Denise Kahn was born on June 26, 1896, to a French-speaking family in Sarreguemines, then part of the German imperial province of Alsace-Lorraine. Simone Kahn (later Simone Breton) was a cousin.[2] By 1920 she was an active part of socialist intellectual life in Strasbourg.[3]
In 1926 she married Pierre Naville, the founding co-editor of La Révolution surréaliste.[2] In the late 1920s the pair moved away from surrealism to concentrate on supporting Trotsky against the Stalization of the Communist International. They became friends of Leon and Natalia Trotsky in exile. She helped Trotsky translate several of his books into German, and she translated his Towards Socialism or Capitalism? into French.[3]
Kahn also made translations of Arnold Schönberg's Treaty of Harmony, as well as work by Karl Marx, Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which were never published.[1] Louis Aragon's letters to Denise Lévy have been published,[4] as have those of her cousin Simone Breton.[5]
Works
Translations
(anon.) 'Leonce et Lena' by Georg Büchner, Commerce, 1924.
Correspondance complète by Friedrich Hölderlin. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Translated from the GermanInterview mit dem Tode.
Dialectique de la nature by Friedrich Engels. Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1950.
De la guerre by Carl von Clausewitz. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1955. With a preface by Camille Rougeron and an introduction by Pierre Naville. Translated from the GermanVom Kriege.
^ abcdeA. Cuenot, NAVILLE Denise, née KAHN Denise, Maitron, version posted on November 30, 2010, last modified December 11, 2020. Accessed December 21, 2020.