Working Translations

Working Translations

Jean Grave, “The Adventures of Nono” (1901) – Full translation

January 1, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve completed a working translation of Jean Grave’s “The Adventures of Nono,” a children’s book written for the Ferrer Schools. It’s a strange and fascinating novel, with a style and vocabularly not quite appropriate in some places for most children, but with sections that seem well wrought for that purpose. I’m going to have to think about this one a bit before I make final decisions about those questions of style and vocabulary in the revision stage, but for now I think this is a pretty good representation of Grave’s work. Click the image in the sidebar for a pdf […]
manifestos

Manifesto of the Sixty Workers of the Seine (1864)

December 17, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I was looking at how much of Proudhon’s Political Capacity of the Working Classes I had translated at various times into English, with some thought about taking it up as the next logical bit of his work to tackle, when The Theory of Property finally gets finished, here in the next month or two. It’s a work that I started reading through enough years ago that my French was at that time very, very rusty. So I had to search around on some old thumb drives to find some of my earliest work on it, and in the process found […]
Ernest Cœurderoy
Working Translations

Four Visions, from Ernest Coeurderoy’s “Hurrah!!!”

December 8, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
Cursed be the hour that I was born! Cursed be the morning star which watched over my mother as she was in labor! Cursed be the first bird that greeted that deplorable day! Cursed be the shepherd and cursed the vineyard keeper who dried the tears of the dew on the hillsides of Bourgogne! Cursed be the midwife who did not smother me in the passage! Cursed be the dog who licked my stains! Cursed, the attentive friends who came to compliment my father because a son had been born to him!!

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Contr'un

Proudhon on “libertarians” in 1858

November 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  I’ve been working my way through those sections of Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church which I didn’t have to consult carefully while writing the chapter on the State, as the next step towards organizing the Proudhon book. There have been a few moments when I’ve kicked myself for not going back and looking at sections, and more than a few where passages I read through in 2008-9 look very different to me now. There are two studies which I’ve never even begun to really do justice, but, so far, the most interesting surprise has come […]
Utopian and Scientific

Fourier, “Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy”

October 7, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE NEW INDUSTRIAL WORLD CHAPTER XXVI. Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy. In the course of the preceding sections and the Preface, we have had occasion to jest about a thesis several times repeated and laughable at first glance; it is that (224) in the societary regime gluttony is a source of wisdom, insight, and social accord. I can give that strange thesis the most regular proofs. No passion has been more badly esteemed than gluttony. Can we presume that God considered as a vice the passion to which he […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon on the “right to punish”

October 3, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Here is another section from the study on moral sanction, the concluding section of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church.] II. — Does society have the right to punish? The philosophers struggle, and the problem is still unresolved. While the Church invokes divine right, the mandate received by it to cure souls, and, if necessary, to execute the bodies of those who disdain the law, the so-called rationalists allege, some legitimate defense, others the talion or vengeance, these the necessity of the example, those, who we could call semi-theologians, the mental hygiene and good of the culprits. Mr. […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon, Justice: Twelfth Study

October 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
The final study in Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church deals with the question of “moral sanction.” This section explains the identity, within Proudhon’s thought of the law, the legislator, and the sanction of the law, understood both as the guarantee of its authority (a notion we obviously have to use carefully in this context) and as the rewards or punishments associated with compliance or non-compliance. 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 […]
Proudhon Library

A Proudhonian summary from the manuscript writings

July 14, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  The project of working through Proudhon’s works, keyword by keyword, has been rewarding for a variety of reasons. It’s been nearly impossible to get a clear sense of the larger patterns in Proudhon’s use of those keywords without that kind of survey, but the work has also unearthed some important explanations and summaries in unexpected places. The section of the State in The Theory of Taxation is certainly one of the most interesting, but in searching for the surprisingly scarce references to anarchy, I ran across some very interesting material in Napoleon III, a collection of manuscript writings published […]
Contr'un

Proudhon and the coup d’état of 1851

July 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
One of the things that ought to be clear from recent developments here is that sometimes the most interesting, and also the most unexpected, insights into Proudhon’s work come from double-checking those things that “everyone knows” about his work. It was, after all, in the context of tracking down how close he came to saying “anarchy is order” that I ran across the dubious translations in The General Idea of the Revolution, and that has led to a general scouring of his work for discussions of “anarchy” and “anarchism,” which keeps raising interesting points about the early uses of that […]
Proudhon Library

The General Idea of the Revolution (partially revised translation)

June 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Since the question of Proudhon’s understanding of “anarchy” is complicated by the fact that the English translation of one of the key texts, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, obscures the range of meanings that term might have, I thought it would be useful to make available a revision of John Beverley Robinson’s translation, which at least restores that particular complexity to the text. I have marked portions of the text in bold: first, I’ve bolded all of the instances in which “anarchie” was originally translated as “chaos,” “disorganization,” etc., and […]