Notes on the New English Edition of Marx’s Capital

Translations of philosophical texts are often not an easy business. The translator should have a profound knowledge and understanding of the thinker in order to transmit their thoughts properly to the reader. Paul Reitter combines both of these aspects. He is Professor at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University as well as a practicing translator interested in the field of translation studies. Reitter will talk about his New English Edition of Karl Marx’s Capital, providing an overview of how previous English translations responded to some of the main translation challenges the text poses and presenting his own responses in this comparative context.

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Reitter’s scholarship focuses primarily on two areas: German-Jewish culture and the history of higher education. Of particular concern in both cases have been the links between intellectual and institutional history, the relationship of cultural crisis and cultural innovation, and the effects of technological change on humanistic culture. A practicing translator, Reitter is also interested in the field of translation studies. He is the author of four books: The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U of Chicago Press, 2008), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton UP, 2012), and Bambi’s Jewish Roots: Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), and, with Chad Wellmon. His current project—coauthored with Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (U of Chicago Press, 2021). Reitter’s articles and essays have appeared in an array of venues, ranging from Representations, American Imago, and Jewish Social Studies to Harper’s Magazine, the TLS, The Nation, the LA Review of Books, Bookforum, and The Hedgehog Review.

Reitter has worked collaboratively on a number of editions, including The Kraus Project (FSG, 2013), with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (New York Review of Books Classics series, 2015), with Chad Wellmon, The Rise of the Research University a Sourcebook (University of Chicago Press, 2017), with Louis Menand and Chad Wellmon, and the volume, for which he served as the translator, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon (Princeton University Press, 2018), with Abraham Socher and Yitzhak Melamed. Together with Chad Wellmon, Reitter organized and annotated new English edition of Max Weber’s famous vocation lectures, published in the New York Review of Books Classics series (2020). With Anthony Grafton, Caroline Winterer, and Wellmon, Reitter is a co-editor of the new book series “Histories of the University” (University of Chicago Press).

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156 Berlin)

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