by Marcus E. Green

In 1957, the first English translations of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks appeared in print. Today there are at least six separate English-language anthologies that contain selected translations drawn from Gramsci’s twenty-nine Prison Notebooks.

In 1975, Valentino Gerratana edited and published the first complete and critical Italian edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, entitled Quaderni del Carcere, published by Einaudi. Since its publication, Gerratana’s edition has become the standard edition of the Prison Notebooks throughout the world.

Gerratana created a critical reference apparatus that distinguishes the notebook number and note number in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. For instance, Notebook 1, §47 indicates Notebook 1, section 47. Gramsci scholars have adopted Gerratana’s critical reference apparatus as the standard reference practice for citing Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.

In the early 1990s, Joseph A. Buttigieg began translating a complete and critical English edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks based upon the Gerratana edition. Columbia University Press published Volume 1 in 1992, which contains Notebooks 1 and 2, and in 1996 published Volume 2, which contains Notebooks 3, 4, and 5.

Because there are many incomplete anthologies of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks available in English, it is often difficult to cross-reference the various anthologies with the critical edition. Because of this problem, I have organized two sets of concordance tables. The tables list the translations of the Prison Notebooks available English, and they cross-reference the page numbers of the anthologies with the critical reference apparatus (i.e. notebook # and note #).

TABLE 1: Anthologies of the Prison Notebooks
This table cross-references the page numbers of three major anthologies of the Prison Notebooks with the notebook numbers and note numbers that correspond to the critical reference apparatus. The anthologies include:

Selection from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

Selections from Cultural Writings. Translated by William Boelhower. Edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985/1991.

Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Derek Boothman. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995.

TABLE 2: Critical English Edition of the Prison Notebooks
This table includes a list of the critical English translations of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks published to date:

Prison Notebooks, Vol. 1. Translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari. Edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2. Translated and edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

To view a list of previously published concordance tables, click here.

First published on the IGS website: June 2002.