I add some news to our collective letter of the 17th.[2]
Yesterday I received a copy of La Société du spectacle translated and published in Italy several days ago (De Donato editore, Bari). This might add an argument in your discussions with English publishers.
But the most important point is that I have never been kept up to date by my French publisher.[3] From the start, our relations have been cold, because I have refused any meeting with journalists. And since his discovery of the threatened revolution, I believe that he has regretted being compromised with subversive ideas that are not stripped of practical significance, with the result that we are enemies.
In such conditions, to assure you of having the [rights to the] English translation, you must quickly obtain the agreement of an English publisher who would buy the rights from Buchet and Gallimard.[4]
If we are warned of the identity of this English publisher early enough, we could obviously intervene and demand that the translation be made by you and your friends.
Quite cordially,P.S. Attached[5] are the choices of texts from the SI that are used in the Italian “anthology” to be published by Silva in Genoa.
[1] From the London group Circuit, which published a translation of On the Poverty of Student Life.
[2] Translator: this letter appears to have been lost.
[3] Buchet-Chastel, first publisher of La Société du spectacle. [The second was Editions Champ Libre, circa 1971, and the third was Gallimard in 1992.]
[4] The rights for Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement. [Both Enragés and Vaneigem’s Treatise on Living, aka The Revolution of Everyday Life, had been published by Gallimard in 1968.]
[5] Translator: not included in this volume.
(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol "0": Septembre 1951 - Juillet 1957: Complete des "lettres retrouvees" et d l'index general des noms cites by Librairie Artheme Fayard, October 2010. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! April 2011. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)