«The romantic fascination
produced in the pure state
by the first sentences of the first chapter
of many novels is soon lost
in the continuation of the story» 1.
The most suggestive aspect of Vygotsky's
perspective for those of us interested in the study of the word
per-ception with reading, as the first act of interlingual
translation process, is that which regards the evolution of the
perception of meaning.
We said that the meaning of a word is a consequence
of the generalization of a concept, of the synthesis of many
perceptive experiences: it is, therefore, an act of thought.
Thoughts, words, and meanings are tightly interwoven, and it is
probably more interesting to study them as a single system rather
than try to isolate components and maniacally demark their
limitations.
But from the point of view of psychology, the
meaning of every word is a generalization or a
concept. And since generalizations and concepts
are undeniably acts of thought, we may regard
meaning as a phenomenon of thinking. It does not
follow, however, that meaning formally belongs in
two different spheres of psychic life. Word meaning
is a phenomenon of thought only in so far as thought
is embodied in speech, and of speech only in so far
as speech is connected with thought and illumined by it 2.
|
As we have already said, there cannot be
elaboration of concepts without language and there can be no
language without an intense thought activity. But the fruit of
such intellectual activity is never fully mature, never truly
results as conclusive. Just owing to this back-and-forth play
between analysis and synthesis, between perception and
generalization, meaning is an ever-evolving process.
In the early 1930s (Vygotsky died at 38 in 1934) his
strong intuition would have already brought up the problem of all
semantic theories - and of all translation studies theories ante litteram -
based on the notion of static word meaning and of 'linguistic
equivalence' between signifiers, in a field that has enormous
importance for the debate on translation. But Vygotsky's book,
published posthumously in 1934, was banned in 1936 (and 'rehabilitated'
in 1936 with Khrushchev and the thaw) because it contradicted Materialistic
Reductionism and mentalism typical of psychological research in
the Stalin era 3.
Consequently, for twenty years Vygotsky's thought circulated
among Soviet researchers, but only in a semi-clandestine way, and
reached the West only in the 1960s.
The meanings of words are dynamic formations changing
with the individual's development and with the various ways in
which his thought functions. The relation between thought and word
is not a thing but a process during which changes can be
considered "as development in the functional sense" 4.
To illustrate the dynamic relation between thought,
word, and meaning it is important to distinguish inner speech
(or "endophasy"), directed toward ourselves, and outer speech,
the one normally referred to as "language", useful for keeping us
in touch with others of our kind. Actually, the two types of
language - given the functional difference - have different
structures, and are two versions of the same kind of translation:
outer language is translation of thoughts into words, while inner
language, in Vygotsky's opinion at least, is a translation of
words into thought 5.
Even if it is now conceivable with the latest research,
the hypothesis of inner speech does not necessarily encompass a
translation into verbal speech - a language between self and self
not using words but only mental sense units - Vygotsky's notion
is nonetheless interesting because the translation of words into
thought is exactly what comprises the act of reading.
Inner speech is characterized by extreme synthesis,
because there is a single 'interlocutor', and can therefore take
as a 'given' the entire context in which an utterance is made.
This is partly true for outer oral language too, where the
contingent situation shared by the interlocutors allowing an
ample 'taking for granted'. For example, if I am in my car still
parked by the curb, and another driver pulls up alongside and asks
me "Going out?" nothing else is needed to understand that he is
asking if the parking space will now be available.
In written language, on the contrary, communication
lacks many meaningful features: intonation, timbre, environmental
context, so the reader may interpret anything not specified by
the author in a far freer way.
As Vygotsky acutely states, "The evolution from the
draft to the final copy reflects our mental process" 6:
and when reading we follow a reverse path.
While translating a text into mental language, we have to
turn meaning into sense. Paulhan, quoted by Vygotsky, defines sense as
"the sum of all psychological events aroused in our consciousness by
the word" 7.
Meaning - in this view - is just one of the zones of sense, the
most stable and precise. A word acquires its sense from the
context in which it appears; in a different context, its sense is
altered.
In the next units we will turn away from the more
psychological aspects of literature to start to ponder what
"meaning" can mean.
Bibliographical references
CALVINO I. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, translated by William Weaver, London, Vintage, 1998, ISBN 0-7493-9923-6.
VYGOTSKIJ L.S. Thought and Language. Edited by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge (Massachusetts), MIT Press, 1965. First edition: Myshlenie I rech´. Psihologicheskie issledovanija. Moskvà-Leningrad, Gosudarstvennoe social´no-èkonomicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1934.
1