Thank you very much for the translation of the Preface.[2] It is a very well-made edition.[3]
The Blunt affair[4] shows the modernism of English democracy in the most pleasant light and confirms that the novels of John le Carre[5] are not too fantastic.
In France, ever since Giscard's example,[6] one only counts money in carats, a unit of measurement that is more elegant and more stable than the guinea. But nothing goes as far as in Italy, where the authorities have finally discovered links between the SI and the Red Brigades! One can say that the SI is like radioactivity: one speaks little of it, but one detects traces of it almost everywhere, and it lasts a long time.
Best wishes,P.S. Would you like to send me a few more copies? Always use the Champ Libre address, which allows the mail to follow me to different places. I am very rarely in Paris.
[1] Translator's note: a bi-lingual Frenchman, living in London, and the founder of Chronos Publications.
[2] Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition of "The Society of the Spectacle" (Chronos Publications, London, October 1979).
[3] Translator's note: Though it did indeed look "professional," the Chronos edition of the Preface was all-too-literal in its renderings and filled with typographical mistakes and badly worded phrases. See our "cleaned up" version of it.
[4] Anthony Blunt (1907-1983), a historian of British art. On 15 November 1979, Margaret Thatcher revealed to the House of Commons that Blunt had been a part of a network of spies in the service of the U.S.S.R. from 1940 to 1954, even when he worked for the British counter-espionage services.
[5] A diplomat and author of spy novels.
[6] And the affair of the diamonds of Bokassa.
(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 6: Janvier 1979-Decembre 1987 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2006. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! April 2007. Footnotes by Alice Debord, except where noted.)