Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman

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СКАЧАТЬ with this stance. Yet despite this fairly sophisticated recasting of gendered parameters, he nonetheless remains wedded to binary oppositions, even when these oppositions allow interesting, counter-intuitive permutations within them.³² Ultimately the binary of man versus woman underpins his entire argument, in tribute to his times. His article is as much an analysis of the literary construction of female identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a document about the gendered views of a sophisticated intellectual of the last Soviet period, and we ask readers to approach it in that spirit.

      In discussing Lotman’s views on gender, one should bear in mind the astonishingly dismissive analysis of Anna Labzina that Lotman gave in his essay “Two Women” [Dve zhenshchiny], which is also included in his Conversations on Russian Culture. As Gary Marker has astutely pointed out, here Lotman falls into the trap of taking entirely at face value the notion that Enlightenment necessarily implies moral probity.³³ In reading Labzina’s memoirs, he dismisses as pure fantasy her account of her first husband Alexander Karamyshev, which depicts him as a depraved, womanizing, child-molesting, card-playing drunkard. Unable to reconcile this narrative with his high-minded vision of a Europeanized scientist, Lotman dismisses her tale of woes as the fabrication of a woman wholly given to a literary masterplot of martyrdom and thus unable to recognize her husband’s attempts to educate her in the ways of the Enlightenment for what they were. Whereas Marker carefully teases out—on the basis of her memoirs, diary, and external evidence—the traces of Labzina’s own resourceful agency and coping strategies, Lotman confines her to the role of a hallucinating girl incapable of receiving the gift of knowledge (even though she was in her fifties when she wrote her memoirs). While the gendered optics of Lotman’s misreading are truly alarming, this passage can also alert us to the pitfalls of assuming that people thought exclusively through literary paradigms.

      All things considered, how then should one translate zhenshchina? Given that in Russian this generic use of the singular sounds entirely neutral, should one gloss over its essentializing implications by adopting the current English-language norm of using the plural instead? Or, on the contrary, should one draw specific attention to the way Lotman’s language embeds gendered assumptions, for example by using the archaizing “woman” without article, making him even more essentializing than he was (or at least sounded in Russian), at the risk of putting off the English-speaking readers we address with this translation? Or would the compromise position “a woman” both convey the gendered language, while also implying the neutrality of its expression in Russian? Ultimately such decisions can only be adjudicated on the basis of an agreed understanding of the role of the translator, which can range from that of an invisible, or inaudible (if duly credited) conveyor of the thoughts expressed in the original into a fluid idiom of the target language, through that of a transcriber and performer attentive to the inflections and cadences of the original and willing to “foreignize” the target language accordingly, to that, ultimately, of an interventionist broker who conveys through translation an interpretation that both historicizes and actualizes the original in varying measures. Priorities will change depending on whether one aims for semantic equivalence, faithfulness to the distinctive form and style of the original, equivalence of effect or impact, or creative and critical reinsertion into a new discursive context. Do we agree with Walter Benjamin that the responsibility of the translator is to retain as much difference as possible, even at the risk of stretching the norms of the target language?³⁴ Given that with Lotman we deal with expository rather than artistic prose, and given the instrumental aims of this translation of making his ideas more widely accessible, it seemed appropriate to err on the side of intelligibility and fluidity, while also recognizing that Lotman’s “otherness,” his distinctive syntax and metaphors, are intrinsic to the meanings he constructs and therefore also worth smuggling through the checkpoints of linguistic boundaries, striking some uneasy balance between domestication and foreignization.³⁵ In the end, we settled for “a woman” as a reasonable compromise that does not disguise the gendered tone of Lotman’s prose, but avoids blatant reification and essentializing. The same principles also determined how we conveyed pronouns, inducing us to avoid modernizing turns such as “s/he.” Thus, in Lotman’s model of communication, the addressee in the I—HE channel remains a HE, and does not become a S/HE. The capital letters here clearly indicate that we deal with an abstract model, not with a representational icon. Avoiding the s/he binary also has the advantage of eschewing the imposition of a binary at a time when fixed gendered binaries have themselves become problematic. We trust the readers will understand that for Lotman, as much as for us, the translator and editor of this volume, the use of the male pronoun is a manifestation and recognition (on our part) of a historical convention that has now thankfully been superseded.

      To facilitate comprehension, especially among readers not specialized in Russian history and culture, it seemed essential to elucidate some of Lotman’s rich cultural references. At the same time, doing so in an exhaustive fashion would have laden this edition with an overly ponderous apparatus. I aimed to cut a middle way, appending a commentary where some additional information was required for full comprehension, while leaving alone many references that could easily be illuminated through a couple of internet clicks. There are many personalities making brief appearances in Lotman’s prose, and I have dwelt on them only where a conceptual understanding of their roles in the text contributed to its understanding. Each piece is introduced by a brief paragraph in italics, in which I took the liberty to highlight some of Lotman’s core ideas, or place them in a larger critical context, which I did partly to account for my selection of works, and partly to aid understanding and gesture at the internal coherence of Lotman’s thinking. Indeed, while the division between the structuralist and the post-structuralist periods in Lotman’s intellectual career is a well-established proposition (and one to which I have contributed myself in my previous works on him), what emerged here, to my surprise, is the consonance and interconnectedness of his oeuvre, despite superficial shifts of emphasis, even across the two broad spheres of semiotics and cultural history. As we worked on the translation, we also noticed a few mistakes. The trivial ones were corrected silently, while we left a trace of our corrections where the matter seemed more consequential or served to illustrate Lotman’s method.

       Translator’s Note

      BENJAMIN PALOFF

      From its inception, the project of offering a representative selection of Yuri Lotman’s work in a new English translation, one that would be both true to the peculiarities of the author’s style and accessible to an audience potentially unfamiliar with it, posed serious challenges that the reader would do well to consider. First among these is Lotman’s often knotty language, which wends between conversational intimacy and dense theoretical jargon. Second is how Lotman quotes liberally (and sometimes inaccurately) from a wide variety of sources, in prose and in verse, in Russian, French, German, and English, from the Middle Ages to the present, each having their own formal and stylistic virtues to which the new readership also deserves access. Finally, there is Lotman’s fondness for wordplay, which ranges from the occasional witticism to a truly generative paronomasia.

      We have approached each of these challenges with the intention of replicating for the Anglophone reader the experience of reading Lotman in Russian, within the limits of language and the translator’s own facility with it. Wherever appropriate, proper names appear in their most familiar Anglicized form rather than in scholarly transliteration (for instance, Tolstoy rather than Tolstoi), and we have reined in the occasional superfluous transition that might grate against the economies of English style. While not always precisely replicating that of the Russian original, we have tried to mirror Lotman’s punning to allow the reader access to those instances when one notion grows organically from the expression of another.

      Verse, meanwhile, is rendered as verse. This strategy, whereby the reader encounters the lyric poems frequently cited by Lotman in English renderings whose meter and rhyme convey that of the original texts, runs counter to the convention, long current in the field of Slavic studies, of providing literal prose glosses that often seem to go out of their way to deprive the reader of even СКАЧАТЬ