RE: [OPE] The English sub-titling of 'Capital'?

Hi Chris and others:
 
You didn't discuss below what for me seems to be the most glaring
difference: in the modified title 'critique of political economy'
was removed and something else very different in meaning was
substituted. Surely, Engels knew the meaning of critique so it is
somewhat puzzling why he would have agreed to "critical analysis".
[Perhaps Aveling, Moore, and Engels thought that 'critique' wasn't
a term as readily understandable in English?] But, the shift
in sub-title from "political economy" to "capitalist production"
represents an even more significant difference in meaning and emphasis.
An alternative translation, perhaps more readily understandable to
English readers" would have been "economics". In any event,
a sub-title which indicates that a work is a critique political
economy (economics) is surely not the same as the modified title.
[Perhaps Engels thought that there was too much emphasis in the title
on political economy?]. It's hard, probably impossible, to know
what they were thinking about when this change was made.
 
In solidarity, jerry

________________________________
> From: arthurcj@waitrose.com
> Subject: Re: [OPE] The English sub-titling of 'Capital'?
> Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 05:05:36 +0100
> To: zarembka@buffalo.edu; ope@lists.csuchico.edu
> CC:
>
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>
> Here is a bit from my collection Engels Today a centenary appreciation p. 177:
>
> More alarming to students than the chapter renumbering may be the fact that the very title was changed in Engels’s English edition. The German book was Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie and the first volume was Der Produktionsprocess des Kapitals. The English version put out by Engels in 1887 was called Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production with the first part called Capitalist Production.[1]
>
> It seems to me that these are very different in that the emphasis in the German seems to be on how capital produces itself as a value form (with a promise of how it circulates to come), whereas the English sounds rather more pedestrian: there is production in general but here we look specifically at its capitalist form. However, whether there is anything in such reflections or not, Engels was not the originator of a deviation from the German. For Marx’s French edition was called simply Le Capital with the first volume called Développement de la Production Capitaliste. The English version was a cross between the two earlier ones.[2]
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> [1] Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling: see MEGA II 9.
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> [2] A 1954 edition, originating from Foreign Languages Publishing House of Moscow, continued with Engels’s title. But in 1965, without notice, the same translation (now from Progress Publishers) had its title changed to correspond with the German: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, Book One, The Process of Production of Capital. The 1983 publication by Lawrence & Wishart, London, of this edition, printed in the USSR, is so titled; and in accordance with the above-mentioned reflections, I complied with the new format in preparing my Student Edition (Lawrence & Wishart 1992) on the basis of this edition.
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> christopher j. arthur
> arthurcj@waitrose.com
> http://www.chrisarthur.net/
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Received on Tue May 26 07:23:24 2009