Internationale Situationniste in English

The Philosophical Preamble

It never ceases to amaze me how simply starting off on a project kicks off a complex process of critique and reassessment – which, if attended to, can refine and hone it’s goals. This has been the case in all the worthwhile musical, artistic and (for want of a better term) critical projects that I’ve participated in.

For me this is the most basic manifestation of “praxis” in my own life: the exercise of a reflective self-critique on my own actions with the aim of focussing them and developing the philosophy/thinking embedded in them. When I was involved in Information Technology training I came across the idea of “action learning” which was a simplified version of the same idea applied to the work-place. So even the world of commerce recognises the benefits of a restricted critique (though critique only your own work practices, don’t dare even think about the basis of the entire system!)

This idea of Theory in Action drives me to the conclusion that action (and sometimes even any action) can be the most efficient technique to drive thought forward. This requires accepting (and even welcoming) mis-steps – being convinced that well-formed critique of each step (both self-imposed and from others) will reveal the nature of any error and suggest the better way forward. And all the time the theory or philosophy which underpins the enterprise can be refined and honed.

Huh?!

Well what does all that mean for this project? Well, basically over the last few days I have realised that to make the outcomes of this project worthwhile I need to seriously expand my (self-imposed) remit and radically rethink my goals. Which will definitely mean my initial timetable is thrown out the door.

It also means a recognition that since this has already happened – it is altogether likely it will happen again (and possibly again and again…). Everything is provisional!

And that means?

Well, the initial goal of this project was simply to compile pre-existing translations of the texts from Internationalee Situationniste into individual ‘facsimile issues’ that would follow the format of the originals. My main contribution was to be in the compilation and formatting of each issue.

My goal has now expanded to ensuring that, to the best of my ability, each text is as readable as possible in English, while still remaining true to the original texts in French.

The important qualification

Now probably the most important phrase here is ’to the best of my ability’. This effort will inevitably be less than perfect due to at least the following factors:

I am not an expert on situationist theory HOWEVER I have had a very strong and active interest over decades.

My own knowledge of French is limited (to be brutally honest, very limited) – I certainly make no claims to being a good translator HOWEVER with my own knowledge and the assistance of the available tools I am able to raise questions about the phrasing of pre-existing translations.

On top of all that I have suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for the past 20+ years, and I’m all too aware of the wild variations I experience in my own cognitive abilities and energy levels!

If those factors make you doubtful about the outcome out my endeavours – good! Be forewarned. But as I said in the “philosophic preamble” I believe that generally an action (even a misstep) is better than no action.

I am motivated to act – and so I have.

What motivated the change in goals?

Over the past few days I’ve begun the process of translating some of the texts that remain untranslated from French. I started doing this mainly for my own use. But…this process has given me a new perspective.

Most of the texts I was working on have not already been translated for a good reason: they are in no way central to Situationist thinking – mainly being news items and critiques of then current events/writings. They are, on the whole, of mainly historical rather than theoretical interest.

My first drafts – a very literal word-for-word translation – yielded results which were in very dense and very convoluted English. All of which is what you’d expect: there are marked differences between French and English grammar, and also (I believe) in what is considered to be good, clear writing in each language. The French seem quite content to read very long sentences containing multiple subjects – because their grammar caters for it. In English this isn’t the case – we don’t have gendered nouns or the variety of verb conjugations to allow for it. It is very easy to get lost in a long English sentence.

So my next step was to make the English easily readable – which took at least 2-3 times as long as the literal translation, because every change made for clarity has to be referenced back to the original French to make sure the meaning hasn’t been compromised.

Then came the revelation!

When I reread some of the pre-existing translations, parts of them read in a very similar way to the first drafts I had produced myself.

It was then that I began to suspect that perhaps some of the difficulty I have experienced in reading certain Situationist texts is actually due to the translation being overtly literal (in the sense of strictly adhering to a word-for-word transcription).

Realising that was the clincher. My initial goal of providing a “facsimile” of the Internationale Situationniste in English is fairly meaningless if I don’t also ensure the texts are also as readable as I can make them.

Hence the decision to do more.

The game plan

I’ll be approaching the project in 3 distinct stages.

Stage One

Once I have proofread each of my draft issues individually I will post them to the site. This will happen over the next few months, hopefully all of the initial drafts will be available by the end of the year (2013).

These drafts are formatted in a way which approximates the original layout – but which makes no attempt to duplicate it. These drafts will be in pdf format and will contain only pre-existing translations – unedited but corrected for obvious typos. With the exception of a few captions to photos, any text which has not previously been translated into English will appear in the original French.

This will get me half-way to realising the initial goal I had for this project – but will only take a small fraction of the work to come!

Stage Two

Once the rough drafts are available I will start the process of going through every text in each issue and comparing them to the original French to see if they can edited for clarity.

This will be done one issue at a time. As I complete any editing I will post each text in three versions:

The original English text (if it exists)

The original French text

The edited English text – with alterations highlighted and footnotes to explain the reasoning behind the less-than-obvious changes.

My progress will easy to follow via the posts uploaded to this blog.

Stage Three

Once the text for each issue is finalised I will compile them into a final draft. At that point I will work on formatting the issue with the aim of producing a more faithful ‘facsimile’ of the original issue .

These will be made available on the blog as they are completed. I’m hoping to have a finalised IS #1 before March next year (2014).

An invitation for involvement

I make no pretensions to being able to provide a definitive English-language version of the 12 issues of Internationale Situationniste. This is simply my contribution to that ongoing project.

Do with it what you will. If my efforts provide a basis for others to build on – or even an instructive counter-example that is fine.

I may well be able to complete this project by myself, given time – but a better result will be achieved with informed critical input from others.

If you feel motivated to give your input please do it. But please do it on the basis of achieving a better outcome overall. I more than welcome input that is intended to move the project forward.

A Final Disclaimer

While all of this sounds great while I type it – the reality of my life is that I am at the mercy of my health. Those who have any experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome will know only too well what I mean.

It is altogether possible (perhaps even likely) that I will have to press the Pause button on this project at the drop of a hat, potentially for months at a time – or even to ultimately press Eject if my health dictates it.

My hope is that even should that happen, the work I’ve managed to complete up to that point will still be of some value to some people.

A Big Week

I have just completed a slightly manic week in which I have managed to produce rough drafts of all 12 issues of Internationale Situationniste.. There’s a lot more work to be done before they are ready for general consumption – however in the meantime if anyone is interested in obtaining a pdf copy of any of the issues in draft form just contact me via the comments.

What I’ll Be Aiming For

I thought that now I’ve reach the end of the initial stage, that it was an opportune time to explain how I intend to approach this project.

The goal I’m aiming for is to have each issue completely translated into English, and formatted as closely as I can manage to the French originals. Obviously there will need to be at least some compromise.

Because of the amount of work involved in finalising each issue, my plan at the moment is to make the individual pdf issues available one-at-a-time, probably at the start of each month.

In this case the beginning of August would see the “publishing” of a ‘final draft’ version of Internationale Situationniste 1, and if I am able to keep to the schedule Internationale Situationniste 12 will be available in July 2014.

I will personally be considering each issue as being in a ‘draft’ stage right up to the end of the project – and as I get the resources or feedback to allow me to improve on each I’ll attempt to do so and reupload the revisions.

So please be forgiving of the quality of the first few issues in their initial released state – I’m assuming that after a few months time I will have a better grasp of the correct layout – and will revise the earlier issues to reflect it.

Translations

At present only 5 issues are completely translated (1, 3, 4, 6 & 7), and due to my own lack of ability to add to the number of accurate translations (or indeed, even to read much French!), I only have the option of making use of the translations currently available. At present there are surprisingly few texts which remain untranslated, but it is a not insignificant number. So unless the work is, through good fortune, coincidentally done by others before I happen to be completing the relevant issue, some of the issues will remain incompletely translated.

Thankfully Anthony Hayes (via his blog Notes From the Sinister Quarter) is still actively making his own new translations available. I will be incorporating these as they become available. However, there may still be gaps remaining as I come to “publish” each issue and I am weighing up what to do in this case.

My initial thought (and what I have done in the current drafts) was to simply include the French text to function as a placeholder – though on reflection I realised that it adds nothing to the goal of the project.

So what I am experimenting with is putting together a non-literal “translation” (using Google Translate, my own limited knowledge of the French and a Collins French-English dictionary) that at least gives the gist of the text. Thankfully the vast majority of the untranslated texts are the more ”newsy’, less theoretical ones from the journal – and I believe that even when read in an inaccurate translation, they couldn’t lead to any meaningful distortion of the core ideas of the Situationists.

I have already tried my hand at 4 texts – and have been pleasantly surprised at how readable they have turned out (unlike the initial output of Google Translate!) and on checking against the original French how much they at least seem to reflect the original meaning.

At the moment my plan is to use these in the placeholder role in my drafts, with the intention of replacing them if real translations become available. Should I get to the point of “publishing” an issue and the text is still unavailable in translation, I’ll decide at that point what to. Any feedback on this point is welcome. Actually, thinking now, I think I’ll even take the decision to make the “translations” available on this blog – at the very least they may act as a goad for others to correct them!

Layout

All of my work up to now has been done on an iPad(!) – so the next stage for each issue is to move them across to a laptop to enable me to use more sophisticated software to allow me to more closely match fonts and layout.

Also at present all of the images I have used are simply clipped from pdfs of the original documents (available from Ubuweb). So as I work on each issue I will be replacing each of them with my own scans. I have have access to 5 originals of the journal as well as the Van Gennep facsimile – so I’m quite confident that my own scans will improve the quality and fidelity of the images.

A Request for Understanding

When you finally get to view the results of my work please keep in mind that I am not a graphic designer, and have limited time and experience. I can only promise that each issue will be as faithful to the originals as I can manage given my limitations.

In the future I will consider making my work available in an ‘open source’ format to allow further fine tuning to be taken on by other people.

The Review

The Situationist International(SI) produced the journal Internationale Situationniste between 1958 and 1969. It functioned as the movement’s main organ, and over 12 issues its pages documented the evolution of Situationist theory, the members’ thoughts on everyday life, and the internal/external dramas of the group.

Given their Parisian base, there were obvious reasons why the journal was written in French. However the international focus of the SI led to a number of attempts to start parallel reviews in other languages (Italian, German, and English). Unfortunately each of the resulting journals was short-lived – and so the vast majority of Situationist writing was difficult to access for non-Francophones.

In English

Thankfully, for the English-speakers amongst us, there have been a dedicated band of people who have translated the writings of the SI into our language. The UK and US-based members of the original Situationist International started the process in the mid-60s, the arrival of Ken Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology in 1981 was a huge milestone along the way, and finally with the advent of the internet a new and dedicated band of translators have taken up the task.

On the Net

The internet has become a great resource for Situationist research with a number of sites devoted to documenting the movement’s ideas. We are all well-served by an easily accessible and growingly comprehensive collection of original SI texts translated into English.

At present the main repositories of English translations of original SI texts are;

the online version of Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology

Not Bored!’s Situationist International Archive

nothingness.org’s Situational International Text Library

and the very comprehensive SI Online

These and smaller sites such as Notes From The Sinister Quarter are the sources of the texts I hope to use in this project.

My Experience of Internationale Situationniste

Like many people, I suspect, my first experience of the Internationale Situationniste was through Knabb’s Anthology, in the pre-internet 80s. The texts were densely written, eye-opening, and fascinating. However at that point the texts were just that: text on the page, and nothing more.

Gradually I happened upon reprints of individual pages from Internationale Situationniste in other books – and was surprised at the careful design and extensive use of illustrations in the articles. Then, when I physically saw my first full set of the journal (1996 in a London bookshop – priced at £2000!) I was stunned by the range of colours on those iconic metallic-tinted covers, as well as the quality of paper and printing. Totally unlike the earlier roneo-ed Potlach – the journal of the SI’s precursor.

French readers have historically been more aware of this aspect of the journal through the availability of facsimile editions of the full 12 issue run of the Internationale Situationniste in anthology form – first produced by Van Gennep in 1970, then Champ Libre in 1975, and most recently by Fayard.

One common narrative strand of the history of the SI is that the artistic elements of the movement were displaced by the activist elements. However the physical presence of the review complicates that story – for while the content of the articles may have altered, the standard of design was remarkably consistent. Aesthetic considerations where obviously never abandoned when it came to the main organ of the SI – its journal.

This Project

I am not a Francophone, and since purchasing a copy of the Champ Libre facsimilie edition a few years ago, I have felt the desire to experience reading the issues of Internationale Situationniste in as close to the original format as possible, in my own language.

Apart from the aesthetic and contextural aspect – there is one other, more important reason that this is desirable. Approaching the texts within the original individual issues gives a historical context to them that is easy to miss in other formats. More than 11 years of theory, experience and praxis separate the texts in No. 1 (June 1958) from those in No. 12 (September 1969).

This is why I’ve embarked on this project to make each issue of Internationale Situationniste available in English translation in as close as possible to the formatting of the originals. Obviously, being personally unable to translate the originals I have had to use those translations already available.

Copyright Copywrong

I am heartened to see that each of the sites which I have used as sources for translations have adhered to the Situationist International’s policy of claiming no copyright over their texts. For this reason (and because the outcomes of the project will be freely distributed) I have felt able to access these translations for this project.

Credit should be given where it is due however, so I have indicated the source of each text and it’s translator in the relevant blog posting. I have made the decision to adhere as closely as possible to the original formatting of the journal – and thus I have not included any references to the translators (or any of their additional notes) in the pdf itself.

As far as this project is concerned I also follow the spirit of the Situationist International by claiming no copyright over these documents – they may be freely distributed and used.

Note
For those wanting to see pdf versions of the original French editions – the excellent UbuWeb has just made these available.