A few translator’s observations on The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch

Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944

Bloomsbury Academic 2025

Translated and edited by Iona Singh

Sick of thinking my own thoughts and writing them down, the possibility of trying to get into someone else’s thoughts and writing them down instead interested me. I knew Lucien Febvre’s work and his subtle approach to the role of feelings from A new kind of history, Sensibility and history and History and psychology (RKP 1973). These are fantastic essays, unique in their field, the kind you dream about when trying to understand the social and political affects of art and design, for example, and they can be applied way beyond the realms of historical studies. And Febvre, in these essays kept mentioning this person Bloch, he died in the war, shot by the Germans, and was a great loss.

When I first began as a French to English translator, some years before, I had the naive idea that some of the ‘Frenchness’ of the original language should be maintained in the translation, if possible, even if this was not quite correct English. A slight miscommunication with the editor of a Publisher I was translating several books for convinced me they wanted a literal translation of the tenses used in French. English and French are different in this way, the imperfect tense, for example, is used more frequently in French. I’m embarrassed to say this now, but I followed this through and the translation read like the events were ongoing and in the present, like the editorial of Hello magazine. Luckily, the misunderstanding was soon straightened out, forgiven, and I never did that again!

This is one set of innumerable choices that the translator must make to determine not just how to interpret the meaning of the original writing but also the way it is expressed, I would call this the politics of translation. Is a text to be translated formally or officiously or is it casual, should I use slang words or stick to polite terms, middle class or aristocratic phrases and how literal do you need to be in the translation in order to really convey what the writer wants.

They were all questions I needed to mull, especially when translating the writings of Marc Bloch. In the beginning it still seemed charming to retain a little of his French expressions and grammar, but by the time I had finished, over years, I ended up understanding that I only needed to convey what Bloch actually MEANT and that alone. And often these charming Frenchisms got in the way and definitely had to GO.

Translating a work awards a great deal of power, leverage and responsibility to an interpreter. For me the best way to honour that was to grasp the sentiment of what Bloch wanted to say, the feeling, as well as the language. I decided it needed to be like Bloch chatting out loud and explaining it. His writing has a chatty element and by the end of the process, every time I read it, I could hear him saying the words out to me in English (with an English accent)?!

It helps a translator to understand what they can about the personality of the translated. When I began stumbling through Bloch’s long sinuous sentences (even his biographer Carole Fink mentioned these as difficult) and pairing them with the stiff war time photos of a middle-aged Bloch and his grand position in French education, I was intimidated into reading and translating his texts literally and formally, which came across as a bit boring and slightly pompous. But with perseverance the nuances emerged and I realised it was in fact ME reading these things into the work. If his writing is a bit polite and formal at times it needs to be adjusted against the politeness and formality of the epoch which is finally therefore negated to reveal that Bloch, who was mainly addressing young people, students, and academics from outside the mainstream discipline of history, was trying to convey things on their level. From then on, the sentiment of what Bloch actually MEANT and how he meant to say it was much clearer.

And how did he mean to say it? After Bloch’s death in the war Lucien Febvre recalls him recounting an argument wearing ‘that slightly amused look on his face’. And that image clicked with me, because on removing those barriers whether from Bloch’s own pages or from inside my head, it dovetailed with the texts to reveal that Bloch was funny. That the contradictions he points out are befuddling puzzles he’s trying to solve, and they often quite amuse him.

The difficulty of trying to get to this as a translator, to facilitate his words as if he is enunciating them, (some of the chapters in the book are transcriptions of lectures) and informally speaking to his class, became the main challenge. When translating from French, the words chosen from the available English are not, of course, to be translated on their own, they are part of a line of words, and sentences of words, and each of these, adjusts the others. The meaning, starts as a fluid dynamic, moving through the intellectual variables of space and time, but gradually in view of the wider text, this is homed in and any inexactitudes whittled away until the meanings are contained within their correct limits and the spirit, irony, and humour finally comes clean.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Marc Bloch chatting to me over many afternoons while the thread of his language was checked and rechecked, even if I couldn’t get a word in. Sometimes little paragraphs that caused so much trouble at the time come back to me out of the blue. Ancient words in French I did not know but now will never forget, and I’ve talked about them so much to my husband that he won’t forget them either. And now the book is published it's a bit of a shame to leave my talkative old mate behind.

A reviewer of the book mentioned that Bloch’s voice ‘shines through’ from within the edition but made no reference to the role of translation in this. Bloch’s voice does shine through, but not of its own accord as some transcendental force that asserts itself under any circumstances, it shines through by the material mechanics of translation, the processes of understanding what that voice is and of eventually ridding it of anything that stifles it.  

Iona Singh

The paperback edition of The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944 with be available from 20 August 2026 from Bloomsbury Academic https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/selected-writings-of-marc-bloch-9781350513433/ and Amazon.

Iran War Notes

Netanyahu, the leader of Israel, sounds reasonable in his speech and his answers to the press questions, he has a nice voice, and is always composed. This is 19/03/2026 during the war on Iran by the US and Israel. The war was started by these powers without warning during negotiations with Iran. The justification has varied for the US and Trump, flipping between the apparent nuclear threat, to the killing of protesters by the Iranian authorities, to regime change.  Now, as Netanyahu speaks, he refers to Iran’s conventional weapons that it has developed, describing them as a way for Iran to develop and protect nuclear weapons. So now, also, Iran may not even develop conventional weapons, as far as these powers are concerned. In effect this means that Iran may not have a state, be a state, an authority with power.

The argument that these allied powers were encouraging an uprising by the Iranian people rings hollow, now, because the bombing, such as of needed infrastructure and the oil storage facilities around Tehran, which affects Iranians badly, does not engender sympathy even from the rebels.

On a news programme, Trump expressed surprise that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz as part of its retaliation. The strait is a narrow point in the vital global trade route for shipping, especially of fossil fuels. This in itself is surprising, both that he did not expect it, and that he would admit to not expecting it. But Trump is hard to pin down, he sows confusion and appears to operate on whims. The attack on the giant gas field shared between Iran and Quatar. Was this known by Trump or not? Who knows. Trump seems to deny knowing it, perhaps because it would not be liked too much by Quatar, a supposed ally.

It seems incredible that the leaders of Iran especially, after all this time, do not seem to realize that the US and Israel work together, they are a ‘double act’ so to speak. Or maybe they just go along with the illusion. Israel manages to assassinate Iran’s leaders almost at will, but still Iran seems to be capable of defending itself with its missiles and drones.

The question is, does Israel and the US really want to degrade Iran to the extent that it represents no threat? Do they not need a good excuse for war every now and then? And what do they really expect from regime change if it were to happen? Not a progressive revolution of course, they do not want a competing progressive democracy or socialism in this fossil fuel rich location, they would prefer the return of the Shah type of aristocracy, it is easier for them to make deals with and exploit.

None of the ‘analysts’ of this war drawn on by the western media bring into the account of this conflict the role of class. The US military bases strewn throughout the region exist because the regional royalty, their ruling classes want them, because they help them control their own working classes. Iran is the different one, the exception, it had a revolution but went one step forwards and two steps backwards, it ejected western interests and deposed the Shah but installed the clerics and absolute religious authority. But it does not have the US bases and is unfriendly to US regional influence, and Israel. It is therefore not entirely untrue that Iran does not represent a threat to the world if it develops nuclear weapons.

But it is also true that we are always threatened by the nuclear weapons in the hands of people like Trump and Netanyahu, and Hitlerism grew out of a democracy, so what is different about Iran? Iran must not have nuclear weapons according to the western powers for a hidden reason, because it is near all the oil and the main trade route for it. For this reason, the Middle East in general must be kept virtually medieval, and it must be reduced into this condition periodically by the imperial powers. It must be made and kept barbaric. This is simple capitalist imperialist competition at work.

What, in any case, is the specific difference with Iran having nuclear weapons to other countries that have them? Aside from the argument that they are crazy, Netanyahu claimed in his speech that if they had nuclear weapons, they would blackmail the world. Is this true? Apart from trying to know what is in the psychology of the future Iranian regime if it had nuclear weapons, what would be their actual, material, advantage? After all, they would only be in the same position as every other nuclear power. If they were to use the bomb, there would be mutually assured destruction, and no winners. Clearly the only real difference would be that other nuclear powers would not be able to sway them with threats so easily, the nuclear powers would lose influence in this region, which in the end is to lose profits.

Regarding the accusation of craziness, Iran has Islam as a state religion, unlike for instance Judaism in the state of Israel. The west implies that this state religion is especially unhinged. History does not prove this, yet every religion has its extreme evangelists who can become state terrorists. At this moment it is the democratic west led by Trump and Netanyahu that is being terrorist, but on a grand crusading imperialist scale that makes the label seem weak and inappropriate. Religion is dangerous because it is faith, and faith knows no bounds.

Coming back to earth, by missing out class in their analysis, the leaders of the west also miss out the thorny issue of their own workers not being able to afford to buy fuel for their cars to get to work and the cost of living is rising again. These are ostensibly at least democracies, which have public opinion, which in the US is opposed to this war. In the Middle East what the working classes think and feel is a mystery to them, at least as far as they let us see. Iran attacks the neighbouring Middle Eastern countries that host US military bases from which they are being attacked, as they obviously would. These attacks must affect the class relations in these countries, causing some wobbles. Thus, it is not only Iran that could develop regime change given this war and its unsettling conditions.

Generally western leaders, in an amazing show of brazen hypocrisy, denounce Iran for attacking these countries (i.e. defending itself) and remain quiet about the unlawful surprise attack by Israel and the US on Iran, which started this war. Brazen hypocrisy is clearly the name of the game these days, it is presumably a rather strange way to try to hang onto a vestige of moral high ground, but they cannot refer to international law anymore, which died with Gaza. This might be seen as the law of the jungle, but in the jungle it is simpler, there is less connivance, subterfuge, espionage, backstabbing, etc., all the hallmarks of human economic contradictions and struggle.

And all this fighting is over fossil fuels, all this extra pollution, at a time when we least need it, when the planet is warming alarmingly due to the burning of these fuels. Truly the global bourgeois classes seem to want to cement their reputation as totally unfit to rule.