Reader's Digest: August 10, 2024

In a recent LRB, the multidimensional A. W. Moore writes about three new translations of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s enigmatic masterpiece, by Michael Beaney, Anthony Booth, and Damion Searls. To call the book “enigmatic” may be an understatement. In the philosopher’s dictionary, the entry for “enigmatic” reads “See Tractatus.”

Moore skillfully elicits the distinctive problem of translation here, that “one of the messages about language Wittgenstein is attempting to convey is that material such as we find in the Tractatus is nonsensical.” How should we translate “a work which, by its own lights and in a quite literal sense, leaves the translator with nothing to translate.”

The challenge prompts a good-natured quip about one of the new editions:

Booth, in his acknowledgments, says that his editor, Donald Futers, has saved him from various errors, among which he lists ‘just plain nonsense’. He then adds the standard caveat that any remaining errors ‘sadly, are entirely my own’. Not if he…