Month: November 2013

Here’s a bit from The Theory of Property (which I have been working on some again), which discusses the relationship between Proudhon’s famous proposal to the provisional government and his developing theory. My famous proposition of July 31, for a tax of one-third on income, one-sixth to profit the farmer or tenant, one-sixth to profit the nation, should not even be considered as an application of my principles. It was a question, let us not forget, of immediate solutions, from day to day. In the crisis which struck all the forms of production, agriculture, manufacturing industry, commerce, income [rente] remained, […]

I’ve set up a poll over on the Working Translations blog, with five possible book-length translation projects, and would love to have folks pick the one that’s seems most interesting. All are to some extent already in-progress. I don’t necessarily promise to follow the recommendations, or promise not to substitute some similar project for the ones listed, but as I start to press towards publication of the next set of longer works, it would be nice to know in what instances I have a little extra push behind me.

I’ve now posted a complete working translation of Joseph Déjacque’s, “The Humanisphere.” There are a small number of problem sections, which I believe will be obvious. I hope, too, that much of what is really special about the work will be obvious as well. There is still a fair amount of editing, smoothing and annotating to be done before we can move forward with publication, first with the collaboration of another translator and then with the comrades at Little Black Cart. But it seems to me, based on my first quick revision of the text, that there is less of […]

I just finished the last paragraphs of a first-draft translation of Joseph Déjacque’s The Humanisphere, a major milestone in a process I started back in 2007, when I translated an excerpt, “Authority and Idleness,” that I at first didn’t even know was from a longer work. As I mentioned when I completed the draft of Part I, Déjacque’s style poses all sorts of interesting challenges, so there are a few stages yet to go before this goes to press, including handing it off to a comrade for his suggestions. But the hardest parts are finished, and I think the start-from-scratch […]

I’ve finally completed a first-draft translation of Part I of Joseph Déjacque’s The Humanisphere, which is not long, but has to be one of the most difficult translation tasks I’ve attempted. I decided to start from scratch, despite the existence of several previous attempts, because I encountered some obvious problems and missed references. If I had known quite how many difficulties I would encounter, I might not have taken the task on, but I’m glad I did.  Déjacque’s style is at once fascinating and maddening. Taking Scandal, as often as not, for his muse, he had a tendency to rant […]

There is another batch of Proudhon’s manuscripts, 1300+ pages worth, available on the Gallica site.

I’ve just finished a working translation of Ravachol’s “Memoirs,” which were dictated to his prison guards in 1892, and am taking the opportunity to also post two related documents, “The Hare and the Hunter,” the article for which Ravachol’s accomplice Georges Etiévant was tried and convicted in 1898, and a letter to the “Comrades of l’Endehors,” by Emile Henry, written in response to Malatesta’s “A Little Theory,” in the wake of Ravachol’s trials.

The Ville de Besançon, home of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, has an excellent digital archive site, which I just discovered includes scans of several of Proudhon’s manuscripts, including Pologne (source of The Theory of Property), Chronos, and notes on a number of the published works. We can hope that Economie and La propriété vaincue will eventually be available, but what is already there amounts to thousands of pages of material most of us have never had a chance to examine.