Episode 3: Translating Rosa Luxemburg in the 21st Century, with Rida Vaquas

Thanks to those who attended last Saturday’s All-Patron Meeting! Particular thanks must go to our guest Rida Vaquas, a translator working alongside me on translating Rosa Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, who kindly gave a talk about her translations and the potential political implications of translating Rosa Luxemburg today.

Here is a rough breakdown of the topics that Rida covers:

00:00 Introduction and outline of her translations, what Luxemburg’s writings reveal about the healthy political culture of open debate in the socialist movement of the time

6:50 Responding to questions from the audience about the articles she is translating

08:15 Explaining the differences between Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin on the nature and role of the socialist youth movement

11:15 Exploring how these differences fed into debates about whether the aim of the socialist movement was to fulfil the promises of bourgeois culture and education, or whether it was actually a divergence from these promises

12:20 Discussing Rosa’s attitude towards party discipline in 1910 and the role of republicanism in the socialist movement

15:40 Looking at the state of play with the translation of Rosa’s works

18:05 Exploring the significance of Polish sources in understanding Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of the revolutionary party and her role as a political leader

19:10 Discussing Rosa Luxemburg’s letters, the fact that so few of them have been translated and the ‘over-representation’ of love letters in the English editions of her correspondence

You can follow Rida on Twitter @rida_again. Her translations and writings can be found in the Prometheus Journal and on Cosmonaut.