Your letter of 4 February has followed me here after a slight delay. To translate the entirety of the journal I.S. would be an immense amount of work.[1] But it would indeed be the best way of correcting the truly unilateral point of view of the Americans.[2] It is certainly very just to apply our old anti-copyright[3] formula to the courageous edition that Taku Fukada has ventured to undertake.
Tell me if one of your friends can read Italian. In such case, I will send you a book by Anselm Jappe (Debord, Edizioni Tracce, Pescara). It is no doubt the best-informed book about me, written by a German man who explicitly takes up a Hegelian-Marxist point of view.
At the beginning of the summer, you will receive Alice's new book, The Essence of Jargon, which goes even further in her explication of argot and its relations with the divisions in society. As I know you are interested in such questions, and since you are already the best specialist in Japan concerning this era of French contestatory thought, Alice proposes to you the exclusive translation rights to her two books. It would be necessary for you to find a richer publisher than Taku Fukada. These are scientific discoveries, hardly debatable when they are known. They are not dangerous "philosophical" opinions, nor do they place in doubt the desirable future of this society.
In case this idea should come to fruition, we advise you to read La Method a Mimile, by Alphonse Boudard, which you must translate. Not that there exists the least shared point in the opinions of these two authors. Boudard is [merely] a talented humorous writer, but he will give you a certain familiarity with the vocabulary of French argot. Please assure your translating comrades of my cordial sympathy. Continue to write me in Champot, from which letters always follow me, wherever I go.
Very amicably to you,[1] Volume I, which included translations of the first three issues of Internationale Situationniste, was published in April 1994.
[2] Translator's note: though it might appear that Debord is referring to Ken Knabb's Situationist International Anthology (1981), he is actually referring to Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces (1989), which -- unlike Knabb's collection -- places its emphasis on art and the first few years of the SI, not on politics and the SI in the post-1968 period.
[3] Translator's note: English in original.
(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2009. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)