Marx, Karl / Engels, Friedrich. Il Manifesto del Partito Comunista. Con un nuovo proemio al lettore italiano di Federico Engels.

€ 15.000,00

The first authorised Italian translation of The Communist Manifesto, including the preface "Al Lettore Italiano" ("To the Italian Reader") prepared by Engels especially for this edition, being the last preface to the Manifesto ever to be written by either Marx or Engels. It was preceded by two earlier, defective efforts and presented itself as the "first and only [Italian] translation of the Manifesto that is not a betrayal" (Lotta di classe I, 8, 17-18 September 1892, English translation quoted in Musto, p. 452).

"One of the outstanding political documents of all time" (PMM), the Manifesto was written on behalf of the League of Communists and commissioned at their Second Congress in December 1847. It appeared for the first time in a German-language edition published in London, February 1848.

Various earlier attempts had been made to translate the Manifesto into Italian, including two efforts that would never come to fruition: the first by Hermann Ewerbeck, a leading member of the League of Communists in Paris, who had announced his intention to translate the Manifesto into Spanish and Italian in 1849, neither of which projects would ever materialise; and a second by the Italian socialist Pasquale Martignetti, who completed a translation after receiving a copy of the Manifesto from Engels in 1885, but was unable to find a publisher due to a lack of funds.

The first partial Italian translation of the Manifesto appeared in 1889, translated by the Italian socialist Leonida Bissolati (1857-1920) and serialised across ten issues of the Cremona-based republican newspaper "L’Eco del popolo". The translation was desperately lacking in quality, without the various prefaces by Marx and Engels and entirely omitting the third section on "Socialist and Communist Literature". Various other parts were either heavily abridged or summarised, with most of the more substantial theoretical terminology either simplified or removed entirely. "Altogether, then, it was not so much a translation as a popularisation of the text, with only a number of passages actually rendered into Italian" (Musto, p. 451).

This defective partial attempt was followed two years later in 1891 by the first Italian edition in book form. The translation was undertaken by the Italian anarchist Pietro Gori (1865-1911), who provided his own preface that imposed an anarchist interpretation on the Manifesto. It was published by the Milanese anarchist publisher Flaminio Fantuzzi, who sent a copy to Engels as a fait accompli. In a letter to Pasquale Martignetti, Engels lamented the omission of the various prefaces by himself and Marx, and criticised numerous egregious errors in the translation, expressing his particular annoyance at the "prefatory remarks by the unknown character Gori" (quoted in Musto, p. 452).

The need for an authorised Italian translation of the Manifesto was, therefore, clear. More broadly, the uptake of Marxist thought in Italy had been notably sluggish, largely owing to the predominance of anarchism in Italy during the First International, compounded by the comparative lack of Italian translations of original theoretical works by either Marx or Engels before the 1890s. The authorised translation came about through the efforts of Filippo Turati (1857-1932), founder of the Italian Socialist Party (Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani). It was originally published in September 1892 in the Milanese newspaper "Lotta di classe". Founded by Turati in June 1892, "Lotta di classe "served as the official organ of the newly-formed Italian Socialist Party and ran until 1898 under Turati’s editorship (see Di Scala, Dilemmas of Italian Socialism: The Politics of Filippo Turati, p. 15f.). The translation was undertaken by Pompeo Bettini (1862-96), a little-known Italian writer and friend of Turati’s, best remembered (when at all) for his poetry, which was rediscovered posthumously by Benedetto Croce. The translation as it first appeared in "Lotta di classe" was based on the German edition of 1883.

A year would pass between the initial appearance of the authorised translation in "Lotta di classe" and the publication of the first edition in book form presented here. This delay was caused partly by some necessary amendments to the text, with corrections and stylistic improvements made with reference to the fifth German edition, published in Berlin in 1891. The proofs of the revised translation were sent to Engels for his approval and, upon the request of Turati, Engels provided a preface especially for this edition as a mark of its authenticity. The preface, "Al Lettore Italiano", was supplied by Engels in French and translated by Turati into Italian. Engels had expressed some reservations concerning the preface, writing to Turati on 7 January 1893: "I am beginning to find these prefaces an embarrassment. Only recently I had to write one for a Polish translation. I really have nothing new left to say" (Marx & Engels Collected Works, Vol. 50: Letters 1892-95, p. 78). The preface contains general remarks on the revolutionary character of 1848 and its legacy, with little reference to the political situation in Italy. It concludes with a stirring reflection on Dante and modernity: "The first capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?" (English translation in Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Books, 2004, p. 81).

The book edition was published under the auspices of the doctrinally eclectic left-wing Milanese journal "Critica Sociale", another of Turati’s projects, appearing as the first volume of the series "Biblioteca della Critica Sociale". It also included the preface by Marx and Engels to the German edition of 1872 as well as Engels's prefaces to the German editions of 1883 and 1890, and reproduced the explanatory footnotes added by Engels to the German edition of 1890, all of which were translated by Turati.

Rare. OCLC lists copies held by Trinity College Cambridge, International Institute of Social History, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, and Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.