Flight

The Cahiers Series continues its exploration of translation in all its aspects with this account by retired professor of Russian literature Michael Finke of his fascinating with flight. Deskbound and myopic, ever since his childhood Finke has dreamt of flight. After decades as a university professor whose secret vice was to spend weekends soaring in lightplanes and gliders, he came across little-studied writings of leading Russian authors of the 1920s who, at the direction of Soviet authorities, engaged aviation as a signal promise of progress in Bolshevik Russia - another dream asking to be translated into reality. The resulting essay allows the literary scholar to meet the flier in an exploration of the sources and meanings of the several dreams inspired by flight. Placed alongside the text are paintings by the British artist Rachael Plummer, paintings which have their own oneiric quality, as airplanes disintegrate into abstraction, and as the offer of an aerial perspective renders landscape almost - but in the end not quite - legible.