A Million Words (Day 93)

I passed the 250,000-word mark night before last. February was the month to wrap up the Bakunin Reader translation as much as possible, so I can turn to the introduction and annotations. That work is pretty well done, and I got a headstart on the Collectivist Reader, which is going to involve a lot of archival digging before I’m through. Check out the Bakunin Library blog for a lot of recent material, including a couple of letters by Bakunin regarding Proudhon. That work got me wondering what it would take to assemble a Mutualist Reader, which still looks like a mighty tough job, but I did get started on some background research, including translations relating to the execution of Gustave Chaudey and the influence of mutualism in the International, along with some of Chaudey’s contributions to Proudhon’s Political Capacity of the Working Classes. On the Proudhon front, I also posted a fairly rough draft-translation of The Theory of Property, and I’ve been puttering away at both the Appendix on the “Perpetual Exhibition” and on the sections of Political Capacity that relate most directly to mutualism. If I get excited about the Appendix, I might push through that this month, but it is more likely that my Proudhon work will be a little less focused, and the Appendix will get wrapped up sometimes in April. I have two longer, largely-completed works, Louise Michel’s novel, The Claque-Dents (which you can sample at the Working Translations blog), and the previously untranslated sections of Jenny P. d’Héricourt’s Woman Affranchised (see La Frondeuse #4), which I hope to finish over the next two months. However, March and April will also be littered with writing deadlines, as I try to get a small stack of manuscripts together for publication, so my workdays start to get a little more complicated at this point. I’ve piled up a couple of comparatively straightforward pieces to tackle on the days when I feel the need to play catch-up on word-count, and it seems likely that, for example, André Léo’s “The Social War,” a speech to the League of Peace and Freedom after the Paris Commune, will get finished. The remainder of the “Visions,” from Coeurderoy’s Hurrah!!! or the Revolution by the Cossacks, should probably get finished as well.