Working Translations

Working Translations

Marius Jean, “The Anarchists’ Ideal” (1929)

August 19, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
As a passionate lover of truth, beauty and liberty, the anarchist struggles for the establishment of an environment within which individuals would be free from all constraint and all authority outside of themselves, an environment in which each individual could rid themselves of all the metaphysical ideas to which, even today, they feel bound to sacrifice themselves.

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Working Translations

Maurice Imbard, “O Anarchy!!!” (1928)

August 18, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
Ah! that word anarchy appeared to me for a long time, in the days of my youth, as a sort of myth.

The change that has occurred in my mindset has not changed my opinion on the grandeur of the word and the beauty of the thing. My aim is still and always to work, to struggle, to hasten the coming of the anarchist life—a life without authority, without obligation, without brutality; a gentle, tolerant, normal, natural life, where people will learn to understand one another.

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poetry

Eugène Bizeau, “Anarchist Individualist Initiation” (1924)

August 17, 2018 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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