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 a glimpse of what makes the poem a poem. The editor and translator have determined that such studied artlessness does a serious injustice, if not to the long-dead poet, who is unlikely to object, then to the reader thus left to take the admiring critic’s word for it. For those who might prefer to read the poems in the original, however, in each instance this is provided after the English translation.
If every translator also edits, retooling the text to serve a new audience in their own language and to their own purposes, then it is equally true that the engaged editor of a translation also translates. That is certainly the case here. Andreas Schönle not only conceptualized the project, selecting its constituent texts and their arrangement, but throughout the process of pulling these texts into English he has been the translator’s close collaborator, interlocutor, and—occasionally, and in the very best spirit—sparring partner. He has rescued the effort from my numerous oversights, misjudgments, and outright errors. The fault for any that remain rests with me alone.
Part One
SEMIOTICS
CHAPTER 1
From Universe of the Mind
This section and the next two are from a monograph, composed partly from previously published articles, which came out first in English translation in 1990 under the title of Universe of the Mind, trans. Ann Shukman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), and in Russian in 1999. Our translation is based on the version included in Iu. M. Lotman, Semiosfera (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2000), 163–177, itself based on the manuscript copy of Lotman’s text. In this section we see Lotman grapple with an important issue, rarely addressed, which is how semiotics can account for the production of new ideas and information, as opposed to the actualization of meanings already encoded in the linguistic structure. Lotman derives novelty from the interaction between two differently