I just looked for an essay in one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations. What a chaotic mess the different editions and translations are. The English text with the title Situations (1965) is a partial translation of volume IV. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [What is Literature?] is in volume II of the first edition, and volume III of the later more chronological one, and available as a separate text in French and English. The English collection Literary and Philosophical Essays picks essays from volumes I and III. The reprint edition of Situations I as Critiques littéraires is of the first edition, not the updated one; the English Critical Essays is a complete translation of the first edition, but not the second edition which came out the same year as the translation. Situations philosophiques reprints texts from different volumes. Situations V has the subtitle Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme, and is translated as Colonialism and Neocolonialism, but I don’t think the English is of the updated version. The first edition of Situations III is translated as The Aftermath of War, but there is also a volume with the same press called Post-War Reflections, which has just the first two parts. There are also a bunch of thematic volumes with Seagull that translate many of these essays – but follow neither Sartre’s initial organisation nor the more chronological second edition. I’m sure there are more confusions.

[update 21 June 2024: a more systematic outline of contents and translations is here.]

The French wikipedia pages are useful – start with Situations I and follow the Chronologie for the other nine volumes. This says what is in the first and later edition of each volume, But has any ever tried to do a bibliography of where the essays are translated? My quick sense is that some essays are available in more than one translation, and certainly in more than one English collection, but that there are other essays which haven’t been translated. I was only, initially, looking for one piece, but it’s opened up what seems to be a really chaotic situation…

Update: Modern Times has some of the essays – some available elsewhere, others not. Portraits is a complete translation of the first edition of Situations IV. Thanks to Patrick ffrench for the information on the first. The essay I was looking for, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” is in Situations III in the first edition and II in the second.

Update 17 and 18 June: my quick take on what should have been done is this. By all means produce a chronological reordering of material, including other essays, but do it systematically and don’t call it the same thing as the earlier French edition – Chroniques, for example. Or add supplemental essays to the existing arrangement. And with the translations, either do all new translations on a systematic basis, which seems to be what Seagull were doing initially, or translate the essays which are not already in English in thematic volumes. Chris Turner has done a huge amount of work with this, but the thematic volumes with Seagull look like they include a lot of previously translated material.

I know from the Foucault shorter essays how difficult it is – Essential Works reprinted a lot of previously available material, but without completely making any previous collection redundant, along with much new material. But its selection of material from Dits et écrits has made it difficult to propose a more systematic version – so many of the ‘best’ essays are already available, often in multiple collections. It has taken Richard Lynch’s bibliographical labours, now being updated by Daniele Lorenzini, to make sense of the English translations.

But from my initial look at the Sartre essays, it seems the case is even more complicated, as there are two French editions. I should also say I’m not against translations which select essays – that was done with a couple of Lefebvre collections I co-edited, for example. There are good reasons for this – not all the essays in a French collection are of the same interest for an Anglophone audience, choices might need to be made for cost, etc. But with Lefebvre we’ve tried to avoid reprinting essays which are already translated, usually only if they were incomplete initially or in hard-to-find places.