This summer, I’m trying to get a reading group on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics going. I chose this book for a few reasons. Adorno has been a continuous presence for me, but I’ve never really dug into his work systematically. More broadly, I am interested in dialectical thought and am especially seeking to recapture the magic of the reading group on Hegel’s Science of Logic I participated in during the pandemic — so this seems like the other main “big book” of dialectics. Even more broadly, I think that having a serious, extended discussion seminar with my intellectual peers would be refreshing to me, so to that extent, the specific text we choose may not be super-important.

And part of me wonders whether we will wind up switching texts, because Negative Dialectics is, in a sense, not fully available in English. The official published translation by A.B. Ashton is sloppy at best, to the point that Ashton was panned by Jameson in his book on Adorno as being “innocent of the philosophical tradition.” A widely circulated alternate translation by Dennis Redmond is significantly better, but still sloppy — as a translator myself, I’m shocked to see so many definite article errors, for instance. Finally, Christian Thorne and Matthius Menda have produced a positively good translation — of the first 43 pages of this 400-page book. Even in the Ashton, one gets the broad strokes, but it’s disappointing not to be able to do the kind of close reading that makes a discussion seminar really sing.

Hence I have turned to the German, which, to be fair to the translators, is genuinely very idiosyncratic and difficult — much harder than Agamben’s prose, for instance, and my translations of his work do unfortunately include some errors despite the greater accessibility of his texts. Adorno leans heavily on the case and gender endings in German to create densely woven prose. It can be very satisfying to read, but also makes unique demands on the reader. Normally in my German reading I can mostly handwave gender and case, which is treated as a somewhat vestigial structure by most authors I’ve read. Adorno is forcing me to finally whip myself into shape and master it, much like reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit forced me to master roots and prefixes. Thorne and Menda show that Adorno’s near self-dialect of German can be rendered into stylish English prose, but it’s hard.

It’s also hard for me simply to read. I have dipped into many languages for reading knowledge over the years, including Qur’anic Arabic, and somehow German is the one that most resists my advances. Through consistent work over the last couple years, I’ve gotten to the point where I can sit down and read standard scholarly German without getting overly bogged down in the dictionary — a skill I will need since my next major research project is on Goethe’s Faust — but to feel like I’m really understanding Adorno, I need to study every word, every pronoun, every ending, every particle. The result is that, in a typical session of an hour or so, I wind up getting through a page and a half. There is no way I can get through the German text quickly enough to keep up with any reasonable pace for a reading group. In fact, at this pace, I’ll be lucky to get through the introduction by the time next semester rolls around.

This observation raises the question of why I am even bothering. The only immediate use of this exercise is to assess the translations, but even there my ranking corresponds to what anyone would suspect after simply reading the translations in English with no reference to the German. For the broader purpose of sharpening my skill in German, Adorno may also be overboard — after all, I have managed to work my way through Part 1 of Faust in the original without undue difficulty. For the latter, I had the alibi of planning a research project and, more immediately, regularly teaching a course centered on the text, but even there my level of study was excessive. My scholarship would focus on the broad themes and influence of the Faust legend, not the nitty-gritty of the text, and in the context a student-centered discussion class, injecting my German tidbits is more likely to be distracting than helpful for students who are often struggling to get their minds around reading a great literary work in English.

One could say the same for other language projects. All of them have some kind of tangential justification, some relationship to my teaching and research. I do often teach the Bible, so gaining a familiarity with biblical Hebrew makes sense. The Qur’an, which I also often teach, is often regarded as both untranslatable into any other language and incomparably beautiful in its original Arabic, so making some effort to check that out for myself makes sense. Similar arguments could be lodged in favor of my attempts (less recent, sadly) to keep my Latin and Greek fresh — I am a professor in a Great Books program, after all! And yet, and yet…

There is a devotional quality to my language routine. Of course it’s not lost on me that many of the texts I’ve studied have been scriptural or devotional works (e.g., Augustine’s Confessions, 1 and 2 Samuel, the Qur’an). I can even trace my attention to linguistic detail back to my efforts to memorize long chunks of the New Testament for the sake of Bible quizzing — efforts that usually petered out, but that forced me to be attentive to every nuance of the (translated) text. What a stange passage I came across that day as I tried to memorize the opening verses of 1 Corinthians:

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24, quoted in the New International Version that I studied for quizzing)

That second “Christ,” seemingly redundant and definitely syntactically awkward, becomes a stumbling block within the text itself. I remember struggling with it, asking myself — maybe for the first time ever — whether there could be a misprint or a mistake in the Bible. I’ve studied the passage in the original Greek; it doesn’t help. It’s irreducibly weird, just like so many of the things Paul struggles to express. If I had passively listened to the passage read out before a sermon or even read through it at a more normal pace, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But to this day I can remember puzzling over that phrase, remember the texture of the pages, the weight of the print, the church van I was riding in (my memorization efforts usually began immediately after completely bombing out at the regional Bible quizzing level in late spring), even the faint nausea I experienced from reading in the car. I was physically uncomfortable and my efforts were motivated by frustration (how could I blow away the competition at the district level but be destroyed at the regional level?!), but it is a happy memory — perhaps my first memory of pure intellectual contemplation.

Similarly, if I reflect on my experience of reading Adorno each morning, or my experience of getting into a regular reading routine with many other texts over the years, I can only report that I find the work uniquely satisfying. A good morning foreign-language session makes me feel energized, in a way I now recognize as parallel to my feeling when I get done with a session on the rowing machine. I love entering that intellectual flow state, and I love seeing the structure and nuances of the other language. I love pondering what resists translation. And above all, I love encountering the thing itself, the original text, dwelling in it, meditating on it — simply for its own sake.