Hegel is hard

I don't mean the concepts involved or anything, just that he's hard to read.  As proof I reproduce without further comment two sentences from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right along with their translation as given here.

Es ist darum als ein Glück für die Wissenschaft zu achten,—in der Tat ist es, wie bemerkt, die Notwendigkeit der Sache,—daß jenes Philosophieren, das sich als eine Schulweisheit in sich fortspinnen mochte, sich in näheres Verhältnis mit der Wirklichkeit gesetzt hat, in welcher es mit den Grundsätzen der Rechte und der Pflichten ernst ist, und welche im Tage des Bewußtseins derselben lebt, und daß es somit zum öffentlichen Bruche gekommen ist.  Es ist eben diese Stellung der Philosophe zur Wirklichkeit, welche die Mißverständisse betreffen, und ich kehre hiermit zu dem zurück, was ich vorhin bemerkt habe, daß die Philosophie, weil sie das Ergründen des Vernünftigen ist, eben damit das Erfassen des Gegenwärtigen und Wirklichen, nicht das Aufstellen eines Jenseitigen ist, das Gott weiß wo sein sollte,—oder von dem man in der Tat wohl zu sagen weiß, wo es ist, nämlich in dem Irrtum eines einseitige, leeren Raisonnierens.

The translation:

Hence it is for science a piece of good fortune that that kind of philosophising, which might, like scholasticism, have continued to spin its notions within itself, has been brought into contact with reality. Indeed, such contact was, as we have said, inevitable. The real world is in earnest with the principles of right and duty, and in the full light of a consciousness of these principles it lives. With this world of reality philosophic cob-web spinning has come into open rupture. Now, as to genuine philosophy it is precisely its attitude to reality which has been misapprehended. Philosophy is, as I have already observed, an inquisition into the rational, and therefore the apprehension of the real and present. Hence it cannot be the exposition of a world beyond, which is merely a castle in the air, having no existence except in the terror of a one-sided and empty formalism of thought.

In other news I have located at least four typographical errors in the Marx-Engels Reader, and this fact has forever discredited Marx and all his works in my eyes.

Comments

[Daniel]

That passage does not actually strike me as that hard to read (in English). I can only take this to indicate that I really need to get out more, as I am clearly losing all contact with reality. (Which, in accord with the passage quoted, would also ruin my ability to do philosophy. It is a dilemma -- if I am psychotic enough to think Hegel is readable, then I am not sane enough to avoid airy scholasticism.)

Allen Wood's translation of that passage reads more naturally as English, and as far as I can tell it also sticks closer to Hegel's German. I'm actually curious why marxists.org used the 19th-century Dyde translation for the opening of the Rechtsphilosophie. I would be surprised if Knox had actually managed to do a worse job of translating it.

"The terror of a one-sided and empty formalism of thought"? That has to be a typo. Though it does give a neat French Revolution-y vibe to the sentence.

[ben wolfson]

It's not hard to read in English. What I really meant is that he's hard to read in German. You'll notice that the number of sentences in the translation is a sight greater than two, and that various clauses have been relocated, some words introduced sometimes understandably (for pronoun purposes, I gather), sometimes not (castles in the air?).

[ogged]

I've heard people say just the opposite: that Hegel is impossible in translation, but not so bad in German. All these problems fall away if you're Jonah Goldberg.

[ben wolfson]

As it happened in the actual translation group (which is the reason for the reading) things went pretty smoothly. And, moreover, I was the one who wound up doing the famous grey-on-grey owl of minerva sentence. Big win.