2 - Re-translating the Manifesto: New Histories, New Ideas

Summary

It is widely appreciated that translation is interpretation. What is not so widely understood is that all interpretation is translation. Even in situations where the reader is a native speaker of the language in which the text is written, the activity of reading - deriving meaning from words - necessarily involves a process of translation. That is, reading is an active process through which various forms of difference are negotiated, so meaning — not just language - is ‘translated’. The outcome of these negotiations, perhaps surprisingly, is not sameness or similarity, but rather difference yet again, often rather self-deceptively and one-sidedly disguised as ‘agreement’.

‘When we understand at all, we understand differently.’ This is a principle that comes to us from the linguistic philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and in this chapter I mean to develop its application in connection with my translation of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, now more commonly known as the Communist Manifesto, reproduced in this volume (pp. 14—37). This is the first genuinely new, line-by-line retranslation since the English version of 1888. A number of new editions done from the 1960s onwards contain differences in translation but are not what I consider to be serious attempts to look at the German texts (which have themselves undergone changes) and to recast the thoughts for a contemporary audience.

This brings me back to the practical implications of the Gadamer/Ricoeur principle, and the development in the 1980s of ‘reader-response’ criticism which elaborates some of the consequences. Interpretation is translation, precisely because in any act of reading the reader must form some judgement as to what the text is saying, most usually a translation into one's own words of ‘what the author meant’, or ‘what the text means to me’. A mere recitation of text, whether from memory or from reading aloud, is generally rejected as an indication of understanding, and therefore of having read a text. This is a clue to the plausibility of my claim that interpretation is translation. Readers are not mirrors or receptacles for meanings that are supposedly fixed in the words ‘on the page’.