In November 1885, Friedrich Engels published an essay in the Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself’). Engels disliked him intensely, and it didn’t help that Hyndman, hiding behind the name Broadhouse, had published selections from Capital in an uncertain English translation when Engels himself was still labouring over the first official translation. ‘Mr Broadhouse,’ Engels wrote,
"is deficient in every quality required in a translator of Marx. To translate such a book, a fair knowledge of literary German is not enough. Marx uses freely expressions of everyday life and idioms of provincial dialects; he coins new words, he takes his illustrations from every branch of science, his allusions from the literatures of a dozen languages; to understand him, a man must be a master of German indeed, spoken as well as written, and must know something of German life too."
Hyndman apparently lacked any such talents. But what could one expect of a man who possessed only ‘a passable knowledge of mere book German’, yet had taken it on himself to translate the magnum opus of ‘the most untranslatable of German prose writers’?
The English translation of the first volume of Capital, overseen and edited by Engels, was published in 1887, four years after Marx’s death. By this point Capitalalready had a reputation, as Engels wrote in the preface, as the singular work that elaborated the ‘fundamental principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working class’ (a phrase Engels used without irony). In a letter of April 1886 to Marx’s daughter Laura, Engels confessed that ‘the English translation of Capital is awful work.’ But the work proceeded, not only in English, but across the globe. A French translation by Joseph Roy (which Marx himself had supervised and revised) had been published between 1872 and 1875.
