Month: July 2019

Working Translations

Proposal for an Anarchist Encyclopedia in 1895

July 22, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
The work of an Anarchist Encyclopedia appearing indispensable to some comrades, who think that such a document would serve a useful purpose, for every person could consult there the expressions, terms and subjects that constantly figure in the texts of all the writers, which escape for the moment those who know, and would instruct those who do not yet and and who desire to learn.

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Contr'un

Anarchist History: No End of Beginnings

July 21, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
After a couple of decades in the wilderness of history, in search of the elusive headwaters of the anarchist tradition, you stop beside some particularly active mountain spring and think that, while no serious seeker would every claim a single source for that tradition, you’ve probably been in the right neighborhood for some time now. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about the return trip.

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E. Armand

Notes on “The Anarchist Individualist Initiation”

July 17, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
My dear Armand, your book is a book of ideas, which is why those who wish to reign by the sword or by the power of their fists do not value it. I, preserving the ideal of my younger years, I like its dawn-air, which breaks as if to illuminate the helpless vessels that the surf carries off… And, fleeing the ebb of human stupidity, endlessly multiplied, how many sailors lost on the granite rocks, how many tormented minds and hearts full of sorrow, will one day to “put in at the port,” if by you aid their “compass” once again finds the north!

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Working Translations

Le Rétif (Victor Serge), “To Be and to Appear” (1909)

July 17, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
We do not live for ourselves—we live for others. We suffer, we struggle and we die for the gallery, to astonish others, to wrest from them a cry of admiration or praise. To appear is the great, the unique concern for the men of this century.

For the vain glory of appearing, they renounce really living. And this is true in all the domains of their activity.

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