Letter to the Committee of the Library of Classics of Philosophy written 21.08.1952

Editorial Committee of the LCP          c                   c            c               In Krakow, 8/21/1952
at Polish Scientific Publishers PWN
dział: filozofia niemiecka
  c    L 42/52

WARSAW, Foksal 17.

Please find attached herewith the rest of the final revision of /Wartenberg’s/ translation of Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”, pp. 58-92, 2 copies.
When the item goes into print, please send me the print of the first correction and the first correction after typesetting /so I can insert page numbers into the index/.
I have to point out that the translation of the “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” was only to be revised, not remade by me. Namely, what was to be changed was only what was either inconsistent with the original or was a clear linguistic error /e.g. German syntax/, or, finally, what caused difficulties in understanding due to being too faithful to the original; however, everything else, in particular both the terminology and the properties of the language used by the translator /Wartenberg/, were to be left unchanged, and specifically no changes were to be made according to the individual language preferences of the proofreader or the editor. This is what the proofreader failed to remember, introducing a lot of completely unnecessary corrections /360 unnecessary or faulty corrections on 55 pages of text/, and worse yet, they proposed a lot of changes that would cost the translation its faithfulness to the original. It is completely unacceptable to suggest changes in the translation without checking with the original whether they would not result in a significant deviation from the thought in and inconsistencies with the source text. I also cannot ignore the fact that the proofreader made a number of gross grammatical errors /e.g. he constantly corrected “lie”, changing it into “lye”, the adverb “there” into “their” – the plural possessive pronoun/.

               My deepest respect