'Just Past' Kase Notes:
Franz Josef - The Long Retreat over 60 years… from
Galicia… or (HRH E II) Ukania
There is a a strange smell on the dance floor. Is It just a funny smell, or perhaps something more sinister? Either way it is impossible to ignore. Gas. A real party-pooper… That Most Terrible Pong!
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Fishy Tales – Like old herrings, gone off: the way the old have of stopping around too long, and the ‘lessons of history’, the recurrent narrative of the destruction of the young by the older generation. No longer red, resistance is articulated in a tragic voice.
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Hobgoblins
Red Republican (9 Nov 1950) – there, among the books in chains, and other printed objects on display behind locked glass cabinets, was the front page from Red Republican, 9 Nov 1850, which included the first translation into English of Marx's famous opening Sentence from Das Kapital, which begins, "Ein gespenst geht um in Europe…".
The translation into English in the Red Republican was made anonymously (a note by the exhibit explains that it was in fact by Helen Macfarlane). The first sentence is given in English as follows:
"A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe, We are haunted by a ghost, the
ghost of communism.''
A hobgoblin also appears in Walter Benjamin's writing, and it was Susan Sontag's idea in her introduction to an English translation of Benjamin's writing in the 1960's (One Way Street etc) to use a hobgoblin to describe the malignant force which drove him from his homeland, and to his lonely death beneath the passes of the Pyrenees between France and Spain in 1940.