It's a book!

Art and Revolution
Originally uploaded by aderieg

Today I actually held it in my hands for the first time, and it is a real book. All the letters of all the words are distributed neatly across some three hundred pages as though they had always been there. For over a year, though, those words were not neatly printed on pages, they were jumbled in my head and scattered through countless files on three computers, many of them marked with different glaring colors. Green was the worst. Long quotations from and references to Hegel were marked with green, and sometimes I still have nightmares about Hegel, where I am accosted by words glowing poisonous green. The words were accompanied by long lists of bookmarks for online resources and background information, and most of the books that are listed in the back of this book as references followed me from home to the office and back again in tall, unstable stacks.

It took me over a year to translate the book Art and Revolution by the Viennese philosopher Gerald Raunig. In the end we went through the whole book together, discussing it chapter by chapter via Skype, rephrasing sentences, debating about single words. After we rephrased the last sentence and I read it again, Gerald said, "We're finished." I was still scanning the page and talking, but Gerald interrupted me and said again, "We're finished. That's the end, we have finished the book." For a moment I was speechless. I had worked on it for such a long time, always alongside all my other translation work, so that no matter how many pages I produced each day, I could never be finished, because I always had to keep working on this book. I couldn't even grasp the idea of being finished. It was only today when I held it in my hands for the first time and saw the words on the pages that I was really able to believe for the first time that it is, in fact, finished.

Of course, this is only the beginning of its new life as a book. It has been well received in German, so I am very curious (and also a bit nervous) to see how the English translation is received. In my office I have a special glass bookcase full of books with my name in them, and it isn't even big enough for all of them. This is different, though. For me, this is a very special book.

When we all finish working this evening, Christopher is going to share one of the tiny bottles of champagne with me, and on Sunday I am taking my three men out for a nice lunch to celebrate, because I couldn't have done it without their support as well. They lived with this book for over a year too.