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Special pages :
Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, June 29, 1883
Extract in: Marx Engels on Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;
Published in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47
To Sorge in Hoboken
London, June 29, 1883[edit source]
Dear Sorge,
My evening's work has been disrupted by callers and this has given me a bit of spare time in which to write to you.
The critique of H. George, which Marx sent you, is so clearly a masterpiece in content, so stylistically monolithic, that it would be a shame to weaken it by adding the desultory English notes written in the margin of Marx’s copy. These can always be used later. This letter to you is written, as was Marx’s custom, with an eye to future publication in toto. You would therefore commit no indiscretion of you let it be printed. If it is to be published in English, I’ll do the translation for you since, as the translation of the Manifesto has shown once again, there seems to be no one over there who can convey our German into literary, grammatical English. For that one must have literary experience in both languages, and not only the experience of writing for the daily papers. To translate the Manifesto is fearfully hard. The Russian translations are by far the best I’ve seen.
The 3rd edition of Capital[1] is causing me a tremendous amount of work. We have one copy in which Marx follows the French edition when indicating the emendations and additions to be made, but all the detailed work remains to be done. I have got as far as ‘Accumulation’,[2] but here it is a case of revising almost completely the entire theoretical section. On top of that there is the responsibility. For to some extent the French translation lacks the depth of the German text; Marx would never have written in German in that way. Moreover the publisher keeps pressing me.
Until I finish this there can be no question of my going on to Volume II. There are in existence at least four versions of the beginning, thus often did Marx apply himself to the task, the editing of the definitive work having been interrupted on each occasion by illness. How the arrangement and conclusion of the last, dating from 1878, will agree with the first, which goes back to before 1870, I cannot yet say.
Practically everything has been saved from the period up to 1848. Not only virtually all of the mss he and I worked on at the time (in so far as they haven’t been eaten by mice), but also the correspondence. Everything after 1849 is also complete, of course, and, from 1862 on, is actually in some sort of order. Also extensive written material on the International, sufficient, I imagine, for a full history, though I have not yet been able to take a closer look at it.
There are also 3 or 4 notebooks of mathematical studies. I once showed your Adolf[3] an example of Marx’s new explanation of differential calculus.
Had it not been for the mass of American and Russian material (there are over two cubic metres of books of Russian statistics alone), Volume II would have long since been printed. These detailed studies held him up for years. As always, everything had to be brought right up to date and now it has all come to nothing, apart from his excerpts which will, I trust, include many of his customary critical commentaries for use as notes to Volume II.
The photographs are here; as soon as I can find time to pack them I shall send them to you. But how? BOOK POST precludes any stout packing, no parcel post exists as yet,.and to send a small package like this per parcels agency would cost a mint of money. Perhaps you would let me know how best to go about it.
I have already read five sheets of the final proof of the 3rd edition; the man has promised to send three sheets a week.
Your
F. Engels
I haven’t possibly got time to answer little Hepner’s many long letters just now. His reports are always of interest to me, intermingled though they are with a great deal of personal gossip and written with the sense of superiority of the newly disembarked. Meanwhile you had better convey my apologies to him.
Schewitsch has sent me a ‘dignified’ reply and regrets my ‘smallmindedness’. Dignity becomes him. He won’t get an answer.
Nor will Most, who is, of course, bound to confirm everything I have said, which is exactly what has made him so furious. I believe he will find support in sectarian America and sow confusion for a time. But it is precisely in the nature of the American movement that all mistakes must be experienced in practice. If America’s energy and vitality were backed by Europe’s theoretical clarity, you would get everything fixed up within ten years. But that is, after all, an historical impossibility.