#WomenInTranslation: Red Rosa around the world
Celebrating #WomenInTranslation month this August, our last post in this series highlights foreign editions of Kate Evans' illustrated biography of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born German Jewish revolutionary whose life, work and writings in German, Polish and Russian have inspired generations in the nearly 100 years since her untimely death.
Befitting the status of an icon for worldwide socialist revolution, Kate Evan's beautifully drawn Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg has been translated since its 2015 publication into Korean, Turkish, Slovenian, Spanish and French.
Red Rosa: a graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans. Edited by Paul Buhle
First published by Verso in 2015.
A giant of the political left, Rosa Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the canon of revolutionary socialist thought. But she was much more than just a thinker. She made herself heard in a world inimical to the voices of strong-willed women. She overcame physical infirmity and prejudice she faced as a Jewish woman to become an active revolutionary whose philosophy enriched every corner of an incredibly productive and creative life, among her friends and lovers and with passion for science, nature and art.
Always opposed to the First World War, when others on the German left were swept up on a tide of nationalism, she was imprisoned and murdered in 1919 fighting for a revolution she knew to be doomed.
In this beautifully drawn work of graphic biography, writer and artist Kate Evans has opened up her subject’s intellectual world to a new audience, grounding Luxemburg’s ideas in the realities of an inspirational and deeply affecting life.
레드 로자: 만화로 보는 로자 룩셈부르크 [ledeu loja : manhwalo boneun loja lugsembuleukeu]
Korean edition, 2016. Translated by Seok-Jun Jang; Kyung-Sun Park. Published in Seoul by San Books.
Kızıl Rosa : Rosa Luxemburg'un resimli yaşam öyküsü
Turkish edition, 2016. Translated by F. Devrim Kılıçer. Published in Istanbul by Epos Yayınları.
Rdeča Rosa : biografija Rose Luxemburg v risoromanu
Slovenian edition, 2016. Translated by Anja Golob; Katja Šaponjić. Published in Prevalje by Zavod VigeVageKnjige.
La Rosa roja : Novela biográfica sobre Rosa Luxemburg
Spanish edition, 2017. Translated by Alejandra Crosta. Published in Madrid by Izquierda Diaro.
Rosa la rouge
French edition, 2017. Translated by Jérôme Vidal. Published in Paris by Editions Amsterdam.
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Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Polish-born Jewish revolutionary and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist movement. An activist in Germany and Poland, the author of numerous classic works, she participated in the founding of the German Communist Party and the Spartacist insurrection in Berlin in 1919. She was assassinated in January of that year and has become a hero of socialist, communist and feminist movements around the world.
Kate Evans is a cartoonist, artist, and activist. She is the author of numerous books and zines including Threads From the Refugee Crisis and Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Climate Change but Probably Should Find Out.
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The first in this #WomenInTranslation series of Verso books in foreign translation featured Artificial Hells by Claire Bishop. The second featured Precarious Life by Judith Butler.
For books by women from around the world translated into English by Verso, see Women in Translation: A Celebratory Reading List!