knighted, literally. It felt like the flat of a sword 
was hitting my shoulders. This didn’t make me 
friends with his previous translator, who didn’t like 
it one bit. We had even a discussion about whether, 
you know, one should translate the spirit of the 
letter. The man was a letter translator and I was a 
spirit translator. But that actually helped a lot. 
Translating McLuhan was an education to 
McLuhan that no other way could have given me.

So that was a second big moment in my encounter 
with McLuhan. My third one was after having done 
a translation of his book. After having in fact 
spent more time trying to understand McLuhan,