NOT BORED! writes:

Translator's Introduction to Guy Debord's
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

In his "Translator's Note" to his (truly terrible) translation of Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle into English (Verso 1990, reprinted 1998), Malcolm Imrie states:

The French edition of Comments has no footnotes, and it would have been inappropriate to add any to this translation. However, with the author's approval, I have included these brief notes on certain references and allusions that might otherwise remain unnecessarily obscure to English readers.

In August 2004, we found ourselves in strong disagreement with this assessment: footnotes would definitely have helped many readers to better understand Comments, in part because some of the historical events to which Debord refers or alludes aren't very known (have been suppressed, obscured or completely forgotten) in English-speaking countries; and in part because Debord himself "take[s] care not to instruct just anybody." In the absence of such explanations, Debord seemed paranoid (which he wasn't) and his references seemed figural (when they are in fact historical). And so we added 40 brand-new footnotes, while at the same time preserving those written by Imrie. On some occasions, when we found Imrie's notes to be incomplete, we added more information.

Unfortunately, we have had to intervene once again, but this time in the main body of the text. When we compared Imrie's translation to the French original (Gallimard, 1988), we discovered a wide variety of problems with the former: it was verbose and awkward, while the original was pointed and elegant; it was loaded with words that made the developments described therein seem certain, unequivocal and irreversible, while the original descriptions were marked by hesitancy, equivocality and reversibility; it refused to render into English certain key terms that the original used consistently and with an obvious sense of purpose (mediatic, spectaculaire and disparition, among them); and, worst of all, it was full of bad, questionable or even flat-out wrong renderings of Debord's carefully chosen words. Let us cite an example, which is just one example among dozens we could have cited.

Here's Imrie's translation of Debord's citation of a key passage from Thucydides:

Nevertheless the Assembly and the Council chosen by lot still continued to hold meetings. However, they took no decisions that were not approved by the party of the revolution; in fact all the speakers were from this party, and what they were going to say had been considered by the party beforehand. People were afraid when they saw their numbers, and no one now dared to speak in opposition to them. If anyone did venture to do so, some appropriate method was soon found for having him killed, and no one tried to investigate such crimes or take action against those suspected of them. Instead the people kept quiet, and were in such a state of terror that they thought themselves lucky enough to be left unmolested even if they had said nothing at all. They imagined that the revolutionary party was much bigger than it really was, and they lost all confidence in themselves, being unable to find out the facts because of the size of the city and because they had insufficient knowledge of each other. For the same reason it was impossible for anyone who felt himself ill-treated to complain of it to someone else so as to take measures in his own defense; he would either have had to speak to someone he did not know or to someone he knew but could not rely upon. Throughout the democratic party, people approached each other suspiciously, everyone thinking that the next man had something to do with what was going on. And there were in fact among the revolutionaries some people whom no one could ever have imagined would have joined in an oligarchy. It was these who were mainly responsible for making the general mass of people so mistrustful of each other and who were of the greatest help in keeping the minority safe, since they made mutual suspicion an established thing in the popular assemblies.

Our translation:

Those who took the floor were of the conspiracy and the speeches that they pronounced had been submitted in advance to the examination of their friends. No opposition manifested itself among the remainder of the citizens, who were frightened by the number of conspirators. When someone tried despite everything to contradict them, one soon found a convenient way of making him die. The murderers weren't found and no pursuit was made of those one suspected. The people didn't react and were so terrorized that they estimated themselves happy, even in remaining mute, if they escaped the violence. Believing the conspirators much more numerous that they were, the people felt completely impotent. The town was too large and they didn't quite know each other, so that it was not possible for them to discover what it really was. In these conditions, so shameful were the people that they could not confide their grief to anyone. Thus, one had to renounce engaging in an action against the guilty ones, because it would have been necessary to address oneself either to an unknown person or a person of knowledge in whom one didn't have confidence. In the democratic party, the personal relations were everywhere stamped with scorn, and one always asked oneself if he with whom one had business wasn't coniving with the conspirators. There were actually among the conspirators men whom one could never believe that they had rallied themselves to the oligarchy.

Note well: "the party of the revolution" is not even remotely similar to complot (conspiracy); nor is "the revolutionary party" similar to les conjures (the conspirators). Such distortions make the text seem to be describing Stalinist Russia, and not ancient Greece! Taken together, these flaws turned Debord's book into something that it wasn't. This is most unfortunate, because Comments on the Society of the Spectacle is the only book of theory we have from Debord's later period (he committed suicide in 1994) and because, unlike his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, it has only been translated once and that translation has been accepted as valid by English-speaking readers all over the world.

Supposedly Debord approved Imrie's translation. But he should have known better: neither a political activist nor a professional translator, Imrie was a senior editor at Verso, the very press that published his translation. Today, Imrie's is a hustler: a partner in the London-based literary agency Imrie & Dervis.

[Our translation is Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle is not copyrighted, and can be reproduced by anyone, provided that we are credited for the work we have done. — NOT BORED! 17 August 2005]