Year: 2016

fiction

Louise Michel, “The Clavier of My Over-Dream” (1867)

July 4, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_half padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Clavier of My Over-Dream A few days ago, I slept in a lovely dream. I was free, in a boundless space, where I ascended as easily as one follows the paths of our valleys. I found myself in a monument, so vast that its edges seemed like a distant horizon. Silence filled the vaults, but I sensed their incredible resonance. I sat down at an instrument whose keyboard included so many rising and so many descending notes, that it must include many sounds indistinguishable to the human ear. When I put my hands on […]
Working Translations

Louise Michel, “Today or Tomorrow” (1893)

July 4, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1half] Today or Tomorrow. Everything is good that strikes or stings. [1] So much the better if these bandits have finished their work. The scaffold has started the party, and the fire will beat its wings over the apotheosis. The blood of Ravachol splashes, from his false collar to his cuffs, the cold man of the Élysée. The Élysée! That’s the spot that draws the looks! From it the grand finale, the final bouquet will rise into the air, and the cross of Our Lady of the Slaughter will be the streetlamp. [2] The sun has risen red in the […]
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 […]
Saint Ravachol

The Anti-Anarchist Bomb-proof Clockwork Substitute Ruler (1898)

June 30, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Punch (October 29, 1898): 203. IN the gallery of the Fine-Art Society may be seen a number of drawings made in Spain by Mr. E. George, the able architectural etcher and draughtsman. As might be anticipated, they are almost entirely architectural. They are brilliant and broad, limpid in their tones and pure in their tints, but somewhat hard and over-defined even for sunlit Spain. The most artistic of them seem to be No. 10, ‘The City Gate, Salamanca’; ‘A Convent, Salamanca’ (17); ‘San Pedro, and Old Houses, Vitoria’ (21); and ‘The Golden Tower, Seville ’ (44). In the same place […]
Contr'un

One for the road?

June 29, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m contemplating a research “tour” in the fall, gathering up some missing pieces for various current projects and surveying the possibilities for some longer-term work. By that time, I will have at least Anarchy and the Sex Question to promote—and my publisher would certainly like me to take the opportunity. But as I have been thinking about what I really have to offer in the way of presentations that might themselves be taken out on tour, it strikes me that telling folks about what Emma Goldman is going to tell them in a book we hope they’ll buy might not […]
Bakunin Library

The Three Lives of “God and the State”

June 29, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
I have been thinking about “God and the State” in terms of a choice between two texts: the fragment, “God and the State,” and the incomplete work from which it was drawn, “The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.” This is the choice proposed by James Guillaume, when he suggested that the publication of the latter should be the occasion for no longer publishing in the former. But, if Guillaume’s suspicions were correct and Reclus and Cafiero knew what they were publishing, and engaged in a bit of “literary artifice” when they presented it as a fragment, what we have […]
fiction

Leon de Tinseau, “A Beautiful Nihilist” (fiction, 1892)

June 27, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
A BEAUTIFUL NIHILIST. From the French of Leon de Tinseau; V.E.T., Chateau Bange, Bordeaux. In 187-, somewhat before the tragic death of the least Czar, one of the most notable men of the Russian Empire was Prince Michael ——-, whose family name, an illustrious one, reasons of the highest importance forbid our giving. During a visit to France after the war, while at one of the receptions of the Princesse Lise, he met that superb daughter of General de Contremont, whom the Parisian world, springing to life again from its ashes, knew already as “la belle Madeleine,” a girl as […]