Now here's the Ashton translation:
> "The identity of the
> self and its alienation accompany each other from the very beginning;
> whence the bad romanticism of the concept of alienation in the first
> place. A precondition of freedom, identity is at one and the same time
> also and immediately the principle of determinism." (_Negative
> Dialectics_)
Oh, dear. No sentence is too small for Ashton to mangle. The passage reads, literally:
"The identity of the self and self-alienation accompany each other from the very beginning; that is why the concept of self-alienation is bad Romanticism. The precondition of freedom, identity is at the same time immediately the principle of determinism."
Note the subtle Adornic wordplay which gets lost by Ashton; self vs. self-alienation (not "its alienation", as if the self has this character flaw called alienation, but merely the objective fact of self-alienation), plus the compact "identity is... the principle", which jars the reader, invoking precisely the dialectical shock Adorno wants to communicate; Ashton bogs down in extraneous qualifiers. Ugh.
It's not that I'm picky, it's that I've been writing my dissertation on Adorno for months now. You don't want to even know about some of Ashton's real howlers, some of which achieve a truly cosmic zen of awfulness. The philosophically specific meaning really is in the tiniest crevices and unlooked-for spaces of Adorno's text. God help the English-speaking Left if we don't get a crackerjack translation of the thing out there soon...
-- Dennis