W.Flusser. Translation as an act of freedom.

Part 1 

Already in his first writings, namely in the unpublished typescript Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert, Flusser deals with the notion of language. Every thought that cannot be put into words seems very suspicious to him. Even the fact of the multiplicity of languages he articulates carefully by stating that thoughts are formed differently in people’s mind when speaking different languages (Flusser 1957: 58). Still, he formulates his ideas too simplistically and unscientifically attesting a certain priority to languages structured by subject, object and predicate (in grammar, the part of sentence that contains the verb and gives information about the subject), whereas those that differ from the referred model would be simply called ‘Chinese’.

However, it is remarkable to see that Flusser found his upcoming topic, language and communication, while he was typing Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert. In here, he even provides an orientation about the character and origin of translations. First of all, following the Tower of Babel story of the Old Testament, translations are a consequence of the Babylonian confusion. Hereby we are forced to recognize the relativity of our epistemological (the part of the philosophy that is about the study of how we know things) categories.

In Língua e Realidade we read: “The multiplicity of languages reveals the multiplicity of the categories of knowledge”.4 (Flusser 1963b: 39)

Yet our categories are not valid for all languages and realities. And therefore we are more helpless the more often we jump from one world into another.

But the translation process cannot be understood without the writing procedure. A closer look at Flusser’s essays about writing might thus be worthwhile (useful, important, or good enough to be a suitable reward for the money or time spent or the effort made). In these he explains why writing is existentially necessary, making use of the Latin aphorism: “Scribere necesse est, vivere non est” which precedes his book Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?, followed by the comment: “Frei nach Heinrich dem Seefahrer” – in fact this dictum derives from Plutarch’s “Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse” (“We have to sail, we do not have to live“), an aphorism that found its proliferation (to increase a lot and suddenly in number) in the Lusophone imaginary from Fernando Pessoa over Caetano Veloso to Ulysses Guimarães. Inter-discursive (involving discussion) are to be discovered and productively taken up in this quotation.

That way, Flusser might understand the sentence as an existential release (to give freedom or free movement to someone or something), while at the same time he points out the tragedy of writing since this gesture is exceedingly threatened with extinction and replaced in future by other forms and gestures of informing, e.g. pictures, videos, and computers.

Despite the alleged (to say that someone has done something wrong without giving proof) absurdity of writing in our times, it is necessary for those who have something to say.

In many of his essays, he emphasizes the connection between writing and history, since history begins at the point where humankind starts to write.

Writing becomes a genuine property of human being and thus an anthropological premise (an idea or theory on which a statement or action based) any historical being. Historical thinking is a basic prerequisite to the writing procedure of our tireless (working energetically and continuously) essayist and herein he finds himself – as he said – confronted with a ‘dialectics of freedom’.

On the one hand, he is condemned to write qua conditio humana – he expresses it ‘communicologically’ by saying that he is ‘programmed’ –, on the other hand, he does what he wants to do: “to do what I must do, and therefore to do what I want to do is the dialectics of freedom.” 

In a speech entitled “Die Geste des Schreibens” for the University of St. Gallen (is the capital of the canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland), in 1981, he justifies this dialectics in another way, distinguishing a visible from an invisible writing process. 

Visible is only the process of writing, invisible are the guiding thoughts, though being restrained (to limit something) by rules of grammar. In the German edition of the book Gesten he emphasizes a further aspect of freedom that is being expressed by writing. In that the differentiation between nature and culture becomes evident: writing is, according to Flusser, an innate (an innate quality or ability is one that you wereborn with, not one you have learned) ability, though it is not an uncontrolled reflex but rather a gesture we are free to perform. (Flusser 1994b: 32-33)

 While translating, a freedom confining component comes into operation. Thereby, it evolves (to develop or make something develop, usuallygradually)a tension between the power of the translated words and the consciousness.

Flusser writes:

“In my memory exist words from different languages. They are not synonymous. Each language has its own atmosphere and, thus, represents a universe apart. It is imprecise to say that I dominate the languages stored in my memory. Surely, I can translate, and in that sense I transcend (to be better or more important than somethingelse) them all. […] But in another sense it is the language that dominates me, programs me and transcends, because each of them throw me in its own universe. I cannot write without recognizing the power of words and languages over myself.”  At this point, it becomes apparent how Flusser sticks to a classical word-toword-translation, while, simultaneously trying to expand and deepen the sense of the original thought, as Rainer Guldin demonstrates in his essay “Translating philosophy: Vilém Flusser’s practice of multiple self-translation”. (Guldin 2013) Thus, it is more about a philosophical than a literary translation.

By highlighting the respective language atmosphere and the related dominance of singular (a singular noun is a noun such as 'standstill' or 'vicinity' that does not have a plural form and always has a determiner such as 'a' or 'the' in front of it) words the reading of Ernst Jünger’s Geheimnisse der Sprache shines through.

In this way, Jünger writes about the “magic power of ancient sounds that combines the meaning of all mother tongues in itself.” (Jünger 1963: 22) The power of words is even more evident in a further excerpt (a short piece from a book, film, piece of music, etc) from Flusser’s “Die Geste des Schreibens”, as he says: “The words are units which vibrate and have a life of their own. They have their rhythm, their harmonies, and their tunes. In their roots they hold the ancient wisdom of the whole history, whose inheritor I am.” (Flusser 1994b: 36) Jünger starts by classifying languages at the phonetic level of the sounds, Flusser mostly morphologically 
(the form and structure of words in a language, esp the consistent patterns of inflection, combination, derivation and change, etc, that may be observed and classified) at the words’ level.

Nevertheless, both thinkers share a similar view on the origin of language. For Jünger the sounds belong “to the primordial (existing at or since the beginning of the world or the universe) matter of the world like the soil in which they are rooted.” (Jünger 1963: 33) Here we encounter very similar lexical fields, as for instance those formed by ‘primordial’ (Ur) in the compound words ‘primordial matter’ and ‘age-old’ (uralt), as well as the topos (a basic theme or concept, esp a stock topic in rhetoric) of ‘rootedness’ (Verwurzelung).

Flusser considers the words rooted in history, while for Jünger the sounds are based in a dimension preceding history, namely “beyond the computation of time”, corresponding to the term ‘non-history’ (Ungeschichte) in Flusser’s terminology. Both amateur philologists agree on a further issue concerning language conception, i.e. the conviction that language is nurtured

(to take care of, feed, and protect someone or something, especially young children or plants, and help him, her, or it to develop)

“by the ineffable (You use ineffable to say that something is so great or extreme that it cannot be described in words)” and that therefore its origin and destination lies in the ‘unspeakable’, in nothingness.

In Flusser’s language diagram this would be marked as the “area of prayer”, where language fades into nothingness: “The area of prayer is that much far apart from the area of conversation that it almost does not seem to be language. It seems to be the attempt to express what is beyond expression, to think what is beyond thinking.” (Flusser 1963b: 183) Being at prayer (Prayer is the activity of speaking to God) means to have a conversation with the ineffable (causing so much emotion, especially pleasure, that it cannot be described), the divine. This happens, according to Flusser, when the intellect overcomes the language and vanishes. All that remains is silence.  In such a way it is proposed in an article he wrote for the Jornal do Comércio in 1966 that traces back to his interpretation of Wittgenstein (Ludwig Josef Johan ) at the time: “Silence is the fundament and the destination of language.” (Flusser 1966) Jünger’s approach to the ineffable is at first glance less devoted, but identical in content.

His book Das Abenteuerliche Herz is not about the silence of the words, but the flattening (to become level and thinner or to cause something to become level and thinner) and the end of the voices, so ultimately the sounds. Jünger writes: “With the content of truth and validity the voices became deeper, and to the same extent the feeling of pleasure grew. At each stage, the conclusions became more essential and meaningful, and yet more simple. Finally, a single voice remained at this fall into the fountain of knowledge, a dark murmur (the sound of something being said very quietly)that seemed to approach the absolute point, the zone of the primordial words. And as there was nothing else to be thought of the voice became silent, too. It became quiet; the last desire and the last perception cut themselves within the unconsciousness.” (Jünger 2013: 47) Thus, there is a positive reframing of the Heideggerian (Martin Heidegger German philosopher) fall from which one sinks, after a moment of reflection, in the “sensation of thinking”, instead of falling down to the “banality of the man”. 
The basis of his writing therein included his translating, is Flusser’s existential homelessness, respectively the fact that he transcended (to be better or more important than something else) his ancestral (a relative who lived a long time ago)culture towards a completely new one, in his case the Brazilian. In many texts he presents his translation activity as natural, which he, so to speak, had learned from the cradle, when he bilingually - German/Czech - grew up in Prague during the interwar period (Flusser 1992: 79), and which is also grounded in the need of publishing in exile later on. An indication of his style of writing and his ambivalent (having two different feelings about something) love affair with the languages he writes in is the undated German typescript “Eine Sprachpraxis”