Mistranslation of Marx's "Misère de la philosophie"

[yong321]

French socialist, philosopher and economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote a book titled Philosophie de la misère. The titles of its Italian and Spanish translations both translate misère to its cognate, miseria (Italian and Spanish take exactly the same spelling). Its German translation uses the word Elend, which means "misery". The book is indeed about human misery or suffering. But its English translation has both Philosophy of Misery and Philosophy of Poverty. According to Google Ngram, most of the time since its early translation, especially since 1970, the latter is a much more popular title. And the title of the Chinese translation, literally translated back to English, is Philosophy of Poverty. This is unfortunate because the readers may mistakenly think that the book is only about poverty, not misery in general.

Karl Marx responded to Proudhon's book immediately by writing a book, by playing with the words, titled Misère de la philosophie. Now, even more unfortunate than translation of Proudhon's book is that Marx's book is almost exclusively translated into English as Poverty of Philosophy instead of Misery of Philosophy. Are we really supposed to equate misery with poverty? No. If Victor Hugo's Les Misérables had been called, say, Les Pauvres, readers would be misled and confused. Poverty is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for misery. St Francis of Assisi lived in poverty without being in misery, while extremely rich people may still feel living a life of misery.

A Google search finds a person named Tim Newcomb, who recently translated Marx's book as Misery of Philosophy. I can't find any information about this translator. We can thank him for making this long overdue correction.