A Serving of Casual Insults
Most mornings, often before breakfast, I find myself in a righteous fury about having been forced to do some stupid thing to meet the incomprehensible demands some huge global server, presumably for the convenience...
Category: translation
The Measurement Problem
Is there a problem? There is. It concerns the relationship of the measurer to the measured, the scientist (or her measuring tools) to whatever-is-being-measured. Philosophers tend to view it as the relationship of subject to object, noting...
What a difference a [book’s] name makes!
Publishers don’t necessarily ask authors — or translators — before deciding what title to give any particular book. Lambert Wiesing and I assumed that the title of the German book Luxus, would be the English...
How Not to Translate Heidegger
“How Not to Translate Heidegger” is the name of a discussion on academia.edu. One segment, focussed on Heidegger’s use of the word “Dasein,” seems to have ended today. We’ve all received a PDF summary. “Dasein” is often...
Image and Imagine
The German verb “einbilden” is ordinarily translated into English as “imagine.” But at one point in Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser calls attention to the difference between “einbilden” and the cognate “imaginieren”. Expressing his gratitude to Kant for...
Science and Sentimentality
Flusser translated the title of his essay “Geste und Gestimmtheit” as “Gesture and Sentimentality”. I didn’t. I found, and to some extent still find that particular word misleading at best. Its equivalence to “Gestimmtheit” is almost...