Letter to Pasquale Martignetti, April 21, 1892

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 21 April 1892


First published, in the language of the original (German), in La corrispondenza di Marx e Engels con italiani. 1848-1895, Milano, 1964
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO PASQUALE MARTIGNETTI

IN BENEVENTO

London, 21 April 1892

Dear Friend,

I am sorry that I cannot send you a German copy of the Condition of the Working Class.h The book has not been in the bookshops for the past 16 years and even old, second-hand copies are offered only very rarely in dealers' catalogues and are extremely dear (30-40 marks!). I intend to bring out a new edition as soon as I have completed Volume III of Marx's Capital.

I am pleased to see from your translation of the English preface in the Critica Sociale[1] that your English has progressed by leaps and bounds. However, I wouldn't advise you to translate the book from the English text; the translation is very clumsy and full of Americanisms, not all of which I have been able to eliminate.

Once you have got to the stage of being able to translate English rapidly and without a dictionary, let's hope that Labriola, Turati or some other friend will succeed in finding literary work for you so that you may at last get away from the poverty and isolation of Benevento. If only you could leave it and go to Rome or Milan, you would undoubtedly find something fairly quickly.

My preface was not at all easy to translate, containing as it did a number of expressions for which no definition, at any rate in the sense used by me, is to be found in the dictionary.

I cannot thank you enough for the assiduity with which you translate my works, thereby rendering a great service, not only to myself, but also to international relations between Italian and German socialists. You will shortly be getting something else from me, namely the English edition of Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus[2] * with a long new introduction which is to appear in German in the Neue Zeit.[3]

From the outset Fantuzzi seemed a sham to me. You would, I think, be well-advised to ask him to return the mss and corrected proofs,[4] for who knows whether he has any intention of printing anything else.

Very sincerely yours,

F. Engels

  • F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
  1. ↑ This refers to the opposition group of the Jungen (see Note 13).
  2. ↑ The Anti-Socialist Law, initiated by the Bismarck government and passed by the Reichstag on 21 October 1878, was directed against the socialist and working-class movement. The Social-Democratic Party of Germany was virtually driven into the underground. All party and mass working-class organisations and their press were banned, socialist literature was subject to confiscation, Social-Democrats made the object of reprisals. However, with the active help of Marx and Engels, the Social-Democratic Party succeeded in overcoming both the opportunist (Eduard Bernstein et al.) and 'ultra-Left' (J. Most et al.) tendencies within its ranks and was able, by combining underground activities with an efficient utilisation of legal means, to use the period of the operation of the law for considerably strengthening and expanding its influence among the masses. Prolonged in 1881, 1884, 1886 and 1888, the Anti-Socialist Law was repealed on 1 October 1890. For Engels' assessment of it see his article 'Bismarck and the German Working Men's Party' (present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 407-09).
  3. ↑ This letter was first published in: F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. II, Paris, 1956.
  4. ↑ This refers to the second Italian edition of Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in Martignetti's translation (the first edition appeared in 1883). The issue of a second edition had been proposed by Romualdo Fantuzzi and Martignetti in March 1891, to which Engels gave his consent (see this volume, pp. 159 and 160). In the summer of 1891 the type was set, and the proofs read by Pasquale Martignetti and Antonio Labriola. But then the publisher delayed the printing without any explanation, which made Engels contemplate abrogating his contract with Fantuzzi. Despite the delay, the brochure did appear in 1892.