Some books spend a century waiting for absolutely no good reason!
Bonsoir, mes chers… I have finally finished one of the most satisfying projects I have ever had the pleasure of disappearing into. For well over a century, anarchist Ret Marut’s Die Zerstörung unseres Welt-Systems durch die MAR-Kurve simply never existed in English…
B. Traven traveled around the world with The Death Ship, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, et novels that found generations of readers. Meanwhile, one of the strangest, funniest, most uncompromising writings from Der Ziegelbrenner remained where it had always been, waiting in German. Every time I thought about that, I found myself saying the same thing. Mais… pourquoi?
Eventually, curiosity that started as a gift, became a personal obligation…
This particular Ret Marut project began as a present. Someone I love dearly has spent years giving many of us extraordinary translations, patiently opening doors most of us could never have opened alone. It seemed lovely to answer that generosity in kind. So, little by little, I wandered into ‘MAR-Kurve,’ translated a few pages, then another few, et somewhere along the way the whole thing took possession of me.
Living with Marut for that long made it impossible simply to place an English translation between two covers et call the work finished. I wanted people to meet Ret or re-introduce themselves to the Ret Marut who existed before B. Traven: the creator of Der Ziegelbrenner. The man who continued putting the journal out while being hunted down by police. So, the translation gradually became an edition.
Alongside the complete English translation are essays on the historical moment to show how et why this came about, the reception of the MAR-Kurve among individualists of the past et today, translator’s notes, annotations, a bibliography, etc., a rather unapologetic love letter to individualists. The writings circle certainty, authority, reification, Stirner, et the strange habit human beings have of mistaking their own creations for realities standing above them.
The object itself mattered to me. I wanted it to feel familiar like the original Madame Simone issues, which echo French philosophical editions with cream paper and red rules. Minimal. That combination has been part of French printing for generations, not because of sentimentality but because it simply worked, et became beautiful through long use. The title of Marut’s work on the cover appears in Fraktur, a small salute to the original Der Ziegelbrenner, where this Blackletter first appeared. In any case, it is complete et definitive.
A risograph test copy looked good, but proofed on an old Vandercook 4 was far better. So yesterday it had its first print run on an old Heidelberg Windmill, which felt like a nice nod to Germany.
For those who simply want Marut’s words, I’ll also be uploading the complete translation to the wonderful Anarchist Library. It belongs there.
This Bacchus Edition book is another creature entirely. It contains the translation, naturellement, but also everything that grew around it including translator’s dilemmas.
As you can tell I adore it.. I have wanted to place this one into hands for a very long time!
You can find it now at BacchusEditions.net, it begins mailing around July 12.
À bientôt,
Fíona
