Given that three Italian situationists, who are co-signatories of this letter, roughed up, in your offices on 24 May [1969], the two eunuchs -- castrated on the intellectual plane as well as elsewhere -- who serve you as translators and makers of introductions (Fantinel and another), you must know that the attention of the Situationist International is henceforth upon your editorial activities in Italy.
Last year, you published The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord in an infected translation. You relapsed with [the publication of] a pseudo-book attributed to a certain Vaneigam, in which one recognized, despite the rain of mistranslations that fell from every page, the text "Basic Banalities" and two other articles by Raoul Vaneigem.
Still more serious, if that is possible, than this infamous translation -- which we believe was made with your dick, if we can be persuaded that you do not lack one -- is the fact that you claim to have taken the copyrights from the SI and reserved them for yourself in Italy. Despite the lie repeated by one of your cowardly employees on 24 May, you know quite well that you have neither asked for nor obtained any sort of copyright from the SI. Moreover, the texts published in I.S. [Internationale Situationniste] are explicitly presented as free from all copyright (concerning this point, we leave to the side the problem of your relations with the publisher Buchet-Chastel). But the fact that we allow the free reproduction of the texts published by the SI does not mean that a dog of a merchant can hope to compromise us by publishing a caricature of our writings. Moreover, your introductory notes concentrate in just a few lines a great number of false novelties and calumnies. Debord is not an "ex-communist." The SI was founded in Italy in 1957, but not in Turin and especially not at the time of an exhibition. We renounce the enumeration of other falsifications (ideology, philosopher . . . ) because you are as much a cunt as Fantinel and thus incapable of understanding what we say.
You are quite a whore, De Donato. But do you believe that you can continue your falsifications with impunity? You better not. What do you think makes you forget? Do you have the intention of leaving on sale the crude fake attributed to Raoul "Vaneigam"? How do you propose to rectify the lies already published against the SI by your little faggots?
Be assured that the revolutionary organization in the name of which we speak will not lower itself to bring against you some kind of lawsuit in a court of bourgeois justice. But if you do not step back now, you will experience all the consequences, personally and physically.
Since we know that your employees, of which you have the audacity to use as "translators" of texts, absolutely do not know French, and seeing that it is of the greatest importance that you understand our letter quickly and well, we attach to it an exact Italian translation.
(Written on the letterhead of the Situationist International.)
(First published in Internazionale Situazionista: Journal of the Italian Section of the Situationist International, #1 July 1969. Reprinted in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 4, 1969-1972. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2005.)