Yesterday, I translated from Yiddish a passage from a yizkor book¹ for the shetl of Kapresht. I found the passage by searching Jochre (the Yiddish Book Center OCR’d database, which is totally amazing) for שוויצבאָד (shvitsbod), the Yiddish for “sweat bath” or sauna/banya.

The passage itself, about the local bathhouse, is incredible and I recommend checking out my translation.

I read the passage line-by-line the night before with my girlfriend Lucy. While I was translating, I went back and forth between the text, EnglishYiddishDictionary.com, Google, and ChatGPT. Sometimes, I used ChatGPT to do a rough translation of a paragraph and then went back and read carefully.

Often, ChatGPT did a respectable job. It missed some things – mistranslated or skipped over words – but all in all, pretty solid. I found myself surprised that I didn’t really mind how well it did. I didn’t feel it in my ego, or regret over having spent so much time learning Yiddish only to be outdone by a computer.

Later, reflecting on it, I realized it was because the actual “product” of an English translation, was not super important to me. What was important was the experience of reading Yiddish.

That is, the actual sensual experience of reading and comprehending the Yiddish words, perceiving my connection to a historical lineage of shvitzers, sharing it with Lucy.

But of course! Why should I have thought otherwise? The idea that it is only the summation of a process into a final result – that the internal aspects of a process are irrelevant, a “black-box” conception of things – is the sine-qua-non of the capitalist orientation towards the world.

It doesn’t matter how you bring a good to market: by hook or by crook, destroying a forest, squeezing workers until they are like deflated beach-balls, turning a home-cooked meal (infused with care, ingenuity, love) into Soylent. All that matters (to a first approximation) is: its price! Which itself is a proxy for how much labor went into this thing.

For the most part, capital doesn’t even care what it’s producing. It could be time-honored objects like plates or coats, or novelties like Labubus or boba. From that perspective, all that matters to capital (again to a first approximation) is the rate of profit it can derive from the production and sale of a given thing. This is the tendency in capital to homogenize the world: to turn everything into gray goo basically, an exponentially growing congealment of labor-time into commodities. Ideally with as few irregularities, as little friction, as smooth an exponential increase as possible. All that matters is the mere abstraction of the exponential accumulation of labor time. Its physical embodiment is held to be as irrelevant as one can (modulo the imposition of the social and physical world (the closing of the strait of Hormuz, strikes, weather, crop failures, etc.)

In this sense, reading something in the original language – especially in the light of fairly adequate translation machines – is a rejection of this idea. Yes, I could read the passage in English. But reading English is just not the same as Yiddish. It is literally concretely distinct. Even ignoring impossible to translate words, there is still a world of concrete difference. The syntax is different, the sounds are different, the letters are different, the associations I have with both its form and its content are different. Such things are often held to be superficialities and irrelevant. But they really are not. We ere not abstract beings, we are concrete ones.