Between São Paulo and Stuttgart: Multilingualism, Translation, and Interculturality in Haroldo de Campos’s and Vilém Flusser’s Work

The Gesture of Photographing

“…Although it could hardly be clear from reading of ‘The Gesture of Photographing’ in isolation, the idea of translation is central to Flusser’s larger theory of communication (Guldin, 2005). A native of Prague, having grown up speaking Czech and German (as well as learning Hebrew), studying English and French in school, and mastering Portuguese as a long-term resident in Brazil, Flusser spoke five languages and wrote for publication in four of them.…”

“…He developed a pattern of translating his own texts between languages, starting by ‘translating’ the initial thought (he describes it as an image) into the language that best suited it, then moving into another and sometimes back again, mining the thought for further implications, ‘exhausting’ it. The most complete description of this process appears in ‘The Gesture of Writing’ (Flusser, 1991c), an essay that itself exists in seven different versions in four languages (Guldin, 2005: 280). What follows is my translation from German into English, for although French and Portuguese versions exist, it seems Flusser never translated this particular essay into English (Becker, 2011).…”