An important contribution to translation studies and to
the definition of the concept of "translatability" from a semiotic point
of view comes from JUrij Lotman, founder of the Tartu School of
Semiotics. Let us examine its origins.
We must return to the '40s, to Leningrad (now St.
Petersburg), where the young JUrij Lotman enrolls in the University
and - interrupted by his participation as a soldier in World War II -
earns a human sciences degree. Many of his teachers were the same
scholars who, in the two previous decades, had taken part in the
Formalist and Structuralist movements. One of them was Vladìmir JA.
Propp, famous the world over for his studies on folklore and fairy
tales.
In 1950, having earned his degree with honors, Lotman
seeks employment, but, without fail, each time he is about to be hired,
someone else is employed in his place at the last minute. The young
researcher ignores that an anti-Semitic policy is taking place, and
Lotman is an unwitting victim.
Meanwhile a former college mate finds a job at the Tartu
University, and she finds that there are other vacant positions too;
Lotman moves immediately to Estonia. Here, local authorities are too
busy in the struggle against the local populace resistance, hostile to
Soviet regime, to find resources for the campaign against Jews, even if
they had received precise orders from Moscow 1 .
Moreover, in Estonia there were not many Jews left, after the mass
deportations during the Nazi occupation.
So it seems that the fates have deemed Lotman to begin
his university career in Tartu, the second most important town in
Estonia - the northernmost of the Baltic States, officially proclaimed
an independent Republic in 1991. The prestigious Tartu University was
ounded in 1632. In the 1960s, Lotman is particularly interested in the
methods of analyzing poetic texts and in the research on the ideological
models of culture. In 1960, he gives his first course in structural
poetics and, in 1962, publishes his Lectures on Structural Poetics
2.
In 1962 in Moscow, the Cybernetics Council and the Slavic
Studies Institute, where many structural linguistics trends originate,
organized a symposium on the structural study of sign systems. Since
these two disciplines (cybernetics and structural linguistics) are
considered officially pseudo-scientific and are rejected by the official
Soviet academic world, the symposium acquires a truly innovative and
anti-conformist character. During the symposium lectures were read,
among others, about
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language semiotics, logic semiotics, automatic translation, art
semiotics, mythology, language and description of non-verbal
communication systems (i.e. road signs, card divination language, etc.),
semiotics of the communication with deaf-mutes, ritual semiotics
3,
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then eventfully published in the now famous "theses".
After receiving a copy of the Moscow symposium theses, Lotman traveled
to Moscow to meet with his Russian colleagues and proposes a partnership
program geographically based in Tartu.
As a consequence, the prestigious review Trudy po
znakovym sistemam was founded in 1964 which exists and thrives to
this day and is now printed with three additional titles: Sign Systems
Studies, Töid märgisüsteemide alalt (in Estonian) and Semeiotikè.
In 1964, the first conference of the newborn school is held in Tartu.
Many people call this school simply "The Tartu school" because the
annual review published there is still one of the most important
references for world semiotics.
Lotman died in 1993. The Semiotics professorship is now
held by Peeter Torop (widely quoted in the previous units), one of the
most famous researchers, among other fields, in the application of
semiotics to translation studies.
PIn Lotman's writings there is something very
interesting for translation studies. To understand what Torop says
about translatability, we do best to begin from the general Lotmanian
view of culture:
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[...] if, for the biological survival of an individual, the satisfaction
of some natural needs is enough, the life of any group whatsoever is not
possible without a culture [...] All man's needs can be divided
into two groups. To the first group belong the needs that must be
immediately satisfied and cannot (or can hardly) be accumulated. [...]
The needs that can be satisfied by accumulated store form a different
group. They are the objective basis for the acquisition, by the
organism, of extra-genetic information 4.
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In the nature/culture dialectics, Lotman attributes to man, among all
the other living beings, the only possibility of belonging to both
systems:
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Man, in his struggle for life, is, therefore, inserted in two processes:
in one he intervenes as a consumer of material values, of things, in the
other he is, instead an accumulator of information. Both are necessary
for existence. If for man, as a biological creature, the first is
enough, social life implies both 5.
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However, in Lotman's opinion, there are not only the culture space
and the nature space in the semiotic world; there is a non-culture space
as well, "that sphere functionally belonging to Culture, but not
fulfilling its rules" . When Lotman says "Culture", he refers to the
whole of the cultures constituting man's world and, within each of
them, he isolates a "language set", so that every member of any given
culture is "a sort of polyglot".
As we will see, the Lotmanian view of culture is strictly
related to translatability and translation studies.
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[...] culture is a gathering of historically formed semiotic systems (languages) [...]
The translation of the same texts into other semiotic systems, the
assimilation of different texts, the moving of the boundaries between
texts belonging to culture and those beyond its boundaries are the
mechanisms through which it is possible to culturally incorporate
reality. Translating a given section of reality into one of the
languages of culture, transforming it into a text, i.e. into an
information codified in a given way, introducing this information into
collective memory: this is the everyday cultural activity sphere. Only
what has been translated into a sign system can become part of memory.
The intellectual history of humankind can be considered as a struggle
for memory. Not by chance, the destruction of a culture manifests itself
in the form of destruction of memory, annihilation of texts, oblivion of
nexuses 7.
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In later writings, particularly in the essay called On the semiosphere,
his semiotic view is based more and more on the concept of translation.
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[..] all semiotic space can be considered a single mechanism (if not
organism). Then not this or that brick will appear as the foundation,
but the 'great system' called "semiosphere". The semiosphere is the semiotic space outside of which the existence of semiosis is impossible
8.
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In the next unit, we will see that the functioning of this huge and
complex organism has a dense network of translations at its base.
Bibliographical references
EGOROV B. 'izn´ i tvorcestvo JU. M. Lotmana. Moskvà, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999. ISBN 5-86793-070-X.
LOTMAN JU. Izbrannye stat´i v trëh tomah. vol. 1. Stat´i po semiotike i tipologii kul´tury.
Tallinn, Aleksandra, 1992. ISBN 5-450-01551-8.
LOTMAN JU. Lekcii po struktural´noj poètike. In JU. M. Lotman i tartusko-moskovskaja semioticeskaja shkola. Moskvà,
Gnozis, 1994, p. 10-263. ISBN 5-7333-0486-3. Edizione italiana: JU. Lotman, La smiosfera, Venezia, Marsilio, 1985.
ISBN 88-317-4703-7.
LOTMAN JU. Stat´i po tipologii kul´tury. Tartu, 1970.
USPENSKIJ B. Tartuskaja semioticeskaja 'kola glazami eë ucastnikov, in JU. M. Lotman i tartusko-moskovskaja semioticeskaja shkola.
Moskvà, Gnosis, 1994c, p. 265-351. ISBN 5-7333-0486-3.
1 Egorov 1999, p. 48-49.
2 Lotman 1994.
3 Uspenskij 1994, p. 270.
4 Lotman 1970, p. 26-27.
5 Lotman 1970, p. 28.
6 Lotman 1970, p. 30.
7 Lotman 1970, p. 31.
8 Lotman 1992, p. 13.
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