MIA > Archive > Wilhelm Liebknecht
First published: in German, 1896.
First published in English: 1901.
This translation: 1957.
Translated by: Unknown (name not provided).
Source: Reminiscences of Marx and Engels. Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957, Moscow, USSR. pp. 95-136.
Public Domain: This work is free of any copyright restrictions.
MIA page: by Bill Wright, July 2023.
MIA Editor’s Note: Two separate English translations exist of this work. The first one was done by Ernest Untermann and first published in 1901; the second one, reproduced here, was done by an unknown translator for the 1957 Soviet compilation Reminiscences of Marx and Engels. Both are freely available in the public domain; the original Untermann translation is available here.
While I can’t read German and therefore can’t compare their faithfulness to the original text, the Untermann translation appears to steer closer to the original German prose, while this 1957 translation is abridged more to be easier to understand for English readers. Both translations, however, do not seem to be complete reproductions of the 1896 German original; both appear to have content missing from the other edition, and the chapters are presented in a different order, which makes it tough to tell the full extent of their differences. The 1901 Untermann translation seems to be the more complete edition, and I personally prefer it for that reason. This 1957 translation however is an easier read and may be preferable for those without time to spare.
Of note, the 1957 translation seems to have deliberately excluded a few passages that would have been distasteful to contemporary readers, most notably the one dealing with Karl Marx’s apparent belief in the then-respected racist pseudoscience of phrenology. —Bill Wright, July 2023.
Last updated on 12 July 2023