Maggs Bros.

The first complete Mexican edition of all three volumes of Das Kapital, an immensely popular new translation undertaken by the Spanish-Mexican Marxist academic Wenceslao Roces (1897-1992), frequently reprinted and arguably the most widely disseminated of all the Spanish translations.

Roces was a member of the Spanish Communist Party who as Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education and Fine Arts during the Second Spanish Republic. He was forced to flee Spain after Republic’s defeat in the Spanish Civil War and lived out the rest of his life in exile in Latin America, taking up academic positions in Chile and Cuba before finally settling in Mexico.

The first complete Spanish translation of all three volumes of Das Kapital had been published in Madrid in 1931. The translation had been undertaken by Manuel Pedroso and included an entirely new translation of the first volume along with the first ever Spanish translations of the second and third volumes. Another complete translation was published in Buenos Aires in the same year as the Wenceslao Roces translation, including a reprint of Juan Justo translation of the first volume (originally published in 1898) along with yet another entirely new translation of the second and third volumes by Juan E. Hausner.

See: Victoria Correa Merlassino, ‘Guide to the Analysis of the Spanish Translation of Karl Marx’s Capital’.