translations

  ---- by Richard G. Smith

  Baudrillard began his career in 1956, teaching German at a provincial French high school (lycée). From 1966, Baudrillard was employed by the University of Paris X at Nanterre to teach sociology and rapidly established himself as an academic sociologist through the publication of a number of books that interrogated the culture of consumption in western societies. However, spanning this early period - between 1956 and 1971 Baudrillard also translated a number of works from German to French.

  The bulk of Baudrillard's translations are of plays by the late Peter Weiss (d. 1982). From 1964 to 1968, five translations of Peter Weiss's plays were published (1964, 1965, 1966, 1968a, 1968b). Weiss's plays of the mid-1960s are illustrative of his temporary commitment to revolutionary socialism, and it is telling that it is these particular plays that Baudrillard chose to translate. For example, Weiss's (1965) The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade is his most famous play, and is generally known as Marat/Sade. It involves a dialectical discussion of individualism and socialism, and his Discourse on the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Vietnam and the Events Leading Up to It as Illustration of the Necessity for Armed Resistance Against Oppression and on the Attempts of the United States of America to Destroy the Foundations of Revolution (1968b) is also staunchly Marxist, narrating both the historical antecedents to the Vietnam conflict and fiercely condemning the United States and France for warmongering.

  As well as a translation of Bertolt Brecht's play Dialogues of Exile, Baudrillard also translated Mühlmann's Messianic Revolutionaries in the Third World, a sociological work on Third World messianic and millenarian movements which consists of a series of socio-psychological analyses of Les movements nativestes. Thus Baudrillard was at this time translating important works from the political Left. Indeed, he also translated in this period Marx and Engels' The German Ideology and Engels' The Role of Violence in History. Having translated ten (1956, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968a, 1968b, 1968c,1968d, 1969) texts from German to French, taught German and provided the accompanying text for René Burri's Germans (1963) - a classic work of postwar European documentary photography - it is evident that Baudrillard was, and remained throughout his life, a passionate Germanist. However, it is also clear through his translations, and his involvement with the journal Utopie, that Baudrillard was, in these early years, aligned intellectually with an oppositional climate in France that stood against the Arab-Israeli War (1967) and the Vietnam War, and which culminated in the protests of May 1968.

  Passwords

   § may 1968

   § photography

   § politics

   § Utopie