February 25, 2004

...the gnawing of the mice

Posted by Chris

I’ve been rereading parts of the German Ideology , the text where Marx and Engels really start to get historical materialism straightened out. And very fine and interesting it is too. But my purpose in this post isn’t to discuss the content of a work which Marx and Engels did not publish but “abandoned … to the gnawing criticism of the mice”, but to reproduce (below the fold for bandwidth reasons) a page of the original MS which appears in facsimile in volume 5 of the MECW. What readers get, thanks to the intervention of subsequent editors, as a piece of elegant if vituperative prose, appears in the original in the form of a half-crossed out scrawl . The scrawl only occupied about half the page, the rest of which is filled with jottings, notes and many many doodled heads (probably by Engels). Other facsmile pages are in an even worse condition with great chunks consumed by the rodents. [I now discover that the page I’ve photographed and a few others besides are on the marxists.org website anyway, never mind ….]

gi2.jpg

The page displayed is from the Feuerbach part of the MS, and the facsimile is at MECW 5 facing p. 35.

gi4.jpg

Below I’ve enlarged a detail of Engels’s heads.

Posted on February 25, 2004 11:12 AM UTC
Comments

Wasn’t it David Riazanov, the Russian translator of the original Gesamtausgabe who said you had to translate Marx twice — once from German into whatever language you wanted, but before that from Marx’s appalling handwriting into German. And even beyond that, much of Marx and Engels’ correspondence is written in a weird joky French-English-German hybrid, filled with portmanteau words and whimsical in-jokes.

Posted by Kieran Healy · February 25, 2004 12:02 PM

Someone should have started the Cartoonist International, instead.

Posted by Mike · February 25, 2004 05:19 PM

That actually looks like a lot of my notebooks.

But mine are better.

Posted by Chirag Kasbekar · February 25, 2004 07:27 PM

Beautiful! No irony here, I really find this calligraphic swirl of heads-within-heads to be a thing of beauty. And I discover I have more in common with Engels than I thought: I always doodle heads facing to the left as well.

Posted by Natalie Solent · February 27, 2004 09:46 AM
Followups

→ Face doodles.
Excerpt: Who do you reckon did this, and while doing what? The answer is here. And this is who put meRead more at Brian's Culture Blog
→ Face doodles.
Excerpt: Who do you reckon did this, and while doing what? The answer is here. And this is who put meRead more at Brian's Culture Blog

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.