Month: July 2016

Working Translations

Louise Michel, “The Claque-Dents,” Ch. I

July 4, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Prologue] I A whole unhinged crowd jostled, for one dizzy day, at the division of spoils, accomplished at the Hôtel des Ventes, of the furniture of Lucrèce Milot, a madwoman of the best class, now tragically dead. The distracted, daft, and jaded vied for the smallest of trinkets. A blood-soaked rag was sold for the price of an objet d’art. Those things touched by the crime were worth their weight in human folly. Little Muscadet had spent the last bits of his wife’s dowry there; young Madulphe had taken “an enormous toll” on his expectations, his parents not being very […]
Working Translations

Louise Michel, “The Claque-Dents”

July 4, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CLAQUE-DENTS [ Claque-dents: the chatter of teeth in unheated rooms, the wretches who live there, the hovels and brothels where they live, the vampires in human guise who keep them there in order to drain the life from them, the clank of gold and, finally, the gnashing of teeth in the death throes. The word itself chatters. How would we choose just one meaning, when all of these, together with the event they signal—the final exhaustion of the Old World—are so obviously the composite protagonist of Louise Michel’s tale? ] [one_half padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The claque-dents: these are the death […]
announcements

New home for Working Translations

July 4, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Most of my old blogs have been integrated into the new Libertarian Labyrinth site over the last couple of years, but my translations have remained scattered in various places. I’m finally starting to remedy that situation, with the launch of a new Working Translations site, attached to the Labyrinth archive. The Index page there contains a recently updated list of translations archived throughout the Labyrinth, and the blog itself features side-by-side dual-language presentations of selected works. Gradually, I’ll revise everything and pair it with the text in the original language. So if you are here and not there, you are […]
Bakunin Library

An appealing, but apocryphal tale

July 1, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
“So you see those fellows yonder?” said a man to me in a Russian village in 1871, pointing to a group of sallow, bearded, low-browed peasants, who were slouching past in their ragged frocks of sheepskin. “These are the men who carry all Russia on their backs, and the moment they find out how much they have to bear, down we all go together; but they endure it because they don’t know how ill off they are!” Few more striking truths have ever been uttered, and the utterer could hardly be accused of speaking without experience, for he was no […]