Current Issue
Guest edited by Elke Brems, Pieter Boulogne & Jack McMartin.
Cover image: Russian revolutionary Poster, Moscow 1918. From redavantgarde.com.
This focus issue proposes to examine the international travels of one of the world’s most widely translated songs, L’Internationale. Its text was written by Eugène Pottier in French in 1871 as a poem to commemorate the Paris Commune of Spring 1871, the first time French workers took state power into their own hands, shortly after the Franco-Prussian War. The Commune was violently quelled by the conservative French government in Versailles. Seventeen years later, in1888, the Belgian socialist and composer Pierre De Geyter set Pottier’s poem to music. The song has since travelled in many languages and versions and has become a worldwide symbol of social struggle.
This focus issue seeks to consolidate new research on translations and adaptations of L’Internationale in different languages, historical contexts, social settings and media and explore the transnational and transmedial links between them. In doing so, we want to demonstrate how insights from (song)translation studies, reception studies, cultural memory studies and social history can be combined productively to explore the worldwide circulation and myriad social uses of one of the world’s most iconic and impactful songs.
