Gestures

Translator’s Preface

translator’s Preface Flusser selected and ordered the essays to be included in Gestures1 in 1991, just months before he was killed in an automobile accident. He was living in France at the time, traveling frequently to Germany for speaking and teaching engagements, for at seventy years of age, he was enjoying a degree of fame for the first time in his life, primarily as a critic and theorist of new media in a German-speaking context. The new notoriety brought new publishing opportunities: the Gestures book was to be published in German. Yet nearly half of the selected essays were in French. Flusser wrote for publication in four languages. Of these, German was the language he used most often,2 followed, in descending order, by Portuguese, English, and French.3 He developed what appears to have been a unique pattern of translating his own essays into the other languages available to him. At the same time, he was articulating a theory of translation closely bound up with his own sense of himself as leading a nomadic, “bodenlos”—literally, “foundationless”—life. Flusser describes his own process of translation and “back-translation” (moving from a target language back into the source language) in some detail in “The Gesture of Writing,” a text written in English.4 A version of the essay—by the same name—appears in this volume of Gestures, my translation from the German text that formed part of the 1991 edition. The text published here covers much of the same theoretical ground as the version Flusser wrote in English but does not include nearly so extensive a description of his idiosyncratic patterns of thinking and writing in different languages. In fact, there are seven different versions of “The Gesture of Writing” in four different languages,5 making it a good example of the difficulty that vii viii transLator’s PrefaCe accompanies any search for an “original” text, of deciding which of many existing versions was “first,” to say nothing of which should be considered “authentic,” “definitive,” or even “complete.” It is as if we are dealing with seven different originals. Rainer Guldin sees translation as a central idea that structures Flusser’s thought as a whole.6 In a very succinct recent account of the translation practice, he writes, In Flusser’s work, nomadism is . . . metaphorically linked to a specific notion of translation as a basically endless, open-ended enterprise . The translator is forced to move on continuously, striving at the same time to get back to the origin, only to discover that there is no such possibility. Meaning is homeless and itinerant.7 Depending as it did on his very particular engagement with the languages at his command, Flusser’s self-translation process was clearly unique to him. Evidence of the idiosyncracy and particularity of his sense of what translating is and does appears in many places, sometimes very fleetingly. In Does Writing Have a Future?, for example, he asserts that “a writer forces the spoken language to accommodate itself to orthographic rules. Language defends itself. Each language defends itself according to its character. German is slippery, English brittle, French deceptive, Portuguese sly.”8 This particular conclusion must be Flusser’s alone. Given that no one else would sense the same relationships among these languages, he is right to say that the only translation that meets the criteria he sets will be one by the author himself, neatly ruling out the intervention of any other translator. And yet even the first edition of this book involved an external translator . One possible resolution to the apparent conflict might be that publication did have some stabilizing effect on Flusser’s nomadic patterns of writing. It seems likely, too, that Flusser recognized others’—notably publishers’—understanding of translation while continuing to practice and theorize his own: if the solution reached is more or less satisfactory, the text will be published...the publication of a text, however, is a profoundly ambiguous act in a way, embodying only a temporary compromise.9 transLator’s PrefaCe ix The first publication of Gestures in 1991 should be understood as such a solution. No doubt Flusser considered the decisions tentative and ambiguous . Still, that was the moment he deliberately ordered particular texts in a particular way in one language. On that occasion, the French texts mentioned earlier were translated into German by Wilhelm Miklenitsch under Flusser’s direction, and some new text was...