An extraordinary copy of the earliest Spanish translation of Das Kapital, uncut in the original parts and unbound as first issued.
The partial translation was undertaken by the Spanish federalist republican Pablo Correa y Zafrilla (1844-1888) and serialised between 1886 to 1887 as bimonthly supplements issued to subscriber’s of the newspaper La República, the official organ of the Partido Republicano Federal, Spain’s ruling party during the First Spanish Republic of 1873-1874. The translation was announced by La República in late-January 1886, and the first part was issued to subscribers on February 10, 1886 (as reflected by the 1886 date on the title page). The remaining parts were issued on 10th and 25th of each month, and publication was completed by mid-1887, when La República started advertising the complete parts for sale unbound or in a cloth binding (“elegantes tapas de tela”). A later issue title page is referenced by Uroyeva (p. 240) with a publication date of ‘1887’, which was presumably issued for these complete bound versions.
The Correa y Zafrilla translation was hastily prepared and defectively translated with various simplifications and garbling. Moreover, despite Pablo Correa’s preface explicitly stating that his version was taken directly from the original German (“En la traducción he procurado ser fiel al original”, p. iv), it actually consisted of only the first half (chapters 1-12) of the first French translation by Joseph Roy, originally published in 1872-75, as proved by extensive cross-comparison undertaken by Pedro Ribas (1985). The translator’s preface also expressed Correa y Zafrilla’s intention to undertake a translation of the posthumously published second volume of Das Kapital (“No renuncio también a traducir esa segunda parte”), which would never materialise, and the incompleteness of the Correa y Zafrilla translation of volume one may well be explained by his untimely death on April 19, 1888.
A rival partial Spanish translation of Das Kapital was published later in 1887, produced in direct response to the Correa y Zafrilla version by the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), Spain’s foremost socialist political party founded by Pablo Iglesias in 1879. With close ties to the German Socialist Party, the PSOE responded quickly to what they perceived as a besmirchment of Marxist orthodoxy, beginning work as early as April 1887 on a translation of the famous Gabriel Deville abridgement of the first volume of Das Kapital, originally published in French in 1883. The PSOSE translation of the Deville abridgement was enormously successful, remaining the most widely read version of Marx’s Kaptial in Spain well into 1930s, despite the appearance of the first complete Spanish translation of Das Kapital in 1898. In contrast, the Correa y Zafrilla translation received little to no attention at the time of its first appearance and thereafter, an obscurity that was no doubt cemented by the absolutely scarcity of the publication.
Rare. OCLC list single copies in Spain (Ateneu Barcelonès) and Argentina (Universidad Católica de Córdoba). KVK adds another copy in Spain at Universidad de Salamanca. RareBookHub list only one copy to have a sold at auction, appearing at Galerie Bassenge, Berlin in 2018, in an early twentieth century binding, which sold for EUR 29,520 including premium.
See: Pedro Ribas, ‘La primera traducción castellana de “El capital”’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, No. 420, 1985, pp. 201-210; Horacio Tarcus, La biblia del proletariado: Traductores y editores de El capital, Siglo XXI Editores, 2019.
The Pablo Correa translation is conspicuous in its absence from most of the standard bibliographical works on Karl Marx such as Draper or Rubel, with the exception of A. Uroyeva’s For All Time and All Men (1969), Moscow, Progress Publishers, p. 251.
