Marx-Engels Correspondence 1889

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 16, 1889

Anyhow you have done a marvellous thing in the Senator, about the most difficult thing on earth to be put into English. Not only that you have done it with all the proper impropriety, but even with a near approach to the lightness of the original. And that while both subject and metre are rebellious to translation, the senator of Empire No. 142 being an unknown quantity over here. If you were a boy I should say: Molodetz, but I am not versed enough in Russian to know whether that epithet (equal about to the English: you're a brick!) can be feminised into: Molodtza!