very often a book has more than 1 title:
– there is the title of the thing of bound paper (Selected Works) and the title of the text.
– there are titles (of things of bound paper) that combine translated and untranslated titles of the text, or give one of the two as the subtitle or otherwise.
– or there is “Grammatica arabica Agrumia appellata”.
– or…
Titles “Quran”, “Grammatica arabica Agrumia appellata” or “Erpenius” do not translate anything.
They do a different job. They tell those who know it (“Quran”, “Agrumia”, “Erpenius”) or everyone (“Grammatica arabica…”) what book this is.
And if we treat the title as a part of the text we’re translating, if we don’t translate the title, our translation is partial. Yes, there are translators who would replace the title with another one which means a different thing because this another title means something in their culture and the replaced title is meaningless.
But many would give the translation at least somewhere. And then your book has more than one title and the question “what is THE title of this book” is silly.
And then there are cases where it’s perfectly clear what the title is – and that the title is simply far too cumbersome to ever quote. For example this one that contains the author’s name, all his titles, and all his memberships.
Longer titles used to be much more frequent in books published in English, but of course that led to conventionalized or ad hoc short forms for convenience.
This may have been uncharacteristic of 20th-century literature in German, but Hermann Hesse’s last novel is formally titled in full _Das Glasperlenspiel. Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Magister Ludi Josef Knecht samt Knechts hinterlassenen Schriften_. It has been variously referred to in English as both _The Glass Bead Game_ and _Magister Ludi_. Neither of these is obviously *wrong*. (I was just reading a facing-page translation of a lengthy poem Hesse wrote while working on that novel, where the German title “Stunden im Garten” is Englished extremely boringly as “Hours in the Garden.” No imagination, these translators.)
Herman Melville’s first published book is titled in full _Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, During a Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas with Notices of the French Occupation of Tahiti and the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet_. I think it was originally marketed as a non-fiction memoir but is widely believed to be fictional in places. But if you just say _Typee_, the Melville specialists will know the book you mean.
EDITED TO ADD: The current standard spelling of the toponym that Melville took for the book’s name is apparently Tai Pī. I suppose some busybody could put out a new edition with the old spelling (with its perhaps “primitive” or “exoticizing” vibe) superseded with the new in the title.
And then there’s the full Russian title of Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1922 novel «Необычайные похождения Хулио Хуренито и его учеников: мосье Дэле, Карла Шмидта, мистера Куля, Алексея Тишина, Эрколе Бамбучи, Ильи Эренбурга и негра Айши, в дни Мира, войны и революции, в Париже, в Мексике, в Риме, в Сенегале, в Кинешме, в Москве и в других местах, а также различные суждения учителя о трубках, о смерти, о любви, о свободе, об игре в шахматы, о еврейском племени, о конструкции и о многом ином» [image], generally known simply as «Необычайные похождения Хулио Хуренито» [The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito].
where the German title “Stunden im Garten” is Englished extremely boringly as “Hours in the Garden.” No imagination, these translators.
It could also mean “deferring payment in the garden”. I haven’t read the poem.
That sounds more like Heinz Erhard than like Hesse.
@Stu: it’s mostly vaguely-pastoral, with flashes of mystical/alchemical woo-woo. At the end his wife comes back from doing her errands in town and tells him his hair is too long and he needs to get it cut because he’s “ja schließlich ein Mensch und kein Waldgott.” Can’t guarantee it would be to your taste.
@Hans: That sounds more like Heinz Erhard than like Hesse.
You have cleverly identified one of the sources of my sense of humor.
@JWB: Hesse was such a loser. But he’s ok if you’re boning up for Stilted Woo exams.
Germany is the land of Dichter, Denker und überkandidelte Pappnasen. To be fair, that seems to apply to any country with a writing system. When you get far enough in to realize how much shit goes down, it’s too late.
@Stu: By this point Hesse had long abandoned both Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland (where he’d lived on and off on various occasions since childhood) in favor of Ticino on the other side of the mountains, where they’d apparently say poeti, pensatori e pagliacci esagerati. Has a nice ring to it.
I know what “pagliacci esagerati” ought to mean, but still did a “pagliacci esagerati in inglese” search just for fun (the “in inglese” was in one of the prompts, so I chose that one for more fun). The first hit says it means “sagging leaves”.
Maybe it’s not a good idea to fun around like that, in these times. I probably got sapped by AI. Rock sock.
I’m not sure if the Ehrenburg/Jurenito title is longer than the full title of one of my favorite childhood books, by Sergey Bobrov, namely Волшебный двурог, или Правдивая история небывалых приключений нашего отважного друга Ильи Алексеевича Камова в неведомой стране, где правят: Догадка, Усидчивость, Находчивость, Терпение, Остроумие и Трудолюбие, и которая в то же время есть пресветлое царство веселого, но совершенно таинственного существа, чьё имя очень похоже на название этой удивительной книжки, которую надлежит читать, не торопясь (usually known as just Волшебный двурог, which is the title on the cover), which was listed under “longest title” in the 1993 Russian Book of Records (…unaccountably misattributed to the year 1848; the first edition [which is the one I had] actually came out in 1949, and the second in 1967).
[EDIT: it looks like the Bobrov title has slightly more characters but the Ehrenburg one has slightly more words.]
And then your book has more than one title and the question “what is THE title of this book” is silly.
“The name of the song is called Haddocks’ Eyes…”
Are there some sort of rules to keep people from breaking the record by sly tactics? Like, the title all has to fit onto a conventional single title page, without using excessively small type or without leaving “customary” amounts of white space around the text? It was once claimed that the longest song title of at least the “rock music” era was Fairport Convention’s “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament for the 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat from the Straits of Loch Knombe, in the Year of Our Lord 1727, on the Occasion of the Announcement of Her Marriage to the Laird of Kinleakie,” released as a b-side and with the title all squeezed in a legible font into the or a relevant part of the label. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_Be_Thankful#/media/File:Sir_B._McKenzie's_Daughter's_Lament_For_The_77th_Mounted_Lancers_Retreat.jpg
OTOH, if you look at the a-side of the same single, the song title (only three words) is in a notably larger point size.
the fluidity of titles is on full display in the yiddish folksong world, where we mostly just call songs by their first words or line – which means that basically the same lyrics, to the same melody, can have any number of titles. i’m currently working up a version of a song using a set of variants that get no closer than “di hoyke moyern, ver tut zey stroyen” [the high walls, who builds them?] and “ver tut stroyen moyern, palatsn” [who builds walls, palaces].
@JWB, apart of naming the text and informing the reader (“naming”: I say “Quran”, you understand what text I mean even if you don’t know what al-qur’aan means, I say “JWB”, you understand who I’m talking to. “Informing”: The Arabic Language), titles of poems sometimes provide context.
(and think of those tales with prosaic narration and poetic dialogues, are not poems where titles provide context the same thing?)
“childhood books… namely”
@J1M, by the way, this name refers to the name of the book, and it names the short name as its name:)
Funnily, the name made me think of квадратный трёхчлен, and… that’s what they talk about.
(Thanks, I didn’t know about this book)
About titles of poems that provide context:
Also titles of some Tang Chinese poems (or something taken as titles by us): “I composed it in the city of X on the occasion of Y”. Sometimes you actually wouldn’t have undertood the poem without this, so it is “context”.
And about “tales with poetic dialogues”: I was thinking about Arab tales, but that’s also how Bedouin love works. For all I know Leyla and Mejnun is discouraging (for your humble servant, not Bedouins) realism:) (fuck it)
I by chance last night stumbled into an interesting recent-ish example of the situation where title(s) in translation bear no relationship whatsoever to the title in the original language. Specifically, I learned that the French translation of Pynchon’s _Bleeding Edge_ is titled _Fonds perdus_. This then led me to discover further titles of translations of the same novel that are not only unrelated to the English title but unrelated to each other, viz. _La cresta dell’onda_ in Italian, _Al límite_ in Spanish, and _W sieci_ in Polish.
Presumably these are all motivated at least in part by the impossibility of translating the “bleeding/leading” wordplay the English title depends on? It may also be the case that in other languages the equivalent of “leading edge” remains solely a technical term in airplane-wing design that has not acquired the extended metaphorical senses it enjoys in English.
This discovery was itself a side-effect of learning that there’s a new Pynchon novel scheduled to be published this fall, with a language angle in part of the publishers-blurb plot summary: “Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress* he’s supposed to be chasing.” A.D. 2025 and there’s still no taboo in polite society against blatant anti-Uralic stereotyping and bigotry.
*Introduced in the previous sentence as “the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering.”
Sometimes it’s difficult to understand the reason. E.g. French (Demain les chiens) and Italian* translations of City by Simak. Did they think the English title is… bad? Uninformative?
*And also German and Swedish…
@drasvi: I think some folks think of the title of a book as some sort of profound aesthetic statement/choice by the author that needs to be deferred to while others think of it as basically a marketing-strategy thing separate from the substantive content of the book, where you can thus easily change it from country to country (or edition to edition) as easily as you might change the cover art. There are lots of Agatha Christie books which came out under different titles in the U.S. than in the U.K. without generally having been “translated,” and only in a few cases was there something about the British title that would have made it puzzling to American readers – it was simply different publishers making their own judgments about what would sell the most copies in their particular market and the author either having no contractual right to complain or not being interested in exercising that right because she was willing to defer to the judgment of others as to how to sell the most copies.
I used to be more in the first camp, getting bothered when titles seemed to be changed for no good reason, but now it makes sense to me that they want to choose a title that will sell as many copies/tickets as possible; presumably the authors/moviemakers want that as well, so everybody’s happy.
It may also be the case that in other languages the equivalent of “leading edge” remains solely a technical term in airplane-wing design that has not acquired the extended metaphorical senses it enjoys in English.
That’s at least true for German.
Out of the examples you quote, one can see how the Italian (“At the limit”) and the Spanish (“The crest of the wave”) try to render the English concept by native approximations. The French and the Polish don’t even try…
but I do wonder how much even the word lentils forms part of American culture, at least in some regions versus others
I would say that lentils were a pretty common food when I was growing up in California. They certainly were in my home where we sometimes ate it with sliced hot dogs. The dish went under the Spanglish name of lentejas y güinis.
*30 seconds later*
Day saved.
güinis
Depending on pronunciation, worth slightly more than libras.
FWIW, Danish uses the very native-looking forkant for ‘leading edge’. Være på forkant med udviklingen scores a clean 10 on the floscularity metric.
I’ve never heard borde de ataque in Spanish except as a term of art in physics, and a trawl through the Corpus del Español seems to confirm that
(I say “physics” rather than “airplane wing design” because it’s also used of things like ship propellers or cars.)
J.W. Brewer “It was once claimed that the longest song title of at least the “rock music” era was Fairport Convention’s “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament for the 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat from the Straits of Loch Knombe, in the Year of Our Lord 1727, on the Occasion of the Announcement of Her Marriage to the Laird of Kinleakie,””
The longest name of a song that I can think of at prima vista is “The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You’re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, ‘I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'”
followed closely by “To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and It Involves Tube Socks, a Paper Airplane, and Twenty-Two Able-Bodied Men”
Same album.
‘I’m A Cranky Old Yank In A Clanky Old Tank On The Streets Of Yokohama With My Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-O, Beat-O, Flat-On-My-Seat-O, Hirohito Blues’ was listed once in the Guinness Book, but that seems to be a myth (perhaps intentional).
Longer and/or more daft ones here.
I haven’t read Capital in any version (though I think I might soon), but here’s a pretty detailed article from (I’m assuming) a Marxist website that has a lot of issues with the translation. I’d be interested if anyone here had an opinion about it.
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22000_capital-critique-of-political-economy-volume-1-by-karl-marx-reviewed-by-meade-mccloughan/
[edited to add: I only have a small amount of German, so I don’t feel qualified to judge whether the complaints are reasonable or not]
Thanks, that’s indeed detailed, and very interesting; I too look forward to the reactions of those who actually know German. And apparently there’s yet another translation coming out…
I am not sure if “fidelity to the German” is not tinged with a sort of Protestant zeal on the part of reverent Marxists trying to rescue their sacred text from the accretions of the “rootless cosmopolitan” Engels and the “corrected by Marx himself, but maybe he was senile” French edition. German philosophers especially like to use (constellations of) words in ways that are not immediately obvious even to German-speaking contemporaries. One of the links said something to the effect that Marx viewed himself as a political writer and not a philosopher, but I think 19C political writers wrote longer works (i.e., not tracts or pamphlets) in a rather different style to their 20C counterparts.
Before I begin, here’s a comment that’s already there:
Correct. Property rights my ass. Yes, the word is generally a bit more abstract/bureaucratic than in English because Mensch is available for “human being”, but it’s not any narrower. If Hegel wrote that it was, he was not being descriptive – he was explaining how he was turning it into a technical term for his philosophy and giving it a new definition.
Heh. The French is wrong, too. “une oeuvre de l’histoire” is an obvious misquote of un œuvre de l’histoire.
And here’s a case where the attempt to translate a figura etymologica went awry (all brackets in the original):
Yes, Schmetterling means “butterfly”, Raupe means “caterpillar”, and Puppe, otherwise “doll”, means “chrysalis”; but sich entpuppen is never used for emerging from a chrysalis. It only means “turn out to be in a more or less dramatic reveal”. Der Pudel entpuppte sich als Mephistopheles, or die Einfuhrzölle entpuppten sich schnell als Schnapsidee, that kind of thing. The etymology is obvious, and Marx was having fun with it, but Reitter committed the etymological fallacy, and McCloughan is cheering him on.
Thanks, David!
Polysynthesis: Why noun when you can verb?
Bureaucratic German: Why verbiage in the face of the possibility of nouns?
Philosophical German sides with bureaucratic German on this point, and may have done so even more in the 19th century. Reitter noticed that this isn’t how you actually say things in English, so he reworded many sentences without changing the meaning at all. McCloughan seems not to have noticed and is deeply unhappy, giving three paragraphs of examples and concluding: “I find the result unsatisfactorily blurry; we seem to lose Marx’s focus, as conveyed by his use of substantives.” It’s not focus. It’s the expected style for 19th- or 20th-century academic German; not so much for 21st-century English, even if academic.
Here, Reitter was as literal as McCloughan wants him to be: he translated a genitive as a genitive instead of sticking with the word order and using “of”. Is she happy now? Nope! She waffles about “contractions” and seems to believe the genitive case is one because it’s got an apostrophe!
Why “force”, though? Gewalt means “violence”. Not Newton – Attila. Trogdor the Burninator.
Thanks very much, that’s exactly what I was hoping for!
I am still a bit hesitant, but based on everything in this thread, I think I’ll pick the Reitter translation to read. It’s kind of seeming like six of one, a half dozen of the other, though. Anyway, I’ll be able to credit the new translation (& Hat’s post) with finally getting me to read Capital.
Correct. Property rights my ass.
The next time a Viennese waiter asks me “wie viele Personen” when I reserve a table, I’ll be sure to specify which ones have properly rights.
@dm
from G W.F. Hegel, “Kritik der Verfassung Deutschlands”, Einleitung (you might conclude I have not read the whole thing and you would be correct):
—
Die Form des deutschen Staatsrechtes ist tief in dem gegründet, wodurch die Deutschen sich am Berühmtesten gemacht haben, nämlich in ihrem Triebe zur Freiheit. Dieser Trieb ist es, der die Deutschen, nachdem alle anderen europäischen Völker sich der Herrschaft eines gemeinsamen Staates unterworfen haben, nicht zu einem gemeinschaftlicher Staatsgewalt sich unterwerfenden Volke werden ließ. Die hartnäckigkeit des deutschen Charakters hat sich nicht bis dahin überwinden lassen, daß die einzelnen Theile ihre Besonderheiten der Gesellschaft aufgeopfert, sich alle in ein Allgemeines vereinigt und die Freiheit in gemeinschaftlicher freier Unterwürfigkeit unter eine oberste Staatsgewalt gefunden hätten.
—
David, I find it hard to justify a reading of “violence” for “Gewalt” here, I would translate with “power”. Although this was published after Hegel’s death (“aus dem Nachlass”), I assume Marx was familiar with this text, since it is political and Marx was a “Jung-Hegelianer”.
Yes, I think DM is too harsh here; there are cases where German Gewalt usually is translated by English “force”. E.g., Gewaltanwendung normally is “use of force”, not “*use of violence”.
Yes; there are plenty of fossilized compounds where Gewalt just refers to political power. Indeed, the separation of powers is Gewaltenteilung; resisting arrest is Widerstand gegen die Staatsgewalt; and having the keys to the house is to have the Schlüsselgewalt. The etymology is reasonably clear, too – walten, vague as it is, refers to perfectly peaceful ways of wielding power.
But the Marx quote describes the law of the jungle.
Thanks for the quote; now I’ve read any of it at all…
In my English, “the process of production of capital” is idiomatic and “capital’s process of production” is not. When “of” indicates a “direct object” relationship (something produces capital), changing it to ‘s usually or always sounds wrong to me. Not colloquial or informal and not, I think, because I was taught the word “possessive”—just wrong. The same is true of possessive pronouns or whatever you call them, like “her murderer”. But a lot of people use that construction.
It can also be ambiguous. Are “his assassins” the assassins he employed (unexceptionable) or the people who assassinated him (the usage that doesn’t sound right to me)? That might be part of the basis of my dislike, since I often come up with the unintended meaning first.
In my English, “the process of production of capital” is idiomatic and “capital’s process of production” is not.
Mine as well; when I read the latter I suspect ESL (though of course that would frequently be incorrect).
I was taught ‘s with persons, of otherwise, and I’ve since found that there are prescriptivists who have said the same. While these are not absolute rules in real life, even apart from lexicalized exceptions*, they’re still noticeable general tendencies, and capital’s process of production sounds wrong to me, too.
* The world’s greatest _ is much more common than the greatest _ of the world.
walten, vague as it is, refers to perfectly peaceful ways of wielding power.
And sometimes you have no clue what it means tbh. “Wield and wield” ?
O Freiheit süß der Presse!
Nun sind wir endlich froh;
Sie pocht von Messe zu Messe
In dulci jubilo.
Kommt, laßt uns alles drucken
Und walten für und für;
Nur sollte keiner mucken,
Der nicht so denkt wie wir.
ETA: “walten für and für” here prolly means “advocate for our opinions until the cows come home”.
Who will claim that Goethe never produced doggerel ?
@David M.: I could easily talk about capital’s role or influence or characteristics (if that makes sense). It’s the “direct object” relation that bothers me. (And just so no one misunderstands, I have no problem with other non-possessive uses of “possessives” such as “David’s country” and “my boss”.)
Personen: What about the reviewer’s response, that present-day usage doesn’t necessarily bear on what Marx meant in the 19th century, and “when Marx introduces and uses the term ‘person’ in chapter 2 he is explicitly doing so in the Hegelian manner”? (This is Marx introducing it, if I understand correctly: “Aber es handelt sich hier um die Personen nur, soweit sie die Personifikation ökonomischer Kategorien sind, Träger von bestimmten Klassenverhältnissen und Interessen.”)
To Vanya’s point, even if not all Menschen in all times and places since the prehistoric emergence of the species were also Personen in the specific technical/Hegelian sense, I suspect that approximately 100% of Menschen patronizing restaurants in Vienna in the 21st century of the C. Era are also Personen in that specific sense.
If die Personen with the definite article is real, I need more context to understand it.
I was taught ‘s with persons, of otherwise
‘s is normal with NPs referring to times, too: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Come back in a year’s time. Wednesday’s event will be … in all these cases. using “of” would be Foreigner Talk.
I suspect that the rule you were taught was really based on an overhasty analogy with German bare genitives preceding their heads. (Incidentally, that is what I’ve always understood “Saxon genitive” to mean, but googling suggests that the term has become a would-be learned name for English ‘s. Maybe it always was, and I just didn’t notice before. Stupid term, anyhow.)
I bet that comes from a tradition that held “of” to be the French genitive…
…That’s actually not about persons, but about words that don’t need an article. Preposing a genitive with an article (der Welt größtes _) is archaic/poetic (as opposed to das größte _ der Welt).
…or not. Now that I think of it, genitives without articles are generally preposed if they’re of persons, but can go anywhere otherwise (Deutschlands größtes _ = das größte _ Deutschlands).
Hm.
Anyway. Deutschlands größte Tageszeitung der Welt.
“If die Personen with the definite article is real” — real as opposed to what? A misquote? A typo? I don’t understand the question. That’s the text, you can find it online (for example). But actually, that was the wrong sentence to quote, since it’s from the foreword. The passage the book reviewer was talking about was this:
Still, even if Marx distinguishes Personen from Menschen consistently, and the translator follows that distinction faithfully, I don’t think it’s going to be helpful for the Anglophone reader unless the translator puts in a footnote to stress “watch out, persons here has only this restricted technical sense.”
@David E.: Native speakers at least Americans, have been taught that only humans get ‘s, or only some class including humans, animals, buildings, vehicles, and I don’t remember what else. The latter is from a friend who was born c. 1963.
Bryan Garner writes, “The old line was that it’s better to use an ‘of phrase rather than the ‘s to indicate possession when the possessor is an inanimate object . Write foot of the bed, not the bed’s foot.’ Robert C. Whitford & James R. Foster, Concise Dictionary of American Grammar and Usage 96 (1955). Foot of the bed, of course, is a SET PHRASE, so the example is not a fair one.” Garner’s Modern English Usage, 2016.
J.W. Brewer: “I suspect that approximately 100% of Menschen patronizing restaurants in Vienna in the 21st century of the C. Era are also Personen in that specific sense.”
I have patronized Viennese restaurants in the 21st century and I’m not. Several other people I have patronized them with are also not.
“If die Personen with the definite article is real” — real as opposed to what? A misquote? A typo? I don’t understand the question.
I assume DM was tripped up by this because in es handelt sich um X the X usually is indefinite. It normally introduces definitions. But here, Marx is not defining:
Die Gestalten von Kapitalist und Grundeigenthümer zeichne ich keineswegs in rosigem Licht. Aber es handelt sich hier um die Personen nur,
Here, es handelt sich um X doesn’t mean “this is (not) what I/we call X”, it means “this is (not) about X”. Speaking contemporary German, I’d rather write Aber es geht hier um die Personen nur, and I guess that’s also what DM would do. I can’t say if Marx’s choice was idiosyncratic already when he wrote the foreword, and I’m not sure that there aren’t any speakers of contemporary German to whom Marx’s wording looks perfectly normal, but this may be one of the cases where usage simply has changed over the course of almost two centuries.
Adding to the discussion about Personen: In all the Marx quotes I have seen up to now in this threat, one can read the word with its everyday meaning without recourse to any special Hegelian definition; one could replace Person by Mensch or Individuum and the meaning would stay the same. So colour me skeptical concerning the Hegelian interpretation.
Ah. Everything Hans said; die Personen makes enough sense in context.
Also interesting to see the consistent -n instead of modern -en after vowels (like the Bundesministerium des Innern that I’ve mentioned before). This is a case where Standard German has become more archaic since then in order to be more regular. (Or the range of what counts as standard has narrowed down to the most conservative variant.)
Yes. I’m used to famous quotes being slightly off.
I was also taught to use whose _ only with persons, and the _ of which otherwise – which can be quite cumbersome, so I’ve been using inanimate whose a lot since I found out it exists out there.
@dm
I suspect you would also like the Dublin “Whos are yous?”, nicely disambiguating singular from plural, whereas the poor German speaker must risk ambiguity with “Wer sind Sie?” or overfamiliarity with “Wer seid ihr”?
Awesome.
I think V and I either have rival and incompatible understandings of the technical Hegelian sense of *Person* in German or he is being jocular.
Despite a not-very-non-obvious shared-etymology connection to “persona,” I don’t think most Anglophones feel any sort of vibe of artificiality in “person” applied to a human being. Indeed, when you are using legal jargon and are thus used to the notion that corporations and limited partnerships etc. etc. are also “persons” you use the NP “natural person(s)” to specify live human beings, which sort of has an implicature that their “personhood” is itself natural rather than being a social construct.
I use inanimate “whose”, though with a bad conscience, as the form still trails clouds of animacy for me. It’s just that “of which” sounds so Lynne Truss.
Here’s a recent use of the ‘s (“Saxon”) genitive for an extremely inanimate (and extremely tiny) noun, in a text written in a fairly formal register: “A technique that can determine the chirality of a molecule using that molecule’s own electrons could allow researchers to probe the dynamical behavior of chiral molecules on very short timescales.” Note that it also uses the “French” genitive just before that.
>have been taught that only humans get ‘s, or only some class including humans, animals, buildings, vehicles, and I don’t remember what else.
Your theory’s very essence seems to be that English won’t allow…
I don’t actually want to finish that sentence. Just wondering whether any native speakers balked at “your theory’s very essence seems to be”. It sounds acceptable to me. Maybe not in formal writing, but in speech, certainly.
There are definitely apostrophe-s constructions I balk at. The rule as quoted may be helpful for non-native speakers who need some way forward. But I don’t think it gets at the core issue.
Oh and for that other allegedly animacy-linked thing, there’s a 2008 scientific article with the stirring title “Copper methanobactin: a molecule whose time has come.”
Although I suppose you could read that title as presuming/imposing a certain honorary animacy for/on the molecule in question?
CEGL (the other, Quirky, one) treats lexical restrictions on the ‘s possessive (p1277): favoured by nouns higher in the animacy scale (as advertised), often impossible with concrete inanimates (so not *”this house’s roof”) but also favoured by geographical nouns and nouns denoting locatives and time (“China’s population”, “the world’s economy”, “last year’s profits.” Within this group, cromulence is also affected by the nature of the possessum: “China’s economy”, but not *”China’s map.”
They also point out that while *”the car of the lady” is unacceptable, “the car of the lady in front of him” is fine.
On “own”: CGEL (the one you first thought of) points out that in this sense it actually requires a preceding possessive pronoun or s-possessive, except in some set expressions.
Schoolteachers teaching English to L1 speakers should not have the hubris to attempt to lay down “rules” which only account for some cases and not others as if they demarcated between grammatical and ungrammatical. Their hapless students should nod and smile and ignore them. After that lesson’s homework (sic) is done, Teacher (assuming them also to be a L1 speaker) will not even notice if they “break the rule.”
Re the “Quirky” examples: “last year’s profits” were not somehow earned/generated by the time period; rather they were earned/generated in that time period by some unspecified-but-ascertainable-from-context specific assortment of animate creatures. “China’s economy” is similar, mutatis mutandum.
“Yesterday’s earthquake in Peru”?
Most of what we talk about involves people, directly or indirectly. You could take almost anything as referring directly or indirectly to “animate creatures” with enough ingenuity.
But I agree that “country” names shade into cases like “family.” On the other hand, “the Moon’s potential as a source of rare minerals” is fine for me. As is “the Moon’s gleaming appearance.” No US schoolteacher is going to stop me perpetrating such Ghastly Solecisms.
Also
https://www.lyricsondemand.com/n/nationalanthemlyrics/usanationalanthemlyrics.html
Surely objecting to the inanimate possessive in this case would be Unpatriotic (and probably Extreme Radical Socialism.)
Examples like “yesterday’s earthquake” perhaps underline why “possessive” is a not-entirely-helpful label. “Genitive” seems better precisely because its etymology is more opaque.
Googling turns up examples of the deprecated (by Quirk-et-al.) “this house’s roof” that seem perfectly idiomatic and unremarkable to me. Maybe there are regional variations in the perceived acceptability of that one?
Re “anthemic” use, here in the Space Age rockets fit neatly into the “vehicles” group of inanimate objects that even peevers agreed could use the ‘s construction. Maybe not in 1814, but I think anything that makes a lot of noise might qualify? But I’m not certain of how widespread this peeve ever was. I have no memory of any schoolteacher I had ever insisting on it, although that may not mean very much.
I agree that “possessive” is not a good name (CGEL-as-in-Cambridge actually uses “genitive”, no doubt for the very reason you cite.)
I’m surprised that “this house’s roof” is OK for you. But it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve stumbled across regional or L1-idiolectal variation in such things.
Kusaal, being more logical, has nothing corresponding to “of”. and treats all these constructions the same formally:
dau la biig
man the child
“the man’s child”
dɔkaŋa nwa mɔpil
hut.this this thatch
“the roof of this house”
I would say that, at least if primed as I was in this thread, “this house’s roof” sounds a bit odd in isolation. But googling of course uncovers examples where it is part of a longer sentence that flows perfectly well without sounding odd to my ear.* Is there a negative reaction to “its roof” when the antecedent of “it” is a previously-identified house? I had some occasion last summer to talk about my house’s roof.** Or perhaps the roof of my house. Or maybe just “the roof” or “its roof” where context had already established the structure of which it forms a part.
*You will of course potentially elicit different reactions if you ask people to gauge the acceptability of short phrases presented in isolation than if you give them long passages and ask them to circle anything that strikes them as oddly-phrased.
**If you need to change insurers for your house on a tight schedule because questions have arisen about the financial stability of your incumbent insurer, you may learn as I did that some insurers use a simplifying heuristic of refusing to even quote coverage on a house whose roof has not been replaced within the last 20 years, presumably because they don’t want to incur the expense of an inspection to assess the condition of a more aged roof. (My roof is approaching its 23rd birthday without any obvious leaks or other problems.)
“Since the hailstorm, this house’s roof really needs to be replaced,” sounds utterly ordinary to me.
I don’t know German, but reading the excerpt from the foreword that ktschwarz provided above alongside GT translation, it seems to me that a case can be made that Marx uses Mensch when he means “a human being” and Person for the sense of “legal and economic actor”.
It’s interesting though, that the basis of Marx’s thought is that things are ruled over by people by violence (Gewalt). I am not sure what he thought about a very common situation when a person inflicting their Gewalt on things is not a legal owner. It is pretty dubious suggestion that the basis of economic relations is the necessity to move things around. But that’s irrelevant to the point of meaning and translation… Apart from the requirement that to produce a fitting translation, the translator has to understand what the text says and if the text has some meaning, it might be helpful to know what it is.
It would of course be more charmingly regional to say that the “roof needs replaced.” Can’t do that in my idiolect, though.
Works in mine. I have some vague recollection that this may be a Scottish thing.
In the Marx bit, I’m not sure how wide a scope “Waaren” has. I am reminded of my Property teacher back 35 years ago when I was in my first year of law school saying (perhaps more often than was necessary) that the naive general populace thinks that property law is about relations between human beings and non-human things whereas we enlightened initiates understand that it is in fact about relations among human beings concerning which humans have what sort of legitimate control over which non-human things.
But that’s a much broader point than just about transferring title to “commodities” via contract. The phrase “die ökonomischen Charaktermasken der Personen” interestingly evokes the etymology of “Person,” which well may have been deliberate, but as noted above I don’t know if that etymology is as obscure to the typical current German-speaker as it is to the typical current Anglophone.
Native speakers at least Americans, have been taught that only humans get ‘s, or only some class including humans, animals, buildings, vehicles, and I don’t remember what else.
i’ve never been taught that, heard it presented as a rule, or even heard of it as a form of peevery.
more importantly, it doesn’t in any way match either my experience of english in use or my loshnkhush.
(to me, “needs [verb]ed” is marked as (u.s.) southern and/or rural, but has definitely migrated into my idolect and those of quite a few of my friends, likely through the rather eclectic institutional lect of the Bread & Puppet Theater, where it’s a less core alternative to “wants to be [verb]ed”, which may (or may not) have originated as a calque from some flavor of (silesian?) german by peter schumann)
FWIW, one source that is reasonably au courant with the literature says “The home of the needs washed construction is the Midlands (Wood et al. 2022): Missouri, Illinois, lower Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The core region, where it is accepted at the highest rates and in the widest variety of sentences, is in Indiana, Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania (Wood et al. 2022).” Also, “This construction is also strongly attested in the Englishes of Scotland and Northern Ireland (Duncan 2024; Strelluf 2020, 2022; Smith et al. 2019; Brown and Millar 1980), which are believed to be its historical source.”
There’s a map showing regional variation in the judged acceptability of “the car needs fixed.”
https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed
J.W. Brewer: Despite having relatives in Pittsburgh, including some non-standard speakers (e.g. “You was”), I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard the “needs washed” construction except as an example of Yinzer dialect. The person I’ve heard it from the most is from Lubbock, Texas. I’ll add that its home is in Ohio and other states but doesn’t include the Cleveland area, at least.
@rozele: I thought I knew better than to use a “bare plural” the way I did in “Native speakers[,] at least Americans, have been taught…” I hope it was clear from the context that I meant that some native speakers have been taught that, not that all (by any stretch) have been. Anyway, that will teach me to post when I’m sleepy.
Note this other interesting point from the page I linked to in my prior comment:
“Duncan (2024) argues that if the construction did come to the United States from Scots-Irish immigrants, we might expect it to exist in the dialects of other locations that saw a lot of Scots-Irish settler colonial migration, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. While the construction ‘is attested in regions [of New Zealand] with a high proportion of Scottish settlers,’ Duncan (2024) says, it does not exist anywhere in Canada or Australia. This is relatively surprising and poses a linguistic puzzle that has no solution as of yet.”
How do “animate-only ‘s” people deal with the double genitive? “A picture of the museum” not being “a picture of the museum’s”. Maybe a legal person for which actual ownership is possible is an honorary anima; does that cover all cases?
Completely obscure. Even most people who learnt some Latin in school will not be aware of the original meaning of persona – the relevant texts are not part of the standard curriculum.
@mollymooly:
Quoth Merriam-Webster: ‘Before we leave this curiosity entirely, there is an oddity to address. We said above that showing possession with of is normally used when it is a thing that has possession, rather than a person or animal having possession. The double possessive/double genitive, however, throws that out the window. We can say “a dream of Mabel’s,” but we cannot say “the winner of the contest’s.” It turns out that English only lets people and animals be doubly possessive, and insists that they use of to do so. Don’t blame us. We’re only the messenger.’
The challenge would be to find a good counterexample to this claim. Their illustrations are not particularly compelling-as-such. You would use “a dream of Mabel’s” precisely to avoid the potential ambiguity in “a dream of Mabel,” where Mabel could be either the dreamer or the topic of someone else’s dream. But “the winner of the context” poses no such potential ambiguity. So maybe the real question is whether you need an animate noun (or an honorary animate like a museum) for that sort of ambiguity to be possible in the first place.
@JWB: o, that’s so interesting! the southern speakers i’m thinking of are mostly uplanders from tennessee and western north carolina, which tracks with that. i wonder if the spread beyond central appalachia tracks with northwest-ward labor migration from there to the current core usage zone?
@JF: it’s interesting to me to have never encountered it, given that it seems like others here were so actively taught the distinction!
@rozele: Lots of early Scotch-Irish settlers in Western Pa. and also down through Appalachia. Question is then where their descendants and/or associated speech features subsequently radiated. More into the Midwest (but also Ozarks/Oklahoma) than the lowland/coastal South.
I’m not sure if this could connect with the double-genitive thing or not, but one can come up with instances of two inanimates A & B where it is not particularly intuitive whether A “possesses” B or B “possesses” A. Imagine e.g. a rock covered by lichen. Is the rock possessing the lichen or the lichen possessing the rock? Or is the answer that you can express it either way and it’s sort of a question of focus. But the double-genitive situation seems more where the genitive construction can be used to convey both possession and some other sort of connection, such as that of a portrait to its subject, who well may be different than its owner, and using the construction disambiguates which of those it is. Maybe the rock-lichen puzzle leads to some other interesting syntactic intrigue, though?
@do, dm
Here are the sentences immediately following the Hegel text I quoted earlier:
Die hartnäckigkeit des deutschen Charakters
hat sich nicht bis dahin überwinden lassen, daß die
einzelnen Theile ihre Besonderheiten der Gesellschaft auf
geopfert, sich alle in ein Allgemeines vereinigt und die
freiheit in gemeinschaftlicher freier Unterwürfigkeit unter
eine oberste Staatsgewalt gefunden hätten .
—
The stubbornness of the German character did not allow itself to be overcome to the extent that the various parts could sacrifice their eccentricities [Besonderheiten] to society, unite as a whole [in ein Allgemeines], and find freedom in a commonly undertaken free submission to a state executive [oberste Staatsgewalt]
—
Here is the paragraph after:
Das ganz eigenthümliche Princip des deutschen
Staatsrechtes steht in unzertrenntem Zusammenhange mit dem Zustande Europas, in welchem die Nationen nicht mittelbar durch Gesetze, ſondern unmittelbar an der
obersten Gewalt theilnahmen. Die oberste Staatsmacht
war unter den europäischen Völkern eine allgemeine Gewalt, an der Jedem eine Art von freiem und persönlichem Antheile zukam , und dieſen freien, persönlichen, von Willkür abhängigen Antheil haben die Deutschen nicht in den freien, von Willkür unabhängigen Antheil verwandeln wollen, der in der Allgemeinheit und Kraft von Gesetzen besteht, sondern sie haben sich ihren späteren Zustand ganz auf der Grundlage jenes Zustandes der nicht geſetzwidrigen , aber gesetzlosen Willkür erbaut.
Der spätere Zuſtand geht unmittelbar von jenem
Zustande aus, worin die Nation, ohne ein Staat zu sein,
ein Volk ausmachte. In dieser Zeit der alten deutschen
Freiheit stand der Einzelne in seinem Leben und Thun
für sich . Er hatte seine Ehre und sein Schicksal nicht
auf dem Zusammenhange mit einem Stande, sondern auf
sich selbst beruhend. In seinem eigenen Sinne und eigener
Kraft zerschlug er sich an der Welt, oder bildete er sie
sich zu seinem Genusse. Zum Ganzen gehörte er durch
Sitte , Religion, einen unsichtbaren lebendigen Geist und
einige wenige große Interessen . Sonst — in seiner Betriebsamkeit und That ließ er sich nicht vom Ganzen beschränken , sondern begrenzte sich ohne Furcht und Zweifel nur durch sich selbst ; aber was innerhalb seines Kreises lag, war so sehr und so ganz er selbſt, daß man es nicht einmal sein Eigenthum nennen konnte, sondern für dieses zu seinem Kreise Gehörige, was wir einen Theil nennen , und woran wir also auch nur einen Theil unser selbst setzen würden, setzte er Leib und Leben , Seele und Seligkeit daran .
—
The completely characteristic [eigentümlich] principle of German civil law displays [steht in] an unsevered connection with the state of affairs [Zustand] in Europe, in which nations did not participate in [the process of] executive rule [oberste Gewalt] indirectly through the judiciary [durch Gesetze] but did so directly. The executive power of the State [oberste Staatsmacht] was among European peoples a general ruling capability [Gewalt], from which to each individual [jeder] a sort of free and individual [persönlich] portion [Anteil] was assigned [zukam], and the Germans did not want to transform this free, individual and self-determined [von Willkür abhängig] portion into the free, externally/impersonally determined [von Willkür unabhängig] portion consisting of the general nature and applicability of laws, instead they based their later state of affairs [Zustand] on that state of affairs [Zustand] of not unlawful, but lawless self-determination [Willkür].
I leave the following paragraph untranslated, but I have considered it when translating the above. I am not trying to refute the reading of Gewalt as “violence” in the sentence quoted from Marx, as cogently argued by DM, just saying that the word Gewalt (and words like Zustand, Willkür) could be used by e.g., Hegel and Marx in ways that do not match modern expectations.
Here is a link for the online text:
https://hegel.net/hegelwerke/Hegel1893-Kritik_der_Verfassung_Deutschlands.pdf
J.W. Brewer: I do not posses real estate, and am therefore not a person. I am to inherit some, but I do not posses it currently.
I tried reading it that way, and it works; but reading it the normal way works just as well. More research is needed.
I haven’t commented on this sentence from the Marx quote yet:
First, the lack of sind before the comma is really striking. Omitting the copula seems to have been a thing in some dialects in the 17th and I think 18th centuries, but I didn’t expect it in the mid-19th outside of rarefied poetry.
Second, this is a case where Gewalt brauchen is probably better translated as “use force” than “resort to violence”, but even so it’s explicitly brutal.
Third, the whole thing is an allusion to the climactic line of Goethe’s Erlkönig: Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt! (The copula is not omitted there, though.)
That may or may not be required to explain the use of brauchen for “use”; today it means “need”, and “use” is gebrauchen, verwenden or anwenden, Gewalt anwenden being a fixed locution.
Lastly, andern is yet another example of postvocalic -n for modern-yet-more-archaic -en.
The map has all of Ohio in the two highest acceptance categories (of four), and almost all of Ohio in the highest.
Yes, and Gewalt still has broader meanings, as detailed above. I’ll comment on the rest of the Hegel quotes later, however.
@V: Hegel is not focusing only on ownership* of land and Marx for his part is very much *not* focused on real estate but on Personen owning stuff-people-make, i.e. “commodities” [Waaren in the archaic spelling] that have “surplus value” embedded in them because capitalism. Apparently you can get Marxists squabbling among themselves over the question of whether land is a “commodity,” and the internet offers you sentences like “One of Polanyi’s most important contributions to critical social science was his insistence that land, labor, and money were fictitious commodities and that the liberal propensity to treat them as if they were real commodities was a major source of contradictions and crisis-tendencies in capitalist development” usw.
I’m separately a bit unclear to what extent Hegel was focused on a “Person” necessarily having actual ownership or other rights in some sort of property versus simply having the theoretical legal capacity, per the norms of the relevant place and time, to own property without regard to whether that capacity has been put to use.
*Also, you can have “property rights” in real estate without owning it. In a typical residential rental situation, both the landlord and the tenant have certain property rights in the same real estate, with the law (perhaps as modified in certain respects by the specific lease) determining who has what.
the other “kampf” Anglophone students might have learned about in a history class touching on Germany is the Bismarck-era Kulturkampf, and wikipedia right now glosses that (suspiciously euphemistically?) as “cultural struggle.”
See this 2004 LH post: