Vilém Flusser: An Introduction

3. Translation and Multilingual Writing

Translation and Multilingual Writing 45 3| Theoretical Concept and Creative Principle Translation is in many respects of major importance in Flusser’s life and work: it is at the same time a philosophical concept, a critical tool and creative principle, an art and craft of writing, and a metaphor for a nomadic existence between cultures and continents. Translation serves a specific way of thinking, writing , and living. Flusser wrote most of his texts in two or more of his four writing languages—Portuguese, German, English, and French—continuously translating and retranslating himself. Furthermore, his life, enacted between two continents, can be interpreted as an existence “in translation,” in Salman Rushdie’s understanding, when he described the rootless lives of the exiled and displaced in a contemporary multicultural global economy. In an interview with Hans Joachim Lenger in Hamburg in 1990, published in Zwiegespräche, Flusser sums up his lifelong interest in the subject: “Perhaps everything I do is an attempt to elaborate a theory of translation. But I am not going to live long enough to do that” (ZG, 149). In the 1960s, Flusser wrote a series of essays about the concept of translation in an attempt to elaborate a comprehensive theory 46 | translation and multilingual writing in the field. His extremely ambitious project, at that time, was conceived as a synthesis of Heidegger’s existentialism and Wittgenstein ’s philosophy of language through a theory of translation , reuniting the two main strands of philosophical thinking in the West: the Continental, phenomenological, hermeneutic, and the analytical Anglo-American school. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he attempted twice to write a longer study on the subject but had to give up, producing drafts of texts only: Problemas em tradução [Problems in Translation]1 and Reflexões sobre a traduzibilidade [Reflections on Translatability]. He possibly considered Wittgenstein’s verdict that any encompassing theory of translation is unattainable as each individual case calls for its own unique theoretical solution, a pragmatic maxim he also applied to his own daily translating activity. Although afterward , the subject of translation practically disappeared from his texts—with very few exceptions—his ideas about translation resurface in many guises in his later communication and media theory and find a practical application in the systematic multilingual writing practice that Flusser expanded and refined in the course of his career, truly one of the most fascinating traits of this multitalented philosopher. Flusser used the concept of translation not only as a concrete practice to be theoretically analyzed in and of itself but also as a metaphor to be used within and across other fields of research, in his case, philosophy and history as well as communication and media theory. Apart from reconstructing the main lines of Flusser’s theory and practice of translation, the main questions to be asked here would therefore have to be as follows: what is the actual relevance of Flusser’s ideas on translation for translation studies at large, especially after the cultural turn has reshuffled and redefined the field?2 In which way could his theoretical and practical heritage inform the ongoing debate? And finally, may Flusser’s use of translation help the development translation and multilingual writing | 47 of an operational concept of translation within other discursive fields? We are going to deal with some of these aspects in the present chapter and with others in the following one, especially in connection with Flusser’s theory of media evolution, which heavily draws on a view of history as a series of translational leaps developed in the 1960s. Zooming Out Translation is to be found everywhere in Flusser’s work, sometimes in the most surprising guises. It not only represents one of the central moments of his whole philosophical system but it also functions as a sort of hidden principle of writing and rewriting , one of Flusser’s most important, if not the most relevant, creative driving force, a basso continuo reverberating through his complex, many-layered, labyrinthine work. Flusser’s oeuvre could be interpreted as an ever-expanding spiral organized around a few loosely interconnected concepts suspended above an empty, groundless center. Each new writing effort presents an attempt to translate what has already been written into a new context and onto a new level of meaning. The following example shall illustrate this. Flusser started his writing career from a linguistic theory of reality, moving on to communication and media...