The Claque-Dents

Working Translations

Louise Michel, “The Claque-Dents,” Ch. III

December 27, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Chapter II] [one_half padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] III Old Hermann went straight on, hardly knowing where he would stop. His house had long since been passed when he began to notice fatigue. So, regardless of eyes fixed on him, the old man made himself at home on a heap of stones piled up by workers at a street corner. The veil hung in the old man’s hands. as he had entirely forgotten all that had happened. He wiped his brow with it, taking it for his handkerchief. Sylvestre followed constantly.—Old Hermann’s appearance gave him the shudders. But he was quite wrong, […]
Working Translations

Louise Michel, “The Claque-Dents,” Ch. II

July 5, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Chapter I] [one_half padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] II At the home of young Stéphane’s mistress there occurred a scene at once burlesque and sinister. Thirty thousand francs, won at the tables when chance was on his side, had allowed him to buy the bed and the jewels; he tried Lucrèce’s coral necklace on Marguerite. On her marble neck, its red line made the mark of the scaffold. Marguerite was vaguely aware of this thought of Stéphane’s. He saw her put her hand to her neck, as if to a wound. An intuition of the crime passed through him, while a […]
Working Translations

Louise Michel, “The Claque-Dents,” Ch. II

July 5, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Chapter I] [ezcol_1half] II At the home of young Stéphane’s mistress there occurred a scene at once burlesque and sinister. Thirty thousand francs, won at the tables when chance was on his side, had allowed him to buy the bed and the jewels; he tried Lucrèce’s coral necklace on Marguerite. On her marble neck, its red line made the mark of the scaffold. Marguerite was vaguely aware of this thought of Stéphane’s. He saw her put her hand to her neck, as if to a wound. An intuition of the crime passed through him, while a sudden fear engulfed 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 […]
Contr'un

Louise Michel, “The Claque-Dents” (IV-VI)

November 13, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CLAQUE-DENTS [continued] IV There are two little-known islands on the coast of Morbihan. From a distance, Hœdik has the appearance of a seahorse; some bits of land, one having the appearance of bagpipes, the others stamped in the shape of the tail, surround it. Houat is a double star; reefs, where the waves and wind roar, border Hœdik and Houat. On these islands, and on their constellations of islets, live a population of fisher-folk who only know the sea. On the horizon, eating into the coasts of Quiberon and Penmarch, is the sea; between the two harbors, a first […]
Contr'un

Louise Michel as a Fiction Writer / The Claque-Dents

October 27, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
One of the results of my continuing research on anarchism is that I occasionally find whole new genres of anarchist writing opening up in front of me. And recently, between my work on radical feminist writing and my work on the intersection of science fiction and fantasy and radicalism, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading, researching and translating fiction. A work like Jean Grave’s The Adventures of Nono is relatively unique as a children’s story, but the number of adult novels—including some that are very adult—written by anarchists is very large. One of the prolific novel-writers was Louise […]