Tractatus Translatus
Legend has it that Damion Searls learnt Norwegian in order to translate Jon Fosse, whom he had read in German and identified as a genius. Searls’ translations of Fosse are, by all accounts, superb. So it is intriguing to learn that he has now translated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, joining other post-centenary interpreters, Michael Beaney, a historian of early analytic philosophy, and Alexander Booth, a poet.
There are two classic translations of the Tractatus, one by Frank Ramsey, credited to C. K. Ogden—which is widely regarded as both heroic and flawed—the other by David Pears and Brian McGuinness. (The philosopher Kevin Klement helpfully built a side-by-side-by-side edition comparing them with the German original.)
Searls aims to outclass both, though his apology takes aim at Ogden first, leaving Pears and McGuiness to a footnote. Searls notes some points of alleged improvement over Ogden, though I think the scorecard is mixed. Consider:
Ogden (3.1): In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses.
[Searls] 3.1: A thought is expressed, and made perceivable by the senses, in a proposition.
Searls is more idiomatic, perhaps, but his translation shifts attention undesirably, as though the task of 3.1 were less to define what a proposition is than to offer advice for manifesting thoughts. Consider also:
Ogden (3.13): To the proposition belongs everything which belongs to the projection.
[Searls] 3.13: Everything that is part of the projection is part of the proposition.
Here “belongs” fits the German “gehört” and avoids the dubious mereological imposition of “part[s].” Another win for Ogden/Ramsey.
Searls’ most interesting argument is about the linguistic contrasts between English and German:
In German, nouns are vigorous, usually compounded together with built-in prepositional spatiality, while the verbs are often generic… In English, though, verbs and adjectives are where the action is; nouns on their own are static. … The German reliance on nouns is why English translations of German philosophy can be so turgid
Searls takes Marx as an example:
When a writer like Marx puts his complicated neologistic compound nouns into play—“The money-form of the commodity confronts the commodity-form of the worker’s labor” or what have you—it has life and a playful, exciting energy in German, from the nouns; the generic verb stehen plus preposition (steht gegenüber, “confronts” or “stands facing”), which Marx repeats over and over again in Capital, produces in German a kind of quivering equilibrium between these energies. In English it sounds like the world’s worst cocktail party: all these stiff creatures standing around not talking to one another.
The issue of nouns and verbs applies to the Tractatus, too: “Which does Wittgenstein privilege?” Searls asks. “Which make up the world?” What’s odd is that he doesn’t mention that the book he is translating explicitly, if enigmatically, answers his questions:
4.22: An elementary proposition consists of names. It is a nexus, a concatenation, of names.
That Searls does not look into this enigma is a missed opportunity, but perhaps not more than that. Elsewhere, his interpretive lens seems more damagingly out-of-focus.
“The book as a whole is confusing about Tatsachen [facts],” Searls writes, “because Wittgenstein says both that the world is made up of Tatsachen (1.1), and that a picture or a sentence is a Tatsache (2.141, 3.143).” Searls objects to this: “‘how things are is a fact’ makes sense in English, in a way that ‘a picture of how things are is a fact’ does not”:
A Wittgensteinian image or sentence is more like a statement of fact. I solve this problem by sometimes translating “ist eine Tatsache” (“is a fact”) as “states a fact”: “The picture states a fact” (2.141). Varying the verb stays truer to what Wittgenstein means by the relationship between world and picture than it would be to say in English that a picture is a fact.
Yet it’s crucial to Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” that representational power is attributed not to mere signs as objects but to the fact that signs stand in certain relations to one another. Propositions do not merely state facts, as anyone could agree: what states a fact is the fact that elements are so arranged as to make a logical picture that is isomorphic with a possible state of affairs. Searls’ stylistic “solution” obliterates this idea.
Most egregiously, Searls retranslates what he admits is the “iconic first line of Ogden’s version of the book—‘The world is everything that is the case’” on grounds of excessive formality, making its language more colloquial: “The world is everything there is.” But the former coheres with Wittgenstein’s signature thesis, in the following sentence—“1.1. The world is the totality of facts, not things”—where the latter does not. “Everything there is” includes all the things there are; but only facts can be the case. Ramsey got this right.
It may seem pedantic to quibble at such length. I wouldn’t do it if Searls were not so critical of philosophers who translate philosophy, urging his alternative vision:
Wittgenstein’s book is explicitly about the relationships between language and thought, between language and the world, making it imperative to get these relationships right in translation. And so I have retranslated the book, paying special attention to where the assumptions of typical academic philosophy translation would lead us away from expressing Wittgenstein’s thought in English. Implicitly, I am making the case for a certain kind of approach that is generally called “literary”—attentive to emotional nuances, subtle connotations, and expressive power—even when translating rigorous philosophical texts.
I don’t object to Searls’ literary mode: the Tractatus is a personal book and its emotional nuances matter. Nor do I think the older editions are perfect. But one can’t translate Wittgenstein well without a sympathetic understanding of the point of his philosophy. And what one cannot speak about, one must pass over in silence.
BONUS CONTENT: Tractatus as subway map, by David Stern and colleagues at the University of Iowa.