THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Communism may not be having a field day at the moment, but Marx and Engels’s little slim book surely is.
The Communist Manifesto, one of the most influential works in modern history that shaped human thinking and the very destinies of nations, has got a new Malayalam translation.
The Centre for South Indian Studies (CSIS) at Kudappanakkunnu, here has come out with the new version, 73 years after the manifesto was first translated into Malayalam.
The book, which is copylefted - a la free software - and priced at Rs 15, will be released here on Monday.
``Communist and socialist political philosophies were founded on this slim text. It contains the cream of those philosophies,’’ Dr R Raman Nair, one of the ten translators who jointly produced the new version, said.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels prepared the original manifesto in German in January 1847.
It was published on February 21 the next year.
The first Malayalam translation came in 1937, but it is not exactly sure who the translator or the translators were.
The work is widely attributed to E M S Namboodiripad and K Damodaran.
That first Malayalam translation was titled `Samashtivaadavijnanam’.
Later, in 1947, E V Dev brought out another translation which was published by Prabhat Book House from Kollam. Then, erstwhile USSR’s Progress Publishers rolled out another one.
``This version was beautifully type-set and was immensely popular,’’ said CSIS secretary and translator C S Sathi Kumar.
Today, that translation is still made available by party-backed publishing houses such as Chintha.
The CSIS translators have chiefly depended on the English translation available on the Gutenberg Project and the old Progress Publishers’ translation.
There are some changes from the extant Malayalam version. A reader had to trudge through several introductions - each one written by Marx and Engels for successive editions - before reaching the text proper.
CSIS has compressed all of that into a single preface written by historian K N Panikkar.