Marx and Engels on the Procrustean Bed: Translating The Communist Manifesto in 1970s Beirut

Abstract

Within three years in the early 1970s, two new Arabic translations of The Communist Manifesto appeared in Beirut. The translations were part of a much larger project undertaken by the city’s publishing houses of introducing Marxist modes of analysis to the Arabic public sphere. The result, Ahmad Agbaria writes, was the appearance “of a wholly ‘new Marx.’” Who was this “new Marx”? He represents, I argue, not only a break from the “old Marxes”—of the Soviet and European types—but the renunciation of an “original” Marx altogether. This new Marx was constituted by a “double anchoring” of oppositional or subversive thought developed outside of the Arab world and its mediation with new “Arabic languages of the present.” Finally, while he was perhaps a common dream of the New Arab Left, he was not an uncontested figure. His translators approached him with such urgency because they recognized the stakes involved.