Working Translations

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 […]
Proudhon Library

Notes on “La Pornocratie”

April 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
The manuscript carries the “Nouvelles de la Révolution” header, like the sections in the expanded “Justice,” and we know that Proudhon intended it as a follow-up to the studies on “Love and Marriage.” In a letter to Garnier Frères, December 12, 1860, Proudhon wrote: “At this moment I am studying our young literature. I have read, for example, all the novels of Mr. [Edmonde] About: you can be sure that I do not intend to have wasted my time. But I cannot thus leap from one order of ideas to another without transition; and the transitions for me are in […]
Proudhon Library

“I am a sans-culotte” (excerpt from Justice, Study on Moral Sanction)

March 12, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
  JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH TWELFTH STUDY ON MORAL SANCTION ____ FRAGMENTS Monsignor, I have come here to the end of this long labor. Accused as it has been for seventy years, the Revolution finally becomes, through my mouth and in my person, the accuser. It proves to you today—to all of you, priests, mystics, worshipers of the ideal, apostles of natural religion, conservators and restorers of the principle of authority, privileged of capital and industry, partisans of divine right in property and the State, representatives of all the fictions of the exhausted age—that you do […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

March 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

March 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

March 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]