The early machine gun design known as the Gatling gun had a somewhat brief life for its intended usage, both on the battlefield and in other venues (around 40-50 years while it jostled for attention with other gun designs), but it has had a much longer and more wide-ranging life in the imagination and popular culture. 

In the early 1920s the writer and theorist Walter Benjamin wrote the essay “The Task of the Translator”, in which he gets to the core of what translation between languages means for text, particularly in the difference between the work of the translator and that of the poet.

This video is about the act of translation, from a weapon of war into a multitude of other devices, while still retaining that “echo of the original”. This process has contributed to the design of the Gatling gun (and its original idea) remaining in the cultural imagination.

German reading by Sandra Erbacher

Excerpt from "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" / "The Task of the Translator" by Walter Benjamin, translation by Harry Zohn (in "Illuminations", 1968)