I’m curious about the experience of reading Marx from our users for whom English is their second language. For me as a native English speaker… I love reading Marx but the language feels so arcane at times. I mean, he rarely uses words I don’t understand, but the context in which he uses them often eludes me. It’s almost like he uses to many words when a briefer sentence would be more effective, at least to a modern audience. It’s nowhere near the experience of say reading Shakespeare, which I can’t do without some sort of modern guide. But I feel like the language is challenging enough that it’s a barrier to some people.
So I’m curious if the experience is similar in other languages (especially curious about German).
I’m German and I find him easier to understand translated to English, honestly. If you feel like the English is anachronistic-sounding at times, whoo boy did they write in a stilted way in German at the time. I’m guessing that most translations have been updated somewhat as well, while the original German obviously stayed exactly the same, compounding that whole issue. It’s not that I don’t get him in German, but it takes longer to get him, I need to reread sentences a lot - in English it’s comparably straight-forward, really.
It’s worth noting that this holds mostly true for Capital, for example the manifesto is pretty accessible in German too, as you might imagine
That’s because Engels wrote it Engels is so much easier to read.
It sounds like the English may be more straightforward, though I will say I often need to reread sentence or take a moment to think about what’s being said (beyond being an insightful comment, I mean). I think reading vol. 1 of Capital took me about 2X longer to read than a modern book of a similar word count for this reason.
Yea for sure, it’s still Marx, not exactly light reading. German grammar just likes to employ a lot of inversions and overly complex sentence structures - stuff that just doesn’t fly to that degree in English, so the translator already did a lot of work to make it more straightforward, on a grammatical level.
The Reddit meme about how easy German because “le Concatenation, just mash words and works” vs the reality of learning all sorts of complex stuff.