Juri Lotman's Translation Handbook E-Book

Bruno Osimo

• Herausgeber: Publisher s19050
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This book is based on the principle that it is possible to create a text using the writings of an author, focusing on a theme that was not necessarily considered as fundamental or central in the original author’s view. Lotman has never dealt with translation, meant as a professional practice. However, he has often used the word perevod [translation] and its derivatives to talk about semiotics. In other words, he used the notion of "translation" to explain certain dynamics of culture and semiosphere.

Leseprobe

Bruno Osimo

Juri Lotman’s Translator’s Handbook

What a translation handbook would look like if written by Juri Lotman

Edited by Ligija Kaminskienė

Foreword by Peeter Torop

Copyright © Bruno Osimo 2020

Bruno Osimo is an author/translator who publishes himself

The paper edition is made as a print on sale by Kindle Direct Publishing

ISBN 9788831462877 for the hardcover edition

ISBN 9788898467518 for the ebook edition

Author’s email: [email protected]

The possibility to use different languages within the limits of one semiotic unit is the basis of all intellectual processes (Lotman 1994:105).

Foreword, by Peeter Torop

On the translatability of a scientist: the case of Lotman

In the humanities, typically, different, and sometimes even contradictory theories and terminology systems coexist. A good example is semiotics of culture, in which we find the semiology of Barthes, the semiotics of Eco, the theoretical legacy of Lotman, Greimas, Winner, of many contemporary scholars and also, as historical sources, the legacy of Russian formalism, of the Prague linguistic circle, the circle of Bahtìn, and the semiotics of culture of the Tartu-Moscow, French, Italian, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish schools, and so on. To create a general framework of contemporary semiotics of culture, it is necessary to climb to the metalevel, which gives the opportunity to understand the complementarity of the different guidelines and theories. Complementarity underlies the systematization and generalization of knowledge. This process, which we define as "methodological translation", results in disciplinary or methodological consistency of knowledge or understanding of the rules of knowledge management.

Methodological translation may be disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary, depending on the possibility of definition of the object of investigation and the possibility of description of the terminological field. According to some positions, in order to express identity it is important to establish terminological dictionaries, while others give more importance to research methods, or rely on ad hoc principles, in which it is the specific of the object of investigation that dictates the analyzability and that justifies the use of any method and a mixture of terminologies.

Humanistic knowledge develops mainly from the study of culture and its different spheres. But while studying culture in all its manifestations, culture scholars at the same time shape it, creating a specific metalevel in the culture. Jakobson was one of the first to distinguish the language level from the level of the metalanguage: "On these two different levels of language the same verbal stock may be used; thus we may speak in English (as metalanguage) about English (as object language) and interpret English words and sentences by means of English synonyms and circumlocutions" (Metalanguage as a Linguistic Problem 1956). For Jakobson metalanguage is a linguistic problem and concerns not only scientific investigation but also the everyday life of children and adults: "Metalanguage is the vital factor of any verbal development. The interpretation of one linguistic sign through other, in some respects homogeneous, signs of the same language, is a metalingual operation which plays an essential role in child language learning". However, it is not just the individual child, but also culture as collective intellect that needs a metalanguage to develop. This metalanguage, or rather, system of metalanguages, is developed by humanities scholars. Given that these scholars and their metalanguages are also part of culture, they too have to be analyzed.

Juri Lotman, the protagonist of Bruno Osimo’s book "Juri Lotman’s Translation Handbook", is one of the founders of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. This school does not have a rigorous system of methods and terms, or a methodological doctrine. But if the issues of the world's first semiotic journal "Trudy po znakovym sistemam/Sign Systems Studies" are the source for the entire school to reconstruct the methodological and terminological field program, this does not exhaust Lotman’s individual legacy. For translators, Lotman’s texts have always been a significant problem, because the semantic changes of terms have been a hallmark of its evolution. ‘Language’, ‘text’, ‘culture’, ‘semiosphere’, ‘culture’s memory’, ‘explosion’, and other notions appear in Lotman’s texts with wide variations of meaning. These variations witness the development of Lotman’s semiotics and the conceptual changes in the conception of terms. At the same time, when in the definition of terms there are differences even between works written during the same period, variability is dictated by context.

When Lotman’s works are translated into a given language by different translators, decoding issues become even more complex. The indefiniteness of terminology can become contradictory. For example, one of my respectable Japanese colleagues told me that in Japan Lotman’s reception is complicated because the "Japanese Lotman" does not have a language of his own. The root cause lies in the fact that Lotman was translated into Japanese by different translators with different knowledge of semiotics in general, and of Lotman's other works in particular. Therefore, these different translations do not create a coherent representation of Lotman's scientific thought.

In Italy too there are many translators of Lotman, as well as many experts of his scientific work. Yet, despite the abundance of different interpretations, there is a unitary conception of Lotman’s thought. Perhaps it is the activism of Italian researchers in interpreting his legacy that produces the impression of a shared understanding. Lotman himself would repeat Karl Popper’s notion according to which it is possible to have an exact thought in a language that is inexact. You can develop this notion and say that it is possible to think in a comprehensible way in a language that is inexact. One of Lotman's mysterious skills is his ability to be understandable both as an author of academic texts and as an interlocutor of college students or television viewers. If he is understandable, there must be an elusive consistency that expresses itself not only in popular science articles, but also in serious scientific work. In the case of Lotman, instead of "terminological consistency" we can speak of "categorial coherence" of his thought.

The collective theses on the semiotic study of cultures were published in 1973 (Ivanov et alii 1973)). In the very first paragraph, 1.0.0, the position of semiotics of culture as a discipline is seen as "the science of functional correlatedness of the different semiotic systems". In the early 1980s Lotman clarified the notion of "semiotics of culture". "The design of semiotics of culture – the discipline dealing with the interaction of various differently structured semiotic systems, the internal unevenness of the semiotic space, the need for cultural and semiotic polyglotism – greatly changed traditional semiotic ideas". And ten years later Lotman writes in his book Culture and explosion: “Semiotic space appears to us as a multilayered intersection of various texts, developing together in a certain layer, with complex internal relationships, varying degrees of translatability and spaces of untranslatability. Under this layer there is the layer of ‘reality’ – the kind of reality that is organised in a variety of languages with which it is in hierarchical correlation. Both these layers together form semiotics of culture. Outside the borders of the semiotics of culture lies reality, which is placed outside the limits of language”. Readers will find these two quotations in this book.

This book by Bruno Osimo was a revelation for me in its own way. It reminded me of some little-known facts of the history of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school and allowed me to see a new general categorial aspects of Lotman’s scientific thought. An interesting fact is Vygotsky's participation in the founding of semiotics of culture. In 1962 a Congress of semiotics was held in Moscow whose proceedings contained a long excerpt from Vygotsky’s book Psychology of Art, despite Vygotsky being long dead. The passage had been chosen by Ivanov, one of the leading semioticians of the school. It was he who earnestly tried to reconnect the Tartu-Moscow school to a forcefully repressed heritage, mainly consisting in Bakhtin and Eisenstein. This fact came to my mind the first time I read the manuscript of this book.

Lotman rarely explicitly referred to Vygotsky, but the present book shows that for a complete understanding of Lotman we must reflect on the hidden or scarcely obvious link between Lotman’s ‘thought’ and the notion of ‘thought’ in Vygotsky’s works. Vygotsky’s triad, speech/egocentric speech/inner speech, is deeply integrated into Lotman’s thought. Speech as a manifestation of language, egocentric speech as an external system to the structure and inner speech as a complex system of alternating verbal and visual codes or, translated into Lotmanian metalanguage, discrete and continuous (iconic) languages. Lotman liked to refer to the parallelism between human intellect and culture as "collective intellect".

Against the backdrop of this parallelism, Lotman’s special relationship with cultural universals and the typology of cultures is more understandable. According to the semiotician, the main universal of all cultures is the propensity to self-description and the ability to do so. All cultures have the means to describe themselves, and the richer a culture is, the more it possesses descriptive languages. These languages are the languages of culture and (meta)languages refer to them, in that they are based on natural language (oral languages, narratives of children's stories, literary language, language of literature and poetry, languages of criticism, languages of scientific analysis and other descriptive languages), as well as visual (paintings, book illustrations), audiovisual, media, and performative languages, and also behaviour rituals. Every act of communication in culture can be interpreted at a more general level (meta-level) as self-description of culture. The whole system of self-descriptive languages is comparable, at the level of the individual, to egocentric speech.

But the deep layer of culture is similar to inner speech, where a constant passage from verbal to visual and vice versa occurs. However, this process takes place in the conventional space of a person, a text, a culture, a semiosphere. It is the stage of self-communication that leads to the concept of identity, one’s own and that of others. For this reason, "internal" and "external" become fundamental categorial notions in the whole of Lotman’s system. For this reason, "self-description" and "self-communication" are not always synonymous in this system. The early Lotman called "text" the process formed at the point of intersection of extratextual links and textual references. One of the important features of the whole (text, culture, semiosphere) is its border. In Lotman's works we also find the distinction between external and internal border, and between inner and outer language of the system. Within a culture, he distinguishes outer and inner polyglotism, and outer and inner memory. We can add the singularity or binarism hidden in the notions of “inner monologue”, “inner translation”, “inner indeterminacy”, and so on, without even mentioning all the uses of the inside/outside dichotomy.

In the Lotmanian perspective, language is also the primary modelling system and it provides the basis for secondary modelling systems, without which you cannot understand culture. Language, as a means of communication, is always in evolution. Language manifests itself, its properties unfold in use. Lotman would subscribe to Benveniste's thought that "rien n'est dans la langue qui aura été d'abord dans le discours” [“in language there is nothing that has not been in speech before”]. Language serves as a metalanguage, as a secondary modelling system, and natural language coexists with other sign systems in culture (with the languages of culture). The amount and the types of languages in a culture determine the possibilities of self-description of a culture. However, at the basis of self-description processes are the creative cognitive processes of self-identification. Therefore, at the deepest level, Lotman’s system is based on self-communication, on the expression of one’s personal Ego, of the text, culture, the semiosphere, society, and on the search for the notion of ‘Ego’ in the whole.

This book makes it possible to perceive this deep level of Lotman's thought, where the roots of its integrity are hidden, as well as its categorial structuring of the world and history, which underlies his semiotics of culture. This book can be defined as a good translation of Lotman, because it transmits not so much Lotman's theories, as the kind of thinking that led him to his theories. For this reason, it is a useful book both for experts, who can re-read him, and for "newbies", who start to get acquainted with his semiotic thought.

Peeter Torop

Department of semiotics, Tartu Ülikool

“The semiotic border is the sum of bilingual translation ‘filters’, the passage through which translates the text into other languages located outside of the semiosphere”.

0. Introduction

This book is not an academic publication in the strictest sense of the word. It is mainly intended for M.A. students who are not well acquainted with semiotics yet. Above all, parts like the Glossary have the intent to fill possible cultural gaps that could prevent the reading and understanding of its contents.

0.1 Different planes of nonfiction writing

Nonfiction texts in our culture are divided into essays (e.g. Freud’s, Peirce’s, Lotman’s texts), scientific articles and popular texts. Essays are undocumented texts, expressing thoughts on a topic, the quality of which therefore depends entirely on the author’s genius and notoriety. Research papers are documented works that make claims based solely on other scientific dutifully cited papers, or on evidence of empirical data. Popular texts are the "translation" of scientific papers aimed at non-specialists; they are the popularisation of science.

Science, by its very nature, tends to specialise. This entails the risk that individual scientific sectors become too isolated from one another. Among the duties of popularisation is not only informing non-researchers, but also cross-informing researchers from other disciplines.

The latter aspect is often at risk of being underestimated. In this book, I will endeavour to give my contribution in this direction, by trying not to be too technical-minded in my exposure, so that colleagues of every discipline can, if interested, take a look at it and decide if there may be synergies.

Science is not fertile by only "marrying" itself, but also through "cross-marriages" with other sciences, arts, and crafts. In Italy we tend to think of science as a secondary, grunt, not intellectual activity. However, such accusations sometimes turn against the academy that formulated it, when in academic studies papers are self-referential and conformist as they merely replicate and retrace existing research paths, with tested methods exclusively. The result is the formation of a tiny elite of technocrats who study things that the rest of the population does not understand.

In other words, there is a semiotic hiatus between scientific avant-garde and common people.

This rift is dangerous for several reasons. From the academy's point of view, the danger is to pursue themes and motifs that are of no interest to the progress of society as a whole. From the point of view of the people, the danger is a hardening of popular knowledge, the formation of a subculture based on hearsay and superstition and, ultimately, contempt for science.

This is particularly evident in the field of semiotics in Italy, where, in the vast majority of cases, it is either ignored or, when discussed, it is considered abstract and abstruse, away from any practical interest. This way, semioticians will continue to argue, ordinary people will continue to ignore them or consider them "mad scientists", while researchers from other fields will keep failing to take into account the potentially useful assumptions made in the field of semiotics.

0.2 Lotman in Italy

An example of the above is synthesised by the situation of Lotman in Italy. Though dutifully translated from the late 1960s, his editors and translators would not always understand the scope of his work, with translations that in some cases contributed to alienating potential readers, either because they were inaccurate, or because they were difficult to understand. There was the notable exception of Remo Faccani, a pioneer in this sense, who edited and translated the first collections. However, also in his case, the translation was made by a Slavist, not by a semiotician, let alone by a professional translator. With the aggravating circumstance of Lotman’s texts being considered – inasmuch they had formally been translated into Italian– as a given by a culture that, in truth, had not even remotely been impacted by them.

For an author it is much worse to be translated improperly than not to be translated at all. Awareness of not having read an author creates a situation of emptiness, gap, vacation, awareness of ignorance, while the illusion of having read the author lets you think that you have already scoured and exploited the author's resources. And then there are copyright issues that prevent from retranslating a living author or an author dead less than seventy years ago, resulting in first translations being considered as canon for nearly a century.

In these cases it is important to remember what Popovič suggests: “2. The time of the metatext's culture is set back from the time of the prototext's culture:

│──│─ ─ ─ ─│ ───────│

│──│─ ─ ─ ─│ ───────│”

(2006:112). The inadequacy of the early Lotman’s versions in Italy is mainly the result of Italian languacultural backwardness compared to the Estonian and Slavic languacultures.

For this reason, in this volume all Lotman’s texts were consulted in their original Russian language and were retranslated using a homogeneous and coherent terminology, accounted for in the Glossary. For this reason, I never refer to translated editions but only to the original Russian ones. When you see a year and page reference to Lotman's works in this book, as you will see in the references, the reference is to the Russian original version, and the English translation is mine.

0.3 Lotman’s Italian and English versions and their citability

What are, in principle, the criteria to assign a translation job? The person should have translational competence, i.e. a specific ability to mediate between languacultures. The candidate who wishes to be assigned for the job of non-fiction translation should master logics and use this competence to solve ambiguities. The candidate, moreover, should have an encyclopedic knowledge in the field on which the text to be translated is focused. The candidate should have a systemic knowledge of the target language, and a sensitivity for collocations, for usage in the receiving languaculture, such as to avoid clumsy expressions that are not present in the sending languaculture text and are not easily decodable for the receiving languaculture reader.

The resulting profile, as you can see, describes a highly specialised professional, with a combination of more than one top-level proficiency.

In the specific instance of Lotman’s translations, the translator’s encyclopaedic competence must be in the field of semiotics. And this is particularly important in Italy and in most Western countries, where semiotic terminology uninterruptedly struggles for its identity against confounding neighbouring disciplines like semiology and linguistics, which, in these countries, are incomparably better known and widespread, and tend to monopolise the attention of the academic field. To give a trivial example of what I mean, on Italian Wikipedia it is impossible to use the word ‘semiotician[1]’ (semiotico), because the guidelines impose to use ‘semiologist’ (semiologo) instead, as if these words were synonyms. When, as a Wikipedia contributor, you try to use the right term, it is a matter of seconds before you find your contribution edited and homologated. The informationally catastrophic consequence is that, for example, both Peirce and Lotman suddenly become ‘semiologists[2]’!

This type of struggle is unfair because it simply tries to deny the existence of a discipline by denying its terminology and substituting it with the one of adjacent and similar disciplines. Which, for its visibility, is worse than ignoring it. Censorship would be better than such mimicking.

This is a typical case where a translation has a huge potential for sense generation, to use Lotman’s terms. The (partial) impossibility to translate semiotic concepts, for example, into Italian, should lead to an explosion of translations of Lotman’s semiotic text into Italian culture, which will lead to profound changes of Italian culture itself.

But what happens if the translator is simply the cheapest choice on the market, or for some other reason s-he does not have the mediative and technical encyclopaedic competence to do a terminologically correct job? In this case the translator will – in the rosiest hypothesis – heavily depend on the terminology found in parallel texts and reference sources of the receiving languaculture, almost totally controlled by the semiological-linguistic component. This will result in an “interdisciplinary translation”, in the actual transformation of the original concepts into different, more locally mainstream ones, instead of allowing the insertion of new concepts in a slightly receptive, but potentially much adsorbing, environment.

The cheapest choice on the market is not necessarily a young or clumsy professional translator who desperately tries to find new engagements: it may well be a graduate student, or a would-be academician, who knows Russian as a language whose literature s-he has been studying, whose translation is a way of getting a degree, or to provide a service to one’s professor so as to create better prospects for one’s career. In all this, we must consider that, for all the reasons stated above, there are very few departments of semiotics, and in these there may be Russian-translating people only by chance, because semiotics is not necessarily taught in language or translation departments. The consequence is that sometimes the very professor who hypothetically commissioned the translation and made arrangements with the publisher does not have the semiotic or linguistic or translational competence to give the due feedback to the translator, who is left roaming alone among conflicting and striving-to-prevail terminologies.

In this academic battle of terminologies there are many casualties. Possibly the most important one is the intended sense of the author's discourse.

0.3.1 Specific examples of translation problems and proposed solutions

One problem lies with the word ‘yazyk’, ‘language’. In Italian there are two possible translatants, ‘lingua’ and ‘linguaggio’, having different submeanings. ‘Lingua’ means natural language, while ‘linguaggio’ means any other language or sublanguage. For this reason, there are instances where the Italian translator needs to disambiguate even when the author does not. The resulting translation can be inaccurate whenever the translator has not understood the correct sense of ‘yazyk’ in a given occurrence. In this case, the encyclopaedic competence of the translator is key.