Marx for the twenty-first centuryThe first new English translation in fifty years—and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himselfFeaturing extensive original commentary, including a foreword by acclaimed political theorist Wendy Brown“An astounding achievement.”—China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
Q: You are also translating the second and third volumes of Capital, left in manuscript at the time of Marx’s death and edited for publication by Engels. Is it too early to ask how that part of the project is going?
A: We are excited to be back at it and are enjoying the mix of continuity and change: Volume two has its own special translation and philological challenges.
As Engels laboriously put, or pieced, together the text of volume two, struggling with a bad back and Marx’s nearly indecipherable handwriting, he tried to make the text seem like a “finished whole.” He inserted transitional sections, evened out and to some extent formalized the style, which varies quite a bit in the manuscripts, and worked to create an impression of conceptual integration when Marx’s thinking in fact evolved considerably over the course of the eight volume-two manuscripts. Since the German critical edition of Marx’s and Engels’s works, with its 30-volume section of Capital (completed in 2012), has made available reliable versions of all the volume two manuscripts, you can now track—and, again, make transparent—Engels’s editorial interventions, something that couldn’t be done for the only English translation of volume two currently in print, David Fernbach’s edition, which was published in 1978.
Do you know if they’re doing Vol 2 and 3?
yes, Paul Reitter is working on those also: https://archive.is/hsg1m
all I know is what’s on the page there, if you want 'em that would be a good thing to email them about so they know there is interest