In the meantime, Nicole, Wulf, Claire and my articles are free to read –
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2023.2244204
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2023.2244698?src=recsys
and the article of Wulf Hund:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2023.2224946?src=recsys
and Claire’s: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2023.2232130
with the introduction still to come.
My favourite Warramiri (?) story from Arnhem Land is of a maths teacher out on a river one time teaching kids to measure distances – how far to from the canoe to the river edge, how far to that mountain etc. It was hot, he asked them if they like swimming and were there any crocodiles in the river (this was long before Paul Hogan etc). They said “yes, this big” and gestured with their hands about a foot apart. “Oh, they are babies, we’ll be alright” said the teacher, and started to strip off his shirt. The kids freaked out insisting that the crocs were “this big” – two hands emphatically a foot or more apart. They were measuring the relevant size – the width of the croc’s mouth, not its length. Ha!. Habermas’s “Knowledge and Human Interests” had nothing on these kids. The maths teacher has retold this ‘lesson’ many times in the decades since.
Note to a friend (also to me as placemarker):
The Manifesto translation we have now seems pretty good, though I like the very first one in English in 1850, I am sure you can guess, because the first sentence, ”ein gespenst geht um in Europa“, which we have now as ”a spectre is haunting Europe” was first translated, and published by the chartist and slavery abolitionist, Helen MacFarlane. Her rendering of that first line has it as the immortal, and child terrifying: ”A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe”! Gotta love it.
Macfarlane though married a vicar and died young.
but it is probably well worth exploring her life and writing
This reminds me to read more about here – there is a biography:
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol9/no1/flett.html
This is an actual event – by which I mean an important discussion that makes important moves, negotiates languages and ambiguities of the decolonial/postcolonial/colonial. There is good material here that moves us past the documentary and first steps of critical orientalism – to recall a longer complex anti-colonial history through to … well, travel with Saurabh through the intersections and dynamics past poco and antihumanist debates to, well on and on past the subalternists and teaching us how to travel in the new terrains of thinking the globe, the scandal of the west, the ontological, epistemic and ethical…colonial modernity and nation as contingent interplays – criss-crossed by the promise of freedom and calls to decolonise
Best not to take my word for it, but listen to this, well worth your time. Including the initial minutes in Spanish which, are in fact necessary to start the reterritorialisation of the future.
Die Komödie des Despotismus, die mit uns aufgeführt wird … Der Staat ist ein zu ernstes Ding, um zu einer Harlekinade gemacht zu werden. Man könnte vielleicht ein Schiff voll Narren eine gute Weile vor dem Winde treiben lassen; aber seinem Schicksal trieb’ es entgegen eben darum, weil die Narren dies nicht glaubten. Dieses Schicksal ist die Revolution, die uns bevorsteht (Marx in March, 1843 – letter to Ruge in the Deutsch Französische Jahrbücher) MEGA III(1) 1975: 47)
The comedy of despotism is dangerous … state power is a serious thing, and we cannot leave it as a game for clowns. A ship of fools might drift in the wind a while, but these fools do not know which way the wind blows. Their fate is the revolution, which stands just ahead us.- Marx’s critique of cartoon politicos.
Please check my loose translation (I know there is already an English trans I can check, but later, as I don’t have it handy): (This letter to Ruge was written 4 years before the 1848 revolution was thwarted by Boneparte’s bribes and corruption).
OK, looked it up and here is the Marxists.org version – they keep ‘haliquinade’ which is fair enough:
“The comedy of despotism that is being played out … is … dangerous … The state is too serious a thing to be turned into a kind of harlequinade. A ship full of fools could perhaps be allowed to drift for quite a time at the mercy of the wind, but it would be driven to meet its fate precisely because the fools would not believe this. This fate is the impending revolution.”
But I think ‘impending’ is a bit cold for ‘die uns bevorsteht’ – which awaits us. Maybe omitting the self-reference erases revolutionary involvement and urgency?
Writing to a friend I fell down the Stalin rabbit-hole. It started off reasonably for a sunday evening, thinking, because of some translation work I am doing, that we have a lot to learn from the ways Progress Press and the Foreign Languages Publishing House and David Ryazanov in the Marx-Engels Institute set the tone.
Soon after that though I was reading some scuttlebutt (?) about Isaak Illich Rubin and his execution as a Trotskyist – the key source of the Value Form theorists – Backhaus et al. He is accused of implicating Ryazanov in a faked Menshevik conspiracy, which got Riazanov removed from the Directorship of the institute (he had founded in 1921) and also eventually shot. Years of reading the Neue Marxlektüre and I’d forgotten this history, even though Rubin’s book was long before the arrests and show trials, it adds some sort of unresolved sour feeling. What to make of these stories that smell so much of red-baiting as well? I don’t even know if the opening of the archives on these archivists has produced any ‘better’ studies than that of Medvedev – Let History Judge – translated by George Shriver who also translated the volume of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters that is pretty great and edited Bukharin, who I am reading because Rosa’s anthropology volume (lecture course in the Complete works) and Bukharin’s Economics are a sort of dialogue. Of course I cannot do this in Russian, for which I blame my father for assimilationism in Australia – though at least he had me keep the German which he was more comfortable in anyway, even if not his first language it became his main one.
Ackk. I should not be reading about Medvedev, but I wonder about this sort of thing – Medvedev claims Stalin called Ryazanov a clown way back in 1921 (for supporting trade unionism, counter to the central committee). The source for all this is the testimony or memoir of Rubin’s sister… for [everyone’s] entertainment, four relevant paragraphs of the sister’s memoir as glossed by Medvedev. I cannot see if there is any corroboration of this memoir that ‘came into my hands’ (as Medvedev says) but what is tells of Rubin is classic grim reading in the disappeared mode and, well, who to trust? There must be something more from the recent archivists but I can’t find it.
Then, if you like this sort of sordid stuff, the page where Medvedev gives his penultimate assessment of Ryazanov, and it reads as the denouement of the conflict with Stalin already set up way back on page 70 in 1921. Stalin held grudges, but the leap from detail to general Trotsky line is suspect I think. I’ve no candle for Trotsky, but I also don’t trust the narrative here either. Especially as the final mention of Ryazanov says that though he respected Lenin, Lenin also mocked his points – Lenin treated everyone he disagreed with like this, its not unbelievable… what is unbelievable is the implied ‘long memory’ and score-settling that removes Ryazanov, by Stalin and by implication for Lenin. When I think it was more likely some much less calculated but more brutal bureaucratic cleansing… or.. Rubin did also have cancer we are told, and there is no direct evidence he was shot, just disappeared according to his sister.
I am well down the rabbit hole now. Does this backstory to the Marx archive matter. Ryazanov had done so much to bring out the german Ideology, the Paris Manuscripts and the various collected works, in Russian and in German.
I am wondering who I ask among the post-Soviet archivists for a view on all this.
Edit: Subsequently, the next hour was lost to reading a text that sort of regurgitates Medvedev’s account from Rubin’s sister, with the occasional not exactly corroborating reference to archival sources. Nevertheless, it is worth a look at: Ivan Boldyrev and Martin Kragh (2015). ISAAK RUBIN: HISTORIAN OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT DURING THE STALINIZATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOVIET RUSSIA. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 37, pp 363-386 doi:10.1017/S1053837215000413
I picked out the best bits, so to speak. None the wiser really.
Historical Materialists presents a webinar on:
“Reading/Translating Capital Yet Again”
Speaker: John Hutnyk Faculty, Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam
Moderator: Abhijit RoyFaculty, Jadavpur University
Date: January 28, 2021Time: 7pm onwards
Meeting Link https://meet.google.com/bpe-iwug-cru
This is how to do an announcement!. It is well worth reading for both what it says about translation work (as I work on the difficult texts of Bác Hồ) and for its deeply cautious and researched engagement with the GPCR
“It does not serve the interests of the bourgeoisie to train younger generations outside of their class to think independently and to ask critical questions—complicated questions that require investigation, study, and ongoing reflection to answer in an appropriately nuanced or dialectical way. This can be true of sincere, committed comrades as well. For instance, it’s simpler to read Mao, or quotations of Mao, or Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. in order to find the evidence we need to “prove” that what we believe is correct, rather than do more in-depth reading and analysis. But the fact is, unless we tear away the lenses that obscure our understanding of the GPCR, ones that condemn it as a violent, chaotic expression of excess, as well as ones that take Mao’s word as gospel, we will fall into the same traps as the red guards of Beijing and Qinghua University, the very traps that Mao pointed out and roundly criticized in many of the articles in this volume.”
“The fact that the factionalism and dogmatism that eventually plagued the Red Guards (and caused Mao to disband them) plays out in Maoist circles today is an indication that we who call ourselves Maoist, have yet to understand and put into practice many important lessons of the GPCR. Some today continue to hold up Mao and what he said as proof of the righteousness of their own actions and the wrongheadedness of others—without real study and research into what he really thought and why. It’s the very practice of which Mao criticized Lin Biao and the Red Guard leaders: shouting that every word was absolutely true, but then disregarding what he actually said, much less trying to understand why”
Theres much more that’s interesting… Read the whole thing (about 10 mins) : https://www.redspark.nu/en/theory/flp-announcing-the-upcoming-release-of-the-selected-works-of-mao-zedong-vol-ix/
It seems like that old “goodness gracious me” sketch about the funny uncle that was claiming everything in Britain was ‘Indian’ was, – yup, Indian – accurate after all:
Reading Wittfogel and on page 214 he finds the Domesday Book, tdocumenting property rights for landlords of yore, has Arab [Saracen – Ghengis – ok, almost Indian] origins…
‘When in 1066 the Normans conquered England, some of their countrymen had already set themselves up as the masters of southern Italy, an area which, with interruptions, had been under Byantine administration until this date: and some of them had established a foothold in Sicily, an area which had been ruled by Byzantium for three hundred years and after that by the Saracens, who combined Arab and Byzantine techniques of absolutist government.
We have no conclusive evidence regarding the effect of this Byzantine-Saracen experience on William and his councilors. But we know that in 1072—that is, thirteen years before William ordered the description of England—the Normans had conquered the capital of Sicily, Palermo, and the northern half of the island. And we also know that there were considerable “comings and goings” 43 between the Italian-Sicilian Normans and their cousins in Normandy and England, particularly among the nobility and clergy. The latter happened also to be actively engaged in administrative work.44 No wonder, then, that on the basis of his knowledge of the period Haskins, the leading English expert on English-Sicilian relations in the Middle Ages, suggests “the possibility of a connexion between Domesday Book. and the fiscal registers which the south had inherited from its Byzantine and Saracen rulers.” [cites himself]
Haskins’ hypothesis explains well why a typically hydraulic device of fiscal administration appeared in feudal Europe. It also explains why for hundreds of years afterward this “magnificent exploit” had no parallel in that area. Evidently, systematic and nationwide registration was as out of place in feudal society as it was customary in the realm of Oriental despotism’ (Wittfogel 1957: 214)
from Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power and yes, the Orientalism and the anti-communism are strong in this one, and comparative studies on this scale are wild speculation at the level of conclusion, but int he detail, well, the detail is amazing. It is like a randomised global free association generator.
A short film made to explain a model of teaching for a class on Capital and Anthropology/Mapping at Ton Duc Thang University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2018 – Director: Đỗ Thị Xuân Hương Camera and Editor: Võ Nguyễn Thiện Phúc
Transcript of the film in English and Tieng Viet Click Appendix_bilingual_Tieng_Anh_va_Tieng_Viet.
On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural Cartographies. My views, given late in the day, reliant on Gayatri Spivak’s hugely influential work, and following talks by the excellent Sarat Maharaj, Yuko Hasegawa and Wael Shawky (interviewed). Slightly combative and with a slip in putting the Danes in Chandenaggor, it is the talk I wish I could have parsed for Princeton – but that was not recorded, even though some people asked for it (thanks Anisha, Saleh, Ben). Click here for the audio Tate link.
“I am first of all against translation as it is mad,
its impossible,
it cannot ever be true to origins,
its a kind of violence,
it is always political,
it transforms,
it is creative,
it is heroic to try,
it is the essence of communicability,
it is exchange,
it disrupts parochialism,
it is the foundation of internationalism,
it is what we all should be trying to do,
it is the most revolutionary activity,
it is social,
it is life itself,
I am for it”.
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So, translation slippage… my old post above from November 2005 is brought forward again as its both on Victor Alneng’s door in Sweden, and because here at Goldsmiths Ana Ama has activated a research project requesting examples of translational slippage – good term… As I replied to her just now:
“My favourite one is a typo (or was it?) in a bar in the northern Thai town of Chiang Rai – a real cowboy town. At this bar, part restaurant and not obviously a go-go joint, the menu offered a ‘Mixed Girl with Salad’. I do hope it was mixed grill, but …
Lonely Planet’s guide to India used to offer a lot of these sort of things. I remember them mentioning the great Scottish stable breakfast food “Podge” – And in my “Rumour of Calcutta” book (1996) I also mention the miswritten ‘Fried Children’ – instead of chicken.
There are some philosophical issues to be raised about this kind of translation-mockery humour however. So, I hope with the help of Blogospheric collaborationm she can achieve a fine global distribution of cultural put-downs…”
And from the comments page of the original post, Boris Buden translated it:
“3 Comments:
- said…
- And to think they call you “The Enemy of Anthropology.”
- beautiful, John, simply beautiful
- “Prije svega ja sam protiv prevodjenja jer je to ludost, jer je ono nemoguce, jer nikada ne moze biti vjerno originalu, jer je oblik nasilja, jer je uvijek politicno, jer transformira, jer je kreativno, jer je herojski pokusati ga, jer je prevodjenje bit komunikabilnosti, jer je ono razmjena, jer podriva parohializam, jer je temelj internacionalizma, jer je to ono sto bismo svi trebali ciniti, jer je prevodjenje najrevolucionarnija aktivnost, jer je socijalno, jer je zivot sam, ja sam za prevodjenje.” John Hutnyk in CBS (Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian)
[Thanks – again – Kaori for trinket [image] from Japan].
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[Thanks Kaori for trinkets from Japan].
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Trinketization 