Letter to Pasquale Martignetti, May 19, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 19 May 1885


Printed according to the original
Translated from the Italian
First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVII, Moscow, 1935
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO PASQUALE MARTIGNETTI

IN BENEVENTO

[Draft]

[London, 19 May 1885]

Dear Citizen,

...on the etc. I sent you, by registered mail, the translation[1] with my comments. I am very sorry that my limited practice of Italian has not enabled me to do them better, but I hope they will be intelligible nonetheless. I am amazed that, without having lived in Germany and learned the language there, you have been able to render my thoughts so well. I only found a few abbreviated, idiomatic and proverbial expressions where there was an error; and even these are impossible to understand properly for someone who has not spoken the everyday language and even the dialects of the country--things which are not to be found in grammars and dictionaries. And in sev- eral cases when you have understood the meaning well, I think you could be a little freer and more adventurous.

I fear that the note about 'Mark' is not very clear. It is the only note which I think should be printed. The others are for your infor- mation only. If therefore you have any doubts about that note, please let me know and I shall try and rewrite it.[2]

Please excuse the long time it has taken me to do the revision. But my days are taken up with dictating Marx's manuscripts, and my evenings are not always free. In addition, I have had a Danish trans- lation[3] to check at the same time, not to mention the English transla- tion of Capital.[4]

Thanking you again for the considerable work you have done on my behalf, I remain

Your devoted

  1. ↑ the Italian translation of Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
  2. ↑ Engels wrote the note on Mark (see present edition, Vol. 26, p. 236) for Chapter VII ('The Gens Among the Celts and Germans') of the Italian translation of his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
  3. ↑ of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
  4. ↑ The idea of translating Capital into English occurred to Marx as early as 1865, when he was working on the manuscript (see Marx's letter to Engels of 31 July 1865, present edition, Vol. 42). The British journalist and member of the Interna tional's General Council, Peter Fox, was to help Marx find a publisher. However, this matter was not settled due to Fox's death in 1869. The English translation of the first volume of Capital, edited by Engels, did not appear until after Marx's death, in January 1887, and was published by Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., London. The translation was done by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling between mid-1883 and March 1886. Eleanor Marx-Aveling took part in the preparatory work for the edition (see also this volume, pp. 33 and 127-28).