I was recently reading an English translation of a non-theory-related non-fiction book that was published just a few years ago. Next on my list was re-reading Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.

I can only describe my experience as the most severe whiplash; comparable only to reading the comments on a news thread on .world after checking the Lemmygrad thread.

I found myself reading so slowly. In 30 minutes I would have barely read a few pages, even though I was not struggling with the content itself.

I found that it’s just that the language is so needlessly impenetrable. So many run-on sentences, so many odd turns of phrases, archaic terms (not relevant to Marxist theory), and bizarre sentence structures.

I have never read the original German text nor any other language translation, so I don’t have a point of reference. I don’t know how much of it is Engels’ writing style, versus the translator’s 19th century English.
A translation written in 1892 was not written for English speakers in 2026.

My question is: Would these works not become so much more accessible if we had a modern English translation from the original text?

If this would be considered useful, how could we realistically realise this for all of the fundamental works from that time period?

  1. I imagine that finding and hiring a translator who is familiar with Marxism to re-do the translations would be extremely difficult and expensive.

  2. Community translations are probably not feasible as translation requires a very specific skill set, not just fluent speakers.

  3. Machine translations might be possible, but it’s crucial to not lose any specific terminology and not misconstrue the meanings of certain quotes and phrases. The translator (whether human or machine) needs to have a strong grasp on Marxist theory and history to not distort the meanings in the text.

I would really appreciate everyone’s thoughts and suggestions on this. Maybe I completely dropped the ball on this topic.

P.S.

This is not just in regards to “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, it’s just the experience that inspired me to write this post.
I’m not unfamiliar with reading theory from that time period nor Marx and Engels’ writings in general. I’m also not completely unfamiliar with 19th century English, I’ve read plenty of fiction written in that time period as well.

  • ProudCascadian@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    When Lenin rants about Bernstein or Kautsky that means nothing for most modern readers.

    It depends on the state of said modern reader; not all live in the same conditions. Some have read a lot of older texts, and some haven’t. Some have taken an interest in the late 19th and early 20th century, and some haven’t. Some believe that the Democratic party will get better, others don’t believe so, but without exactly understanding why. It is in my opinion varied from reader to reader, especially in diverse places from, say, the Bible Belt, to Bavaria, to Okinawa. In this case, the ideology not just of Lenin, but of Kautsky would mean something very different, provoke a different amount of interest, a different reaction, &c. I personally think that it is best when you first teach the history of what went on, then the Marxist application. For instance, teaching what happened in WWI, and then WWI as explained by Lenin. I was able to get my brother to understand a good amount of MLism by explaining how exactly Capitalism affects Japan, and why they have not just the problems that they, but their particular problems.