ABSTRACT
Scholars and critics have tended to examine Marx’s translation strategies in Le Capital in terms of his prerogatives and aims as a self-translator. Proceeding in this way, they have treated places where the original French translation of Capital, Volume I, appears to stray from the source text either as simplifications that Marx allowed himself for the purpose of making the text more accessible or as attempts to improve the text, that is, to translate upward. In one case, the suggestion is that we would do well to read Le Capital with caution – simplifications can be misleading, after all. In the other, it is that we should see the moments where Marx’s self-translating in Le Capital appears to operate freely as a form of revision, and, because Le Capital is the last edition of Capital, Volume I, whose publication Marx oversaw, we should see such moments as having a special authority compared to their counterparts in other editions of the book, including the German ones. But all translation involves substituting one set of words for another, and when that happens, semantic change necessarily occurs. Hence, we should ask: What if changes in Le Capital that seem to have to do with a specific agenda as a self-translator are functions of Marx’s customary strategies as a translator? Before we can begin to answer this question, we must obviously begin to analyze Marx’s work as a translator, not a self-translator, which is what this article does. First, however, it considers the limitations of recent discussions of how Marx translated himself in Le Capital.
