Juri Lotman's Translator's Handbook: What a translation manual would look like if written by Lotman

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: osimo@trad.it

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