Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a book with an aura. His name, let’s admit it, is already a vibe; the title sets an extremely highbrow tone; the paragraphs are all numbered, promising a very impressive logical rigor, even if questions linger. (Is 6.2322 really exactly one level more pri­mary than 5.47321? What does “3.001” mean since there’s no 3.0 or 3.00?) And then the text itself has a kind of cryptic grandeur, awe-inspiring opacity, Olympian disregard for normal human understanding that gives us what we expect, what we want, from such an iconic philosopher. It’s an exciting challenge. A lot of the reason why the book has been so widely read in the century since its English publication in 1922, by philosophers and philosophy students and nonphilosophers alike, is how it makes its readers feel.

Several similarly forbidding-yet-thereby-thrilling books were published in English that same year—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; James Joyce’s Ulysses—but unlike those, the Tractatus was a translation, and the question arises how much of its style was a byproduct of bringing it into English. The book’s title did not come from Wittgenstein: it was an esoteric pun on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus from 1670, sug­gested by G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher who was the fourth most important figure in getting the book into English, after the credited translator C. K. Ogden, the actual translator Frank Ramsey, and Bertrand Rus­sell. Wittgenstein’s own German title was the far more hum­ble and straightforward Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, something like Essay on Logic and Philosophy.¹ Russell’s introduction, included in the first edition and every subsequent one until this one, firmly placed the book in the context of techni­cal academic philosophy. And the book’s language in English was simply not at all like Wittgenstein’s forceful, earnest, fluid, subtle German.

Yet the book in English is what it is; should it just stay that way? This same debate came up around the retranslation of yet another iconic book from 1922: C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He too completely changed the title (from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to the Shake­speare quote Remembrance of Things Past); he too created an English-language voice, lush and purple, that wasn’t the orig­inal’s. And yet his writing was what generations of English-language Proust readers knew and loved; his translation was modified slightly over the years but largely preserved; when Lydia Davis came along with a new translation faithful to other aspects of the original, such as Proust’s analytical rigor, many readers didn’t care whether or not her version was more like the real Proust—Scott Moncrieff’s Proust was the real thing as far as they were concerned.

The situation with the Tractatus is clearer and less debat­able, for two reasons. First, the earlier translations are more deeply flawed than Scott Moncrieff’s Proust ever was. Second and perhaps more important, Wittgenstein’s book is explic­itly about the relationships between language and thought, between language and the world, making it imperative to get these relationships right in translation. And so I have retranslated the book, paying special attention to where the assumptions of typical academic philosophy translation would lead us away from expressing Wittgenstein’s thought in English. Implicitly, I am making the case for a certain kind of approach that is generally called “literary”—attentive to emotional nuances, subtle connotations, and expressive power—even when translating rigorous philosophical texts.

***

Consider nouns and verbs. Which does Wittgenstein privilege? Which make up the world? A first answer might well be: Neither, you mean “objects and actions”; nouns and verbs are parts of language, not parts of the world. And yet the world is in language, or is language—the two universes correspond, somehow—to know a language is to know a world. A child learning what the words “book” and “sit in a chair” mean is also beginning to learn what books are, and how to sit in chairs.

Of course the categories “noun” and “verb” are not God-given truths that function identically in every human language. I think it is important to establish the general point here before turning to any of Wittgenstein’s terminology. A German dictionary will tell you that a word is a noun, but it won’t tell you how Ger­man nouns work. In German, you typically say “I have hun­ger,” in English “I’m hungry.” Everyone knows not to translate Ich habe Hunger (or likewise J’ai faim from French) as “I have hunger,” but not everyone generalizes from there to the fact that parts of speech function differently in different languages.

German nouns can be unproblematically abstract, and such abstractions are often used with action verbs; English wants adjectives and active subjects. In German one might naturally say, “A large fear rose up within me,” while in English this means “I started to get really scared” (because I am a subject with emotions; scared is how people feel; fear isn’t an object that is big or small, inside me like a tumor, and rising up or mov­ing around in any other way). In German, nouns are vigorous, usually compounded together with built-in prepositional spa­tiality, while the verbs are often generic: stehen, gehen, stellen, machen, haben (“stand,” “go,” “put,” “make” or “do,” “have”) and their numerous compounds. In English, though, verbs and adjectives are where the action is; nouns on their own are static. A good translation from German has to denounify it. Thomas Mann has a character say at one point: “The independence and self-sufficiency of my imagination was additionally delightful,” using three nouns, two of them expressing an intangible qual­ity or feeling; fully in English, what he means is that “Rely­ing entirely on my imagination was even more enjoyable” (one noun). In tighter American English, though this translation wouldn’t be suitable coming from Mann’s scattered, wordy nar­rator: “Just making stuff up is even better.”

The German reliance on nouns is why English translations of German philosophy can be so turgid: complicated nouns with bland or impersonal verbs don’t capture in English the precision and intensity of the German, they clog it up and slow it down. You don’t want to say in English that an object “has a usefulness-nature that allows it to be . . . ,” you want to say “people use it to . . . ,” with a human subject and active main verb (“people use it,” not “it has a quality”). When a writer like Marx puts his complicated neologistic compound nouns into play—“The money-form of the commodity confronts the commodity-form of the worker’s labor” or what have you—it has life and a playful, exciting energy in German, from the nouns; the generic verb stehen plus preposition (steht gegenüber, “confronts” or “stands facing”), which Marx repeats over and over again in Capital, produces in German a kind of quiver­ing equilibrium between these energies. In English it sounds like the world’s worst cocktail party: all these stiff creatures standing around not talking to one another. But the temptation among academic philosophy translators is to be extra-literal about the nouns, especially in crucial moments of the German, precisely where the English most needs verbal energy.

Turning now to Wittgenstein, we find the Tractatus full of sentences like “The possibility of a state of affairs is contained in a proposition about that state of affairs.” This “possibility” is expressed as a noun—compare Mann’s “independence” and “self-sufficiency”—but it doesn’t belong as a noun in English: the sentence means “You can’t have a proposition without the state of affairs it describes being possible.” In other words, the proposition implies or presupposes that what it states is possible, even if it turns out not to be actually true. To avoid the direc­tionality of either “implies” (a proposition yields a possibility) or “presupposes” (the possibility yields the proposition), I use the word “entails”: “A proposition entails that the state of affairs it describes is possible.”

Note that we have also eliminated, along with the abstract noun “possibility,” the language of being “included in” or “contained in” a proposition: that is not how the English lan­guage conceptualizes things (cf. “a large fear inside me”). Where the German language says “inside” or “contained in,” this often means in English something logical or conceptual, not spatial: something is inherent in the proposition, not con­tained inside it like a hat in a hatbox. The problem of mis­leadingly spatial formulations spreads to other areas of the Tractatus as well, for instance where Wittgenstein talks about the “internal” and “external” properties of an object. The for­mer are not literally inside the interior of the object: he means (the German language means) that they are “inherent” or “intrinsic” to the object, and that is often how I translate it, although I do keep “external” for the other kind of property, which is contingent and accidental. (An object’s weight, for instance, isn’t literally on the outside of the object, yet I think it is clear enough in English to call it “an external property” as opposed to “inherent” or “intrinsic.”) Another instance of the same problem concerns Wittgenstein’s conception of “log­ical space,” which has facts “in” it. One option would be to translate this as “the logical realm” or “realm of logic,” but he does mean it spatially, so I decided to put “space” in scare quotes (e.g., 1.13: “Facts in logical ‘space’ are the world”), because in English to call this mode of existence a “space” is metaphorical.

Even the most concrete noun doesn’t remain the same in dif­ferent languages. The French-speaking child learning what the word livre means might seem to be learning what a book is—we are tempted to say that it is “the same object”—but in fact a book is not a livre. Jacques Barzun, discussing the first line of a sonnet by Mallarmé, “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres,” elaborates:

The “sadness of the flesh” gets by, but “I have read all the books” totally lacks the evocative power of the original; as an image it is inert. An approximation would be: “and all knowledge is stale.” The reason why the literal sense fails to convey this feeling lies in the aura of livres; the word is weightier, more charged with reverence than books. In “I’ve read all the books,” one hears a schoolboy, not a philosopher.²

Such nuances aren’t only a matter of poetry. The same physical object in space is not the same elemental thing in different lan­guages, however similar we might think the things would look to a hypothetical speaker-of-no-language.

This perspective is absent from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, although there do seem to be glimmers of recog­nition toward the end, e.g., “The world of a happy person and the world of an unhappy person are different” (6.43). So surely the world of a French speaker is different from the world of an English speaker, filled with different facts about different things. On the whole, though, Wittgenstein’s book describes the world as made up of independent elemental units and describes language as depicting that world with independent, language-neutral, elemental names for the things and elemental words for the relations among them.

The Tractatus mentions translation in the literal sense only twice. In 4.025: “The translation of one language into another is a process not of translating a proposition from one language into another, but of translating only the parts of the proposi­tion. (And the dictionary translates not only nouns but also verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, etc., and treats them all the same way.)” And in 4.243 there is the same emphasis on indi­vidual words: “If I know the meaning of, say, an English word and a German word that means the same thing, it is impos­sible for me not to know that they mean the same thing; it is impossible for me to be unable to translate one into the other.” This is a view of languages as interchangeable collections of labels. It naturally suggests a view of translation where every word in a book, especially every noun, must always and only be translated by a single, consistent word in the other language—which is not actually how language and translation work, despite all the critics and reviewers who seem to think that this requirement is appropriate. And while Wittgenstein doesn’t quite say that every English word has its German counter­part and vice versa, he certainly doesn’t account for how lan­guages construct their images of the world in different ways. We can’t actually translate German to English by replacing every “Möglichkeit” with “possibility” and leaving it at that: a more thoroughgoing—Wittgenstein and German would say “internal”—transformation is necessary.

Wittgenstein’s later Philosophical Investigations famously opens with a passage from St. Augustine that presents a “par­ticular picture of the essence of human language . . : the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.— — In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a mean­ing. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (§1). That certainly sounds a lot like the Tractatus. He then immediately and for the rest of the book shows the flaws in this picture. As for translating only indi­vidual words, the later Wittgenstein sweeps away all the non­sense from the Tractatus quoted in my previous paragraph with a single parenthetical anecdote: “A French politician once wrote that a special feature of the French language is that French words come in the order we think them in” (Philosophical Investiga­tions, §336). The laughable arrogance of this French politician is the same as that of the younger Austrian philosopher who seemed to believe that every language in the world is German with other words swapped in.

As I have already suggested, the substance of Wittgenstein’s theories in the Tractatus is intimately tied to a vision of lan­guage that, among other problems, tends to produce bad translations. This has two important consequences for the book.

First, the English translation of the Tractatus credited to C. K. Ogden and approved by Wittgenstein is inadequate. Per­haps in the grip of Wittgenstein’s model of language, Ogden (or Frank Ramsey) does indeed, as it were, replace every “Möglichkeit” with “possibil­ity” and leave it at that. The translation very often preserves the incessant nominalization, passive syntax, and inverted word order that are fine in German but confusing and bad writ­ing in English:

Ogden (3.1): In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses.

3.1: A thought is expressed, and made perceivable by the senses, in a proposition.

Ogden (3.13): To the proposition belongs every­thing which belongs to the projection.

3.13: Everything that is part of the projection is part of the proposition.

Ogden (4.0641): The denying proposition deter­mines a logical place other than does the proposition denied.

4.0641: The negating proposition defines a logical place that is different from the negated proposition’s.

Ogden (4.466): To no logical combination corre­sponds no combination of the objects.

4.466: There is no logical combination to which no combination of objects corresponds.

Ogden (5.3): According to the nature of truth-operations, in the same way as out of elemen­tary propositions arise their truth-functions, from truth-functions arises a new one.

5.3: Elementary propositions produce truth-functions and truth-functions produce a new truth-function in the same way: this is the nature of truth-operations.

Ogden’s sentences are, with a few exceptions, grammatically correct in English, but they have not been fully translated.

Second, a translation that truly tries to express the ideas of the Tractatus in English will express different ideas. The mere fact that thoughts or propositions in English are not the same as the “same” thoughts or propositions in German is a useful data point, one that itself argues against some of the claims in the Tractatus. At the same time, getting the ideas more fully into English forms helps mitigate what can feel like the inco­herence or flat-out falsity of some of these ideas in the earlier, still halfway German version.

For instance, take the so-called “picture theory” in the Trac­tatus, according to which a thought or proposition is a “picture” of a fact or state of affairs in the world. (If the proposition is false, if it doesn’t happen to describe how the world actually is, then the proposition still depicts what the world would be like if the proposition were true.) The German word for “picture” is Bild, which as usual has a certain amount of verbal dynamism in it: bilden is the verb “to form, to construct, to educate, to cultivate, to fashion.” Culture, the civilized state of the educated person who has been transformed by their education, is Bildung. While a “picture” in English suggests something static, representa­tional, and photorealistic—there are objectively more and less accurate “pictures” of things—a Bild suggests the end product of a process of shaping and creating: an “image.” There is not a right or wrong, necessarily better or worse Bild, and a Bild is not necessarily visual (Wittgenstein mentions musical scores, records, and sound waves as “pictures” of music [4.011–4.0141]; in English a score as a “picture of the music” kind of works, but calling sound waves a “picture” of music seems incoherent).

Language as an “image” of the facts of the world—dynamic, subjective, creative—makes a lot more sense on the face of it (in English) than sentences as “pictures” that look like facts. An “image theory of language” would be different from a “picture theory of language.” What Wittgenstein is arguing for in Ger­man is something in between these two English formulations, but since that thing has consistently been known as a “picture the­ory of language,” I did not in the end retranslate Bild as “image” throughout. As with facts “in” logical “space,” the idea that doesn’t make as much sense in English is ultimately what Wittgenstein seems to be saying. I usually keep Bild as “picture” (especially in, e.g., 6.342, where he is describing a surface with a static, black-and-white pattern on it) and translate the verb abbilden as “depict,” but I sometimes use “image” (e.g., in 2.171: “An image can depict every reality that shares its form”) to pull the translation a bit closer to where the German lands.

I want to insist on one point, given the prevalent idea that the English which Wittgenstein saw and approved is his—that the Ogden version is the book Wittgenstein himself wrote. The fact that Wittgenstein approved the translation of Bild as “picture” doesn’t mean that “picture” is what he was really saying: his English wasn’t good enough to make that decision. Any literary translator of living authors into a widely known language like English will have had the experience of an author who knows the translating language more or less well trying to meddle in the translation and insist on saying things a certain way, despite it often being not quite right. If the author has repeated a term, for instance, they will have had a powerful lived experience of using “the same word” each time; they are likely to underesti­mate the extent to which words in the other language create a kind of Venn diagram with the original word (cf. “book” and “livre”), and they will want the same English word for a usage of the original word in the nonoverlapping sliver of its circle (cf. “I have read all the books”). The translator has to insist on his or her feel for the translating language; in the end, the author isn’t writing a book in English, the translator into English is writing a book in English. For all of Wittgenstein’s stature and genius, I nonetheless include him among this perfectly ordi­nary class of not fully bilingual authors, whose input into the translation is not gospel and whose judgment of a translation is often plain wrong. Meanwhile, Ogden and the book’s other translators were operating in an academic framework of trans­lation that didn’t attend to the different ways English and Ger­man work—for instance, the different amounts of dynamism in a Bild and a picture. Decades of accrued tradition, of philosophy professors and their students grappling with the English of the Ogden version and building arguments and interpretations upon it, don’t change these facts, although of course they do make it harder to accept that the existing translation is flawed.

I have just used one more key word of the Tractatus which has a complex interrelation of nominal and verbal qualities: “facts,” in German Tatsachen. There are two words for “thing” in German: Ding (the cognate word, emphasizing a thing’s concrete physical existence as an object) and Sache (somewhat more abstract, meaning a physical thing but also stuff, issues, business, as in the English phrases “take care of things” and “the thing is . . .”). Tat is a noun form of the verb tun, “to do, to act,” meaning the result of that verb: a Tat is a done deed, an action; the Tatort (Ort = “place”) is the “scene of the crime”; in Tractatus 4.112, where Wittgenstein says that philosophy is an activity, the German word is Tätigkeit. So a Tatsache is an “action-thing,” as it were: its English definition is indeed “fact,” but it is more verb-related in German than our flat, empirical, declarative facts (“Just the facts, Ma’am”). Right at the start of the book, Wittgenstein distinguishes between Tatsachen and Sachen, saying the world is made of facts, not things—a Tatsache is thus not a thing, not just a noun. At one point, Wittgenstein mentions “a mathematical fact” in the more flat, static sense, and there he uses the word Faktum, not Tatsache (5.154). Alle möglichen Tatsachen is closer to “every­thing that can possibly happen” than to “all possible facts.”³

The book as a whole is confusing about Tatsachen because Wittgenstein says both that the world is made up of Tatsachen (1.1), and that a picture or a sentence is a Tatsache (2.141, 3.143). His Tatsache both is reality and is about reality. To some extent this is true in English, too: “My bedroom has two windows” is a fact, and my bedroom having two windows is a fact. The proposition both is a fact and states a fact: the fact is both what is asserted and also the assertion itself. Still, “how things are is a fact” makes sense in English, in a way that “a picture of how things are is a fact” does not. A Wittgensteinian image or sentence is more like a statement of fact. I solve this prob­lem by sometimes translating “ist eine Tatsache” (“is a fact”) as “states a fact”: “The picture states a fact” (2.141). Varying the verb stays truer to what Wittgenstein means by the rela­tionship between world and picture than it would be to say in English that a picture is a fact.

Lastly, there is the German Sachverhalt, another way of put­ting Sachen into action. The verb verhalten, used several times in verb form in the book, means “to behave, to conduct oneself, to adopt a stance,” along with other meanings not relevant here, so a Sachverhalt is the way things stand toward one another—their interrelations. Wittgenstein describes in 2.031 how objects in a “Sachverhalt” “verhalten” themselves to one another: close to a tautology in German, I translate the sentence as “Objects in a given state of affairs stand in certain specific relations to one another.” Ogden’s translation of Sachverhalt as “atomic fact” (“In the atomic fact the objects are combined in a definite way”) was one of his most confusing choices, even aside from the issue that, unbeknownst to him, the term would sound after 1945 like it’s about nuclear weapons: we would now avoid the atomic-age connotation by saying “elemental,” “primary,” “basic,” “indissoluble,” or the like. Ogden must have chosen this translation because Wittgenstein says that Sachverhalte are independent of one another, but Wittgenstein also says, for example in the sentence just quoted, that Sachverhalte are com­binations of objects, so “atomic fact” is totally misleading. It is also not what the German word says or means: no aspect of Sachverhalt suggests anything like “primary” or “elemental.” I like the translation “state of affairs” because it captures the hybrid singular/plural nature of a Sachverhalt: various things combined into one circumstance. Wittgenstein also uses the term Sachlage (literally “how things lie”) as a loose synonym for Sachverhalt; there is no analytical distinction in the book between a Sachverhalt and a Sachlage. I translate Sachlage as “situation” (i.e., “how things are situated, how things sit”), and use “circumstance” (how things “stand around”) for either German word where it’s clearer.

Overall, the language of my new translation makes more sense than the Ogden version.⁴ Such normalcy might be off-putting to anyone who knows and loves the Tractatus in English already, but this is indeed how Wittgenstein originally sounded, even the Wittgenstein of much of the Tractatus. Anyone who wants to defend the earlier translation of, for instance, the famous last line of the book—“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—will have to defend the kinds of passive, inverted, and nominalized constructions quoted above.⁵ In Ger­man the sentence is normal, unlike “whereof” and “thereof” and “one” in today’s English. Wittgenstein first made this point even more directly in his 1916 notebooks—“What cannot be said, cannot be said!” [“Was sich nicht sagen läßt, läßt sich nicht sagen!”]⁶—but he did revise the line to be a bit more stately as the conclusion to his book. Since the earlier translation is so well known, I felt the need to keep the inverted word order in my translation, rather than translating the sentence more directly as “We must not talk about what cannot be spoken of” or “We mustn’t try to say what cannot be said.” But no “whereof . . . thereof” or “About that which one cannot speak of one must . . .” And so: “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent.”

The equally iconic first line of Ogden’s version of the book—“The world is everything that is the case”—is even more straightforward in German, lacking any formality, legal con­notations (a court case), and sense of spatial enclosure (like a suitcase). The German der Fall is related to the verb fallen (“to fall”) and the noun Zufall (chance, or accident: how things “fall out” or “turn out”); also to the zerfällt (“to fall apart, crumble into, decompose, molder”) of 1.2 (“The world as a whole is broken into individual facts,” previously translated as “The world divides into facts”). Something that is der Fall is a contingent result of things that have happened. The world is everything that happens to be the way it is but could have been otherwise. I was tempted, in fact, to translate the first line of the book as “The world is everything that happens.” (Is the world made up of nouns or verbs?) But that seemed to err a little too far in the other direction. The important point is that Wittgenstein was not using any arcane or philosophical vocabulary here. When an Austrian says “Es ist der Fall, dass ich krank bin” (“It is der Fall that I am sick”), they do not mean “It is the case that I am sick,” they mean “Yup, I’m sick,” in the sense of: In theory I might have managed to avoid it—I was hoping I wasn’t sick—but, as it turns out, I did indeed get sick. That’s just how it is. And that is how I translated it—“The world is everything there is”—occasionally deploying “is the case” or “happens to be the case” later in the book.

The terminology I was least able to clear up in appropriately colloquial fashion is that around “meaning”: the German nouns Sinn and Bedeutung and their related adjectives and verbs. This is because of interference from another German-language phi­losopher’s work. Gottlob Frege, whom Wittgenstein often refers to and engages with in the Tractatus, drew a famous distinc­tion between Sinn and Bedeutung in his influential 1892 essay, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung”: these are two different ways to talk about meaning, translated into English as “sense” and “refer­ence.” Sentences about fictional characters, or about “the fourth item on a list” when the list has three items, can be meaningful (non-nonsensical, comprehensible) without meaning anything (referring to any actual thing); in Frege’s terms, such a name or phrase has Sinn or “sense” but no Bedeutung or “referent.” Saying a sentence is nonsensical (or, in the typically German noun-heavy phrasing, that it “has no sense”) is a different way of saying it’s meaningless than saying it doesn’t refer to any­thing (“has no referent”), and Wittgenstein sometimes uses this distinction while at other times he seems to be calling a word or proposition “meaningless” or talking about what it “means” more generally, which in German is that same word, Bedeu­tung. The famous paragraph 5.6—“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”—uses the verb bedeuten, so if Wittgenstein has Frege’s distinction in mind at that moment, he is actually saying that the limits of my language refer to the limits of my world. I believe he is indeed saying that: these are two names for the same thing, referring to the same limits. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be any other sense the English verb “mean” might suggest here, so it seems all right to keep the more direct translation. Often, though, where I have wanted to use the general translation “meaningless” or “means anything,” rather than stiff or wordy options such as “has a sense,” “is non-nonsensical,” or “doesn’t refer to anything,” the more specific alternative translation seemed clarifying; I have occasionally resorted to adding it in parentheses.

Despite such instances of technical philosophical language, the Wittgenstein in this version of the Tractatus speaks more normally and approachably on the whole—a bit closer to the later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations—and it is worth giving English-language readers access to this writer. The literary qualities of the book, which have been so important to a century of its readers, as well as the book’s actual argu­ment, have not been well served by translations remaining too firmly in the grip of how the German language operates. For all its differences from earlier translations, the version of Witt­genstein I present here isn’t trying to reinvent him, merely to offer a better picture of what is actually the case, laying out his ideas as they need to be said and shown in English.

^{1. Hyphenated double adjectives are common in German, unlike in English, and tend to mean both parts rather than a fusion or combination—Switzerland has a “rot-weiss” flag, which means “red and white,” not pink—so literal translations of the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhand­lung as something like Logical-Philosophical Treatise are misleading. ↩}

^{2. Jacques Barzun, An Essay on French Verse: For Readers of English Poetry (New Directions, 1991), 72. Daniel Hahn discusses more extensively the different associations of book (rhymes with crook and nook; visually rhymes with boo and moon and food; also means make a reservation) and livre (like freedom in the form of libre; weight and heavy money, livre; lips, lèvres; rhymes with drunk, ivre) in Catching “Fire”: A Translation Diary (Charco, 2022), 6–7. The point is not only that “book” and “livre” are different words that work differently, but that books are not livres and livres are not books. ↩}

^{3. The German dictionary Meyers Konversationslexikon from Wittgen­stein’s time defines Tatsache as (in my translation): “the result in general of any occurrence, thus any incident or event whether caused by the laws of nature or brought about by a human act of will. In law, T. is taken to mean anything that’s happened which serves as the basis for a juridical consequence, whether it be the gain or loss or change of rights or legal status.” This definition emphasizes the verbal, or resulting-from-verbal, nature of the Tatsache. ↩}

^{4. The other widely used translation of the Tractatus, by David Pears and Brian McGuinness, also makes more sense—it is a big improvement in that it straightens out Ogden’s roundabout sentences, and replaces “atomic facts” with “states of affairs”—but it does little to address the other issues I’ve discussed here: a Bild in that translation is always sim­ply a picture, a Möglichkeit is almost always “a possibility,” Tatsachen are just the facts, the passive German sentences tend to be kept pas­sive in English, and the whole thing sounds academic in general. One scholar tells a revealing anecdote about either Pears or McGuinness, he doesn’t say who: “In personal communication, one of the translators remarked to me about Wittgenstein’s use of terminology: ‘We tortured it to reach some degree of consistency.’ ” The scholar continues: “This translation ‘normalized’ a number of other features of the book also and thus made it look more like a textbook conforming to contemporary aca­demic usage.” Wittgenstein, for his part, “points out [in letters to Ogden] that he is using mostly everyday vocabulary that should be rendered by English everyday vocabulary. He introduces rather different phrasings in his suggestions for improvement of the translation and he nowhere shows any concern about preserving any kind of [consistent] terminol­ogy.” (Wolfgang Kienzler, “Reading the Tractatus from the Beginning: How to Say Everything Clearly in Three Words,” 2008, rev. 2011, p. 9; www.philosophie.uni-jena.de/philmedia/institut-fuer-philosophie/ressourcen-zu-personen/wolfgang-kienzler/kienzler-reading-the-tractatus.pdf.) My translation does not try to impose consistency where there isn’t any in the German. ↩}

^{5. Ogden’s “be silent” also subtly misrepresents the German. In German what we must do is “schweigen,” a verb that implies a certain intentional­ity: it means something like “to choose to say nothing; to stay quiet.” An inanimate object can’t schweigen, only a person, stealthy animal, or other living force such as Nature or the forest can schweigen. Wittgenstein is not saying that we inevitably are silent, like a lump of stone, but that we must keep silent, we mustn’t try to talk about certain things (only an attempt since, literally, they cannot be spoken of). ↩}

^{6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. and tr. Mar­jorie Perloff (Liveright, 2022), 13; when the line appears in the text, on pp. 178–79, the underlining is mistakenly omitted.↩}