2023 Vol. 14 №3

The article examines the ideas of Heidegger, Losev, and Ortega y Gasset regarding the possibility and necessity of translating philosophical texts. The concept of non-translation is an acknowledgment of the impossibility of adequately reproducing a philosophical text in another language while preserving its integrity. Particularly interesting for comparison are the concepts and practices of translation/non-translation found in works written during the same period (1920—1940s), which reveal numerous points of contact. All three philosophers reject conventional translation, proposing instead to consider ordinary words as philosophical terms. Despite the fact that such an approach may make the text appear contradictory to familiar norms, the philosophers insist on the necessity of violating convention. The opposition of translation vs non-translation is related to the multilingual nature of the text, as well as to the problem of language hierarchy and the attitude towards translating others' and one's own texts. Losev and Heidegger employ the technique of retrospective translation, which involves etymologizing or contextualizing texts that are older than the translated text. Etymologization (alongside commentary) is seen as a way to transfer ideas into a different cultural system, and Ortega y Gasset refers to humans as “etymological animals”. In Losev's interpretive translation, foreign translations or translations into other languages are viewed as interpretations and become objects of study. While Heidegger repeatedly criticizes the understanding of language as communication, and Ortega y Gasset takes a fundamentally anti-communicative position, Losev, on the contrary, emphasizes communication. Losev and Heidegger operate with the concept of clarity: the former consistently strives for maximum clarity by using apophatic techniques to eliminate irrelevant interpretations of meanings, but clarity is more of a propaedeutic task; the latter does not aim for clarity but utilizes the technique of infinite clarification. Both approaches raise the question of whether the criterion of scientificity is applicable to the translation of philosophical texts.

In this paper, translation is examined from the perspective of the semantics of possible worlds. The consequences of this viewpoint are explored, particularly in relation to the metaphor of traveling through possible and impossible worlds in translation practice. Special attention is given to cases where there are disparities between the world of the original text and the world of the translated text. For example, in the case of French subjunctive forms, which are grammatically mandatory in the original language, they often need to be replaced with indicative forms in the target language, such as Russian. Externally, this transformation appears as a change from expressing a possibility in one world to making a statement about the actual world. Various techniques for transforming French inserts in the original Russian text (in Leo Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace") are analyzed and compared with the actual French translation found in a French edition of the same text by a Francophone translator. The study demonstrates that the concept of language translatability does not align completely with the concept of text translatability, as the latter is influenced by various external and internal factors related to cultural contexts, traditions, trends, and more. Viewing text translation as a journey through worlds also involves elements from the real worlds that belong to the original author, the translator, and the recipients of the translated text within their socio-cultural contexts.

The paper investigates multimodal behavior of simultaneous interpreters during ‘non-interpretation’ regarded as interruptions in the flow of speech due to difficulties. Video recordings of a TEDtalk on biology interpreted from English into Russian by 24 simultaneous interpreters are analyzed with the help of quantitative and qualitative methods. The distribution of gestures with the moments of ‘non-interpretation’ indicates that referential (representational and deictic) gestures serve the compensatory function of strengthening the mappings between three frames of reference in which a simultaneous interpreter acts at the same time: i. e., the frame of reference of the events described in the lecture, the communicative situation of the source text, and the interpreter’s physical communicative space constrained by the booth. Representational gestures connect the first two frames of reference via the representational modes of drawing, molding, holding, as well as acting out and embodying. Deictic (pointing) gestures help the interpreter to organize the referential objects around him / her, thus integrating the referential frame of events being described and interpreted, and the physical space of the booth.

In 1927, Nâzım Hikmet composed several poems based on his impressions of his visit to Azerbaijani capital, the city of Baku. They will be included in the collection Song of the Sun-drinkers (1928) and will soon be translated into Russian. The Baku cycle was one of the first attempts at a symbolic representation of petroleum in Russian poetry, in many ways foreshadowing the later poetics of the subject, which will develop on Russian material only in the 2000s. One can look at these poems by Hikmet as one of the first attempts to create a philosophy of petroleum, which will find its most large-scale embodiment in the philosophical novel “Cyclonopedia” by Reza Negarestani, where petroleum constitutes a new type of subjectivity, simultaneously fluid and explosive. On the other hand, the image of petroleum will play a key role in Alexei Parshchikov’s poem of the same name, where one can also discern echoes of this philosophy in Hikmet’s Baku cycle. For all these authors, petroleum acts as a radical expression of the logic of non-translation: it is a condensed memory of antiquity, which cannot be directly accessed; its mystery cannot be revealed because, in a sense, it contains no mystery. Such a paradoxical semiotics leads all three authors to the idea that petroleum is alien to the human world and has a special inhuman agency.

The paper centers on the phenomenon of non-translation in the texts of bilingual poets who perform self-translation into the lect of a dominant, ‘larger’ tradition (Putonghua / Rus­sian). Non-translation is set in motion in the conditions of enhanced linguistic reflection of its authors and serves as a marker of a special affective connection with a lect that is permanently associated with a weaker position. Paradoxically, the attempt to expand readership by trans­lating into ‘larger’ lects relies on the strategy of non-translation. Non-translation captures the most content-laden elements of the poem, which in the original serve as a sign of the otherness of the cultural tradition correlated with the text. In this sense, non-translation has a performative character, since its very production emphasizes the critical difference and delimitation of linguistic and cultural traditions.

Ezra Pound’s “Pisan Cantos” is a multi-layered palimpsest rewritten and written over previous editions several times, in which the non-translation of quotes, sayings and headlines becomes an aesthetically significant device. Younger branches of complex poetry after 1945, on the one hand, overcome Pound’s total project, on the other, inherit him through this ‘gap’. Within the framework of this article, the author explores how hermetic poetry (language writing, metarealism and generation of the 21st century) uses non-translation and untrans­latable to create/express political and ontological problems corresponding to this gap. So, in “Drafts” by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, palimpsest exposes the very deployment of language, writing, the ‘trace’ of other languages — all this develops together with the optics of studying writing and the loosening of the dominant hierarchies of poetic subjectivity and artistic form. In the poetry of metarealists Arkady Dragomoshchenko and Alexei Parshchikov, non-translation serves as a way of creating palimpsest marginalia, structuring the perception of interweaving images both through donor text and through the transformation of its motives. And the discommunicative palimpsest of Ekaterina Zakharkiv’s poem “Hiroo Onoda” is based on the unrepresentative function of the non-translation, when the collision of different lan­guages, quotes and references creates both difficulty in perception and communicative faults in the narrative fabric of the work. Thus, the article is an attempt to derive points on a con­tour map of poetic practices, showing both the formation of a way of inter-linguistic inte­rac­tion within the text that is different from multilingualism, and the ways of inheritance through the rupture of the complex and ambiguous nature of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”, which gave rise not only to a new type of modernist epic, but also a special type of poetic palimpsest.

The article examines the principles and methods of constructing discourse that emerges through a unique combination of socio-cultural and linguistic factors in the context of a European metropolis. Participants involved are representatives of the first and second wave of Russian emigration: Gaito (Georgy Ivanovich) Gazdanov, a prominent writer of the Russian diaspora, and Fatima Salkazanova, an aspiring journalist who crossed paths with Gazdanov in the 1960s in Paris while working in the Russian service of Radio Liberty[60]. Salkazanova's oral memoirs provide valuable insights, revealing that Gazdanov remained completely silent in her presence for a period of six months until he unexpectedly spoke to her, advising her to purchase a new watch. The primary focus of this study is to elucidate the strategy employed in constructing this ‘wordless’ discourse, as well as to explore the conditions that facilitate its occurrence, underlying mechanisms, and its historical background. The analysis encompasses linguistic, historical, cultural aspects, and aims to determine its linguistic classification and overall significance. The discourse itself is interpreted as a revival of the archaic ritual of silence practiced in Ossetian patriarchal families, serving as a form of speech etiquette. This relic language practice, rooted in Indo-European archaic traditions, represents a manifes­ta­tion of the rite of passage and allows individuals of Ossetian origin, who may have lost their na­tive language due to external circumstances, to demonstrate their cultural identity. It is suggested that the occurrence of such speech behaviour is strongly influenced by the specific time and place, where forced emigration to Europe not only contributes to the preservation of archaic speech etiquette patterns but also involuntarily activates them.

This article examines the perception of ‘rare’ and ‘common’ languages through literary translations. The study is based on the materials from De Bezige Bij Publishing House in the Netherlands, comparing the periods of 2010—2013 and 2020—2023. A significant increase in the role of translators is reflected in the rise of translation share in the publishing house. There is an observed growth in the number of source languages for translation, with a dec­rease in the proportion of English. Translations from French, Italian, German, Scandinavian languages, Portuguese, and Japanese have emerged. A comparison with the Polyandria Rus­sian Publishing House during the period of 2020—2023 reveals common and distinct source lan­guages. Both publishers translate literature into Danish, Finnish, and French to a similar extent. The Russian publishing house represents Norwegian and Japanese to a greater extent, while the Dutch publishing house releases more translations from German, Swedish, Turkish, and Italian. The Russian publisher also includes Icelandic, Albanian, Korean, and Croatian, while the Dutch publisher includes Hebrew, Romanian, and Portuguese. Both publishers en­com­pass a total of 20 source languages, which is a small number compared to the global lin­guistic diversity. Comparing the volumes of source languages also indicates diffe­ren­ces in pre­ferences. Central European languages are chosen in the Netherlands, while Nor­wegian and Ice­landic are favored in Russia. These differences may be influenced by the cost of rights to works, editorial preferences, and translator availability. The analysis results indicate that neither typological similarity between the source language and the target language, nor association with a specific language group, influences the preference for translating books from a particular language. This highlights the importance of sociocultural factors.

I discuss the relation of linguistics and semiotics on the basis of the Old Russian discourse particle TI1 ‘indeed’, ‘verily’, ‘truly’ discovered by Andrej A. Zaliznjak in 1993. Linguistics and semiotics are different research programmes: the first one deals with specific features of language structures, while the second one discusses general characteristics of all sign systems, from a perspective of interpreting most or all of them as secondary respective to natural language. Formal models of language deal with classes of elements and predict their positions. Lexicographic descriptions provide instructions to the use of particular language items treated as signs with their concepts and syntactics. Functional words including discourse particles allow both approaches. The existence of Old Russian particle TI1 as has been proved by Zaliznjak on the basis of formal conditions, constraining the position of this particle in the clausal structure. Meanwhile, Zaliznjak failed to provide a lexicographical description of TI1 and reliable external parallels from other languages. I argue that TI1 is a marker of verification with the meaning ‘p really takes place’. The view that TI1 expressed enhanced indicativity is not tenable, since this particle was licensed in hypothetical contexts and combined with the optative marker. It is essential to identify the lexicographic type of a functional word in order to get its full syntactics.