The cover of 'Red Chartist' by Helen Macfarlane. Photo: Helen Macfarlane.

By Helen Macfarlane

Red Chartist

By Helen Macfarlane

by Simon Webb 15th November 2024

It must occasionally happen that translators would rather not work on a particular passage. Perhaps such a thing happened to the Scottish Chartist Helen Macfarlane when she was translating The Communist Manifesto from its original German. She was a socialist with strong religious beliefs, whereas Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels seem to have regarded religion as a dead end.