I have no idea why it hasn’t been translated. I even considered translating it myself, but that would be a lot of work, and my reward would presumably be an expert review saiyng soething like “Mr. Emerson is certainly to be commended for his effort at translation. His frequent mistranslations, however, make his work useless or misleading for the English-language audience. A competent translator should be found to provide the scholarly world with a usable version of this fine work”. And I’m not willing to spend months of my life motivating the enormous egos of the scholarly world to do something someone should have done centuries ago.

I frequently find English-language books about authors in languages I am able to read (often major authors previously pretty much unknown in English) provide no help for monolingual English readers—no translation, no appreciation. The foreign-language text is treated purely as the object of literary analysis. This problem is especially prominent in published PhD dissertations, but I know of one case of a scholar who was forced by his committee to translate the text he was working on, but who removed the translation when his work was finally published.

Just that much more evidence for my thesis that humanities graduate schools are bad places and that no one should ever go there.

Andererseits koennte akademische Anerkennung hilfreich sein. Die Bezahlung an dem Autor bzw. Verlag muss irgendwie geregelt sein, aber auf eine Papierversion koennte verzichtet werden. Das wuerde heissen das der Akademiker die Uebersetzung macht und laesst es zirkulieren im elektronischen Form; man muss dennoch fuer die Rechte bezahlen, aber der Rest ist gesehen als Teil der akademischen Arbeit, aehnlich wie Konferenzpapiere. Das Problem das Scott hervorhebt bleibt, aber die Probleme, die die Universitaetspressen betonen, sind nicht unbedingt wichtig.

At Duke University Press we had a discussion about this at our editorial board last week. Alice Kaplan (author of French Lessons, The Interpreter, etc. and a frequent translator from the French for Nebraska and Chicago) talked about this as an ethical obligation in the profession and pointed out the huge imbalence between what is translated out of English versus what is translated in. Statistically the U.S. is pretty much at the bottom for translation in, and your main point, that academic credit might help, is certainly right.

From a press point of view the problem is that to have the rights to translate (as opposed to bootlegging for free) the press pays more to the French publisher than they would generally pay to an English language author writing the same book. Then to pay for translation adds about 6000-12,000 on top of that. There are small grants that might pay a third to a half of that but even so, the costs are very high. Then the only things that seem like smart decisions are the pre-assured sales, like the next big theory person. Badiou? Great! What happens to the Korean or Javanese intellectual’s equivalent book that doesn’t start with the same buzz? How do we learn about those?

• Not all conference papers are bs, of course, many are valuable contributions to the stock of human learning. However, if you’re going to evaluate someone for expertise, I’ll take the guy who can successfully and usefully translate Gramsci’s letters over the guy who can spin an argument about what the letters (in translation or in the original) signify about power relations, Freudian dynamics, splits within the global Marxist movement, etc.