Translating Multilingual Life
This essay reexamines the cultural implications of the act of translation through three quotations from Portuguese into English from Vilém Flusser’s 1992 philosophical autobiography Bodenlos. In retranslating this multilingual life, this act once again displaces preconceived notions not only of philosophical “groundedness,” as Flusser has called it, but also of the very possibility of cultural centrality, to say nothing of authenticity. Moreover, through the continued recirculation of such textual fragments beyond the strictly perceived boundaries of ‘the language in which they were written,’ such transcultural acts may well provoke yet another series of divergent interpretations, especially when read against the backdrop of a New Coast: a geographical zone mapped out by way of a new set of interconnected cultural experiences and markings of multilingual life.
