Month: September 2012

fiction

Han Ryner, “Love Victorious” (1917)

September 30, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Love Victorious For ten years, Pierre Vaumeil passed for mad. Previously, he had been a savant, but the death of a beloved women had, everyone in the little town maintained, destroyed his mind. Often we walked in the country. At times he spoke in a loud voice. Someone said to him: “You speak alone, M. Vaumeil?” He replied: “I am never alone.” And sometimes he told a story, perhaps symbolic, of which he listeners understood nothing. So his reputation as a madman was solidly established. The other day, he wandered according to his custom. A dozen of the curious followed […]
The Sex Question

Joshua King Ingalls, “The Home: Woman its True Owner” (1864)

September 30, 2012
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0″] [Joshua King Ingalls was best known as a land-reformer, but he was also involved with the struggle for women’s rights, and some of his most interesting writing happened when the two concerns came together. This essay, from The Friend of Progress, features that combination of concerns, and comes to a fascinating conclusion. Like many feminists of his day, including many of the most militant women, Ingalls associated women with the home and with nature (what he calls “the passive element”), and his argument here rises directly from that association. But while we might not think […]
From the Archives

Joshua King Ingalls, “Memory and Compensation” (1853)

September 29, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
  MEMORY AND COMPENSATION. BY J. K. INGALLS. How simple and how mysterious, how pleasing yet how awful, is this attribute of mind! A distinctive trait in man, its incipient manifestations are seen in all animate and even inanimate forms. In all nature it would seem, indeed, that man was the only thing which does not remember and conform to the great laws of being. The attachments and antipathies, the attractions and repulsions, are, from age to age, and from period to period, transmitted through all forms and kingdoms. The alkali and acid, though separated for centuries, forget not that […]
From the Archives

Psychometrical Portrait of Joshua King Ingalls (1853)

September 29, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] PSYCHOMETRICAL PORTRAIT. Given from impressions received while holding a sealed letter against her forehead. BY MRS. J. R. METTLER. J. K. Ingalls. This writer possesses a noble heart and mind; the character is open and revealed. By every expression and action this man will indicate something of the nobleness of his nature. Those who have known him long and intimately have found him a true man and faithful friend. He is extremely conscientious, has a great veneration for truth and goodness, and is never so happy as when the words […]
Contr'un

Working Translations blog

September 29, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I have been featuring the list of “working translations” on the sidebar of this blog for quite awhile now, and it has reached the point of being a bit ungainly, taking up space that perhaps would be better used improving the navigational tools. And from time to time I find that, even despite the list, people have a hard time finding some of the translations. In order to simplify access to the most current version of all of my translations, I’ve launched another specialized blog, Working Translations, which will simply contain current versions of all of my (roughly) finished work, […]
Paschal Grousset

Paschal Grousset (1844-1909)

September 29, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Works by Grousset: The Dream of an Irreconcilable (1869) [pdf] Paschal Grousset, Speech pronounced at the grave of Verdure (1873) [text] Speeches of Paschal Grousset and François Jourde on the Paris Commune (San Francisco, 1874) [text] How the Paris Commune Made the Republic (1879) [text] [pdf] Leaves from the Pocket-Book of a State Prisoner (1880-1881) [text] [pdf] I’ve been researching the life and works of Paschal Grousset, the radical journalist, Paris Communard and science fiction writer, whose odd little political utopia-in-a-newpaper, The Dream of an Irreconcilable I recently translated. It’s not everyday that I can indulge both my interest in […]
From the Archives

Paschal Grousset, “Leaves from the Pocket-Book of a State Prisoner” (1880-1881)

September 29, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
  LEAVES FROM THE POCKET-BOOK  OF A STATE PRISONER BY PASCHAL GROUSSET ____ I. L’HEURE DE L’ABSINTHE WELL nigh exhausted with fatigue, I had fallen asleep in an armchair. It was about four in the afternoon of a dull sultry 2d of June. For eight whole days and nights I had not stretched my limbs on a bed, and from the 23d of May I had lived the life of a salamander in the hell of hopeless battle and wholesale murder that Paris then was. Silence at last had succeeded the thunder of five hundred guns—the silence of the grave […]
From the Archives

Paschal Grousset, “How the Paris Commune Made the Republic” (1879)

September 29, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
  HOW THE PARIS COMMUNE MADE THE REPUBLIC. PASCHAL GROUSSET Ludwig Boerne said once, with reference to the revolution of ‘89, ‘One man only might have prevented it, namely Adam, supposing that he had been drowned previous to his wedding.’ The same remark probably holds good of any great popular movement, and would at all events be especially applicable to the revolution of March 1871. To account for its entangled causes and its dire fatality would be to recite the dark list of unmitigated sufferings which concur in making life a burden to such a large proportion of a so-called […]
Contr'un

Bolton Hall, “Separate From Sinners” (1899)

September 24, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I said: “I will separate myself from the world, O Lord. My soul is white, and I am weary of the sins of men.”  God said: “Your hands are red. How came your soul so white?”  I answered: “Lord, it is a bloody world; and generations of men have suffered from their sins. I have profited by their errors. Have I not seen how evil spots the soul? I have kept mine white.”  “Are all your brethren’s souls now white? ” said God.  I hung my head.  “Go back to your work”; said God. “you have learned in their pains, […]
Contr'un

Varieties of Proprietors: Lovers, Husbands, and Mother Hens

September 24, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
SIDEBAR Le propriétaire qui épargne empêche les autres de jouir sans jouir lui-même ; pour lui, ni possession ni propriété. Comme l’avare, il couve son trésor il n’en use pas. Qu’il en repaisse ses yeux, qu’il le couche avec lui, qu’il s’endorme en l’embrassant : il aura beau faire, les écus n’engendrent pas les écus. Point de propriété entière sans jouissance, point de jouissance sans consommation, point de consommation sans perte de la propriété : telle est l’inflexible nécessité dans laquelle le jugement de Dieu a placé le propriétaire. Malédiction sur la propriété! Back in April 2010, in a post […]