Curtis Bowman

Advertisements for Myself - #14

A reader from Portugal recently contacted me to ask me about my book about Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. It's been a while since I mentioned my current projects, and so I thought that I should take a few minutes to post an update.

The good news is that I've been working on the DoE book, but the bad news is that I've decided to put the project on hold for at least two years. Why? Well, I'm also working on another book, a new translation of Richard Wagner's Oper und Drama. I had hoped to write the DoE book while I translated the first part of the Wagner book. Unfortunately, the Wagner book has proved to be more difficult than I had thought it would be, and I had expected it to be extremely difficult to translate.

Wagner's German prose is very difficult to read, even for native speakers of German, and so it's even more difficult to translate into another language. It takes me a long time, usually six or seven hours, to translate a single page. I'm translating Wagner into modern, readable English, and so that makes my task that much more difficult. I could easily translate his prose into tangled, awkward English, but there's no point in doing that. I have to go slowly as I struggle to turn his German into readable English. So, in short, I'm making progress, but only at a brutally slow pace.

I decided to make significant progress on the Wagner book in order not to feel overwhelmed by the demands of the project. I could work on both of my books, but only very slowly. It seems to me that it's better to make steady progress on a single book rather than slow progress on two books. Working on two books, neither of which would be finished in the next couple of years, would just sit too heavily on my mind. So I decided to finish the Wagner book first. Then I can concentrate on the DoE book. That way, I won't feel weighed down by two difficult projects.

Naturally, I wish that I could work on both books simultaneously, but, unfortunately, I had to make a choice. The Wagner book is more important, and will do more for me financially, so I chose it over the DoE book. But I'm fully committed to writing the DoE book. It's just that it will take a little longer than I had hoped.

I'll keep posting progress reports on both of my book projects as they continue to develop.

On Translating Wagner - #1

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had signed a contract for a new translation of Richard Wagner's Opera and Drama. Since it's my intention to keep my readers informed about my projects, I thought that I should post updates to their own category. So from now on all my Wagner posts will be collected in the Richard Wagner category. That way, I can keep them separate from my posts about my progress on my book about Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The good news is that my translation is underway and that I'm making progress. The bad news is that Wagner's prose is often atrocious, even as bad as Hegel's at times. So it's slow going. I've translated the preface to the first edition as well as the introduction. Now I'm working on part one.

When I find the time, I'll post a few passages and discuss how I translated them.

Advertisements for Myself - #13

I've been hoping to get back to regular blogging for quite a while, and I think that I'll soon be able to do so. In the meantime, though, I wanted to say something about my current writing and translating.

When I left Philadelphia ten years ago, I had several ideas for book-length projects. Two in particular have stuck with me, and in the past couple of years I've taken the necessary first steps for getting them off the ground.

I used to teach classes on the Frankfurt School, always assigning to my students Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. I have long thought that I should write some sort of commentary geared towards students who are struggling their way through this extremely difficult, though important, philosophical work. Since I have a lot of experience with this book, it seemed to me that it wouldn't be too difficult for me to write a commentary on it.

Well, I eventually got myself organized, wrote a proposal, and sent it off to an interested editor. I'm happy to report that I now have a contract to write the proposed book.

While I was getting the first book project off the ground, I continued thinking about my next translation project. I had translated a lot of material by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Moses Mendelssohn that finally appeared in two separate books in 2010 and 2011. Once the Mendelssohn book came out, I decided that I had had enough of the 18th century. It was time to move a little bit forward in my translation work, which only seemed natural, since I had already undertaken to write about a book that first appeared in the 1940s.

I prefer to translate material that has either never been translated before or has been so badly translated that a new translation is a necessity. I happen to admire Richard Wagner's operas, and so I started to toy with the possibility of re-translating some of his most important prose works.

I sketched out several possibilities, discussed them for quite a while with an interested editor, and drew up another book proposal. My ideas were well received, and so I signed a contract for another book, this time for a new translation of Richard Wagner's Opera and Drama.

The Horkheimer/Adorno commentary is tentatively entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Reader's Guide. The Wagner book will just be called Opera and Drama. If all goes well, Opera and Drama will be the first in a series of new translations of Wagner's prose writings.

Fortunately for me, both of the books are under contract with Acumen Publishing, a British press for which I've done some work in the past. I've enjoyed dealing with them, and so I'm happy to have further opportunities to work with them.

These big changes in my writing and translating will be good for me, I think. If you look at my academic autobiography, you'll see that my efforts involving 18th century German philosophy never bought me an academic career. The work was worthwhile, of course, but the career never materialized. Consequently, it's nice, after twenty years, just to leave the 18th century behind. It's high time to do something else.

So that's the new plan for the next few years. Naturally, I'll blog about my progress on both books, which means that you should check back here from time to time if the topics are of interest to you.