Translation and Semiotic Mediation PDF

Sign Systems Studies 40(3/4), 2012
Sign Systems Studies

40(3/4)
262 Contents
Тартуский университет
Tartu Ülikool
Труды по знаковым системам
Töid märgisüsteemide alalt
40(3/4)
Contents 263
University of Tartu
Sign Systems Studies

volume 40(3/4)
Special Issue:
Semiotics of Translation and Cultural Mediation
Guest editors:
Elin Sütiste, Terje Loogus, Maarja Saldre
Tartu 2012
264 Contents
Sign Systems Studies is an international journal of semiotics and sign processes in

culture and living nature
Periodicity: one volume (four issues) per year
Official languages: English and Russian; Estonian for abstracts
Established in 1964
Address of the editorial office:

Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu
Jakobi 2, Tartu 51014, Estonia
E-mail address: sss@ut.ee
Information and subscription: http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/sss
Editors:
Kalevi Kull, Kati Lindström, Mihhail Lotman, Timo Maran, Silvi Salupere,
Ene-Reet Soovik and Peeter Torop
International editorial board:
Myrdene Anderson (Purdue, USA)

Paul Cobley (London, UK)
Marcel Danesi (Toronto, Canada)
John Deely (Houston, USA)
Umberto Eco (Bologna, Italy)
Jesper Hoffmeyer (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Vyacheslav V. Ivanov (Los Angeles, USA, and Moscow, Russia)
Gunther Kress (London, UK)
Julia Kristeva (Paris, France)
Winfried Nöth (Kassel, Germany, and São Paulo, Brazil)
Roland Posner (Berlin, Germany)
Frederik Stjernfelt (Aarhus, Denmark)
Eero Tarasti (Helsinki, Finland)
Boris Uspenskij (Napoli, Italy)
Jaan Valsiner (Worcester, USA)
Copyright University of Tartu, 2012

ISSN 1406–4243
University of Tartu Press

www.tyk.ee
Contents
Preface. On the paths of translation semiotics with Peeter Torop ................ 269
Semiotics of Translation
Winfried Nöth
Translation and semiotic mediation .................................................................... 279
Перевод и семиотическое посредничество. Резюме ...................................................... 298
Tõlkimine ja semiootiline vahendamine. Kokkuvõte .......................................................... 298
Ritva Hartama-Heinonen
Semiotico-translation-theoretical reverberations revisited ............................. 299
Новый взгляд на переводо-семио-теоретические отголоски. Резюме .................. 318
Uus pilguheit tõlke-semiootilis-teoreetilistele järelkajadele. Kokkuvõte ...................... 318
Daniele Monticelli
Challenging identity: Lotman’s “translation of the untranslatable” and
Derrida’s différance ........................................................................................................... 319
Вызов идентичности: лотмановский “перевод непереводимого” и
différance Деррида. Резюме .................................................................................................. 338
Väljakutse identiteedile: Lotmani “tõlkimatuse tõlge” ja
Derrida différance. Kokkuvõte ............................................................................................... 339
Dinda Gorlée
Goethe’s glosses to translation .............................................................................. 340
Комментарии Гете по поводу перевода. Резюме ......................................................... 367
Goethe kommentaarid tõlkimise kohta. Kokkuvõte ........................................................ 367
266 Contents
Terje Loogus
Culture-related decision conflicts in cross-cultural translation ...................... 369
Конфликтные решения при межкультурном переводе. Резюме .............................. 384
Otsustuskonfliktid kultuuridevahelises tõlkimises. Kokkuvõte ..................................... 384
Literature and Cultural Mediation

Katalin Kroó
The cultural mediational dynamics of literary intertexts: An approach to
the problem of generative and transformational dynamics ............................. 385
Культурно-медиаторская динамика литературных интертекстов.
К проблеме генеративной и трансформационной динамики. Резюме .................. 403
Kirjanduslike intertekstide kultuuriline vahendav dünaamika: generatiivse ja
transformatiivse dünaamika probleemist. Kokkuvõte ..................................................... 404
Ekaterina Velmezova
The history of humanities as reflected in the evolution of
K. Vaginov’s novels .................................................................................................. 405
Об отражении истории гуманитарных наук в романах К. Вагинова. Резюме ..... 431
Humanitaarteaduste ajaloo peegeldumine K. Vaginovi romaanides. Kokkuvõte ..... 431
Anneli Mihkelev
The image of neighbours: Latvian and Lithuanian literature in Estonia ...... 432
Образ соседей: латышская и литовская литература в Эстонии. Резюме ............... 446
Kujutluspilt naabritest: läti ja leedu kirjandus Eestis. Kokkuvõte ................................. 446
Maria-Kristiina Lotman
Equiprosodic translation method in Estonian poetry ...................................... 447
Эквипросодический стихотворный перевод. Резюме ................................................ 471
Ekviprosoodiline luuletõlge. Kokkuvõte ............................................................................ 472
Contents 267
Culture in Mediation
Tomi Huttunen
On the semiotic description of autogenesis in culture ..................................... 473
К семиотическому описанию автогенезиса в культуре. Резюме ............................. 483
Kultuuri autogeneesi semiootilisest kirjeldamisest. Kokkuvõte .................................... 483
Ileana Almeida, Julieta Haidar

Mythopoetical model and logic of the concrete in Quechua culture:
Cultural and transcultural translation problems ................................................ 484
Мифопоэтическая модель и логика конкретного в культуре кечуа: проблемы
культурного и межкультурного перевода. Резюме ...................................................... 512
Mütopoeetiline mudel ja konkreetsuse loogika quechua kultuuris: kultuurilise ja
transkultuurilise tõlke probleeme. Kokkuvõte .................................................................. 513
Harri Veivo
The city as a mediating device and as a symbol in Finnish poetry
of the 1960s ................................................................................................................ 514
Город как посреднический прием и символ в финской поэзии
1960-х гг. Резюме ................................................................................................................... 528
Linn kui vahendav võte ja sümbol 1960ndate aastate soome luules. Kokkuvõte ....... 528
Aare Pilv
Theses about the poietic principle of metonymy .............................................. 529
Тезисы о пойетическом принципе метонимичности. Резюме ................................. 545
Teese poieetilisest metonüümsuspõhimõttest. Kokkuvõte ............................................ 546
Peeter Torop
Semiotics of mediation ............................................................................................ 547
Семиотика опосредования. Резюме ................................................................................. 556
Vahendussemiootika. Kokkuvõte ........................................................................................ 556
268 Contents
Reviews and notes

Bruno Osimo
Peeter Torop for Italian science of translation ................................................... 557
Preface
On the paths of translation semiotics

with Peeter Torop
“Humanities and social sciences as feedback sciences

have a mission to ensure a culture’s ability to
understand itself. Without self-understanding, culture
would lack identity, and without identity it is hard to
create dialogue with the surrounding world, other
cultures – to be at the same time both capable of
dialogue as well as mentally independent.”
(Torop 2011: 81)
The present special issue of Sign Systems Studies, “Semiotics of Translation and
Cultural Mediation”, brings together a collection of papers written on trans-
lational and mediational aspects of various cultural phenomena and on se-
miotic and cultural aspects of translation. Most of the articles are based on
presentations delivered at the conference “Culture in Mediation: Total Trans-
lation, Complementary Perspectives” dedicated to Peeter Torop’s 60th birth-
day in November 2010.
Peeter Torop has been Professor of Semiotics of Culture at the Department
of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia since 1998. In the years 1997–2006
he also served as the Head of the Department. Over the years he has supervised
close to 40 Master’s and Doctoral dissertations and held lecture courses in sub-
jects such as semiotics of translation, semiotic modelling, semiotics of litera-
ture, interdisciplinary analysis of culture, and numerous others.
Peeter Torop is a scholar of depth and reach. Similarly to his long-time
research interest Fyodor Dostoyevsky who feared profanation and oversimpli-
fication, Peeter Torop has on occasion revealed that the one thing he dreads is
the devaluation of demanding intellectual effort and the possibility of high
1
Here and in the following, the quotations from Peeter Torop’s writings in Estonian and
Russian have been translated by me – E. S.
270 Elin Sütiste
quality being attributed to phenomena that in actuality do not possess it. Peeter
Torop himself is a researcher in the word’s true meaning, a scholar who loves to
delve into his object of investigation, to live among the authors and texts he
studies. By today’s count, his work as a mediator of knowledge has produced
close to 300 publications, their topics ranging from Estonian translation history
to explaining the legacy of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics, from
nuances in understanding Dostoyevsky to examining political issues in present-
day Estonia and making sense of our contemporary multi-, inter-, transmedial,
etc. world. Half of Torop’s publications have been written in Estonian, the
other half is comprised mostly of Russian- or English-language publications.
Since 1970, he has published around 60 articles in Estonian newspapers, which
gives testimony to Peeter Torop’s concern for Estonian culture and his readi-
ness to participate in its internal communication as well as in communication
with other cultures. Some examples of his topics that show the scope of his
interests and fields of competence can be listed as follows: “Translated poetry:
translator and poet” (1985); “Love and mercy” (1987, afterword to Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment); “Literature in film” (1989a); “The
memory of science” (1993); “Butterfly in storm” (on the translation of Boris
Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, 2000c); “Reading of the Internet” (2001b); “At the
sources of Russian terrorism” (2001e); “Simplified Estonia” (2002b); “Eco’s
epiphany in fog” (2004); “Bilingual Estonia” (2005b); “Multimediality”
(2008b); “Theatre festival as cultural autocommunication” (2009c); “National
film and culture” (2012).
Over the years, some subject matters have recurrently captured Peeter To-
rop’s attention. One of the most persistent topics has been that of interrelations
between Translation and Culture: in Torop’s bibliography we can find the first
co-occurrence of these words already in 1979 in the title of his article
“Культура и перевод” (“Culture and translation”, Torop 1979a), while the
most recent example is his 2011 volume in Estonian by a similar title Tõlge ja
kultuur (Translation and culture, Torop 2011b). Translation as a central
cultural mechanism in communication with other cultures as well as in auto-
communication occupies a special place in Torop’s interest sphere. He has
dedicated considerable attention to questions related to translation history,
including the complex issue of methodology of composing translation history
(Torop 1979b, 1989b, 2011a; Torop, Osimo 2010).
Peeter Torop has also been a long-time mediator of the legacy of the Tartu–
Moscow Semiotic School (e.g. Torop 1992, 1998b, 1999a, 2000d, 2000e,
Preface 271
2005c; Kull, Salupere, Torop, Lotman 2011) and specifically of Juri Lotman
(e.g. Torop 1982, 1989c, 1991, 1993a, 2001c, 2002a, 2006, 2008a, 2009a,
2009b). As one among Juri Lotman’s and Zara Mints’s students and colleagues
who were drawn together by the couple’s charismatic commitment to their
academic work, Peeter Torop has expressed his feeling of responsibility for
continuing their work and handing down to the next generation of younger
colleagues (in the Tartu School, ‘colleagues’ have included and continue to
include students) his teachers’ attitude towards their subject matter and their
work (Torop 1999b: 365). On many occasions, Peeter Torop has emphasized
that Juri Lotman set the measure for everybody around him with his high
ethical standards and academic integrity, qualities that are no less relevant in
today’s academic and everyday life than they were at the time of Juri Lotman
(Torop 1999c).
As a scholar of Russian literature by his academic background, Peeter To-
rop has acted as a valuable mediator of Russian literature for the Estonian stu-
dents and reading public. His lectures on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov
are recalled with admiration by his former students even from the days when he
still was a novice lecturer. Dostoyevsky has been Torop’s focus of research in
Russian literature and it is to Dostoyevsky that he has devoted the largest
number of his publications on Russian literature, among these an influential
monograph Достоевский: история и идеология (1997, Dostoyevsky: History
and Ideology).
Torop has acted as mediator of Russian literature not only as a scholar and
lecturer but, so far rather exceptionally for him, also as a translator. In 1981, a
compilation of fragments from Dostoyevsky’s non-belletristic legacy was
published in Estonian translation (Dostojevski 1981). This collection was
composed and translated by Peeter Torop himself, and perhaps it is not wholly
wrong to surmise that the exceptionality of this work in his bibliography casts
some light on Peeter Torop’s own personality, on the topics that are important
to him.
Peeter Torop is also one of the few persistent explicit spokespersons for
translation semiotics today. Translation semiotics is not a full-fledged discip-
line yet, being still in the state of becoming (Torop 2008c: 253). Considerable
mutual influences between semiotics and studies of translation have in fact
existed for several decades: some semiotic ideas have infiltrated translation
studies and become axiomatic knowledge (see, e.g. Jakobson 1966[1959]),
while translation, mainly used as a metaphor, has proved its explanatory power
272 Elin Sütiste
in semiotics on many occasions (e.g. Lotman 2000[1990]; Petrilli 2003a;

Ponzio 2003). Essay collections or special issues of journals2 have been
published that bring together translation and semiotics and give an idea which
authors are considered relevant or responsible for such fusion. For instance, in
his review of Translation Translation, a “mainly semiotic miscellany”
(Chesterman 2004: 359) compiled and edited by Susan Petrilli in 2003 and
containing 36 essays, Andrew Chesterman lists the most frequently occurring
names: Bakhtin, Bassnett, Benjamin, Bhabha, Borges, Derrida, Gorlée,
Jakobson, Lefevere, Lotman, Peirce, Toury and Venuti (ibid.). This list
indicates not only the book’s focus, but also a possible (certainly not a
definitive) circle of people relevant for translation semiotics. In his paper
discussing the reasons why semiotics would be good for translation studies,
Ubaldo Stecconi names five persons whom he considers to have made a
“promising start for translation semiotics”: Jakobson, van Kesteren, Toury,
Deledalle-Rhodes, and Gorlée (Stecconi 2007: 16–17). To these authors
Stecconi then adds five more who have made “interesting contributions to the
field”: Torop, Petrilli, Eco, Nergaard, and Cosculluela (Stecconi 2007: 17).
Several of the above-mentioned scholars have accumulated significant
numbers of renderings and followers. Roman Jakobson is perhaps the best
known founding father of translation semiotics, first and foremost owing to his
seminal article “On linguistic aspects of translation” (1966[1959]) that has
provided food for thought for many later theoreticians (e.g. Steiner
1998[1975]; Derrida 1985; Toury 1986; Eco 2001; Petrilli 2003a). Another,
more distant forefather of translation semiotics, is Charles Sanders Peirce,
whose influence is evident and acknowledged also in the above-mentioned
article of Roman Jakobson. Although Jakobson borrows essentially a single
element from Peirce’s system – the idea of interpretant and the accompanying
concept of unlimited semiosis –, many later scholars have employed Peirce’s
thought much more extensively in explaining and substantiating translational
phenomena. Dinda L. Gorlée, an expert in Peirce and one of the leading figures
of translation semiotics today, has developed the concept of semiotranslation,
which the author herself has characterized as follows: “[Semiotranslation] is a
unidirectional, future-oriented, cumulative, and irreversible process, a growing
network which should not be pictured as a single line emanating from a source
text toward a designated target text” (Gorlée 2004: 103–104).
2
E.g. Petrilli 2003b; Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique Appliquée 9(24), 2010; Sign Systems
Studies 36(2), 2008; Semiotica 163(1/4), 2007.
Preface 273
The form of translation semiotics that Peeter Torop has been advancing
stems to a significant extent from the tradition of the Tartu–Moscow School of
Semiotics. In fact, semiotics of culture has been present in the mainstream of
translation studies since the 1970s–80s. Juri Lotman’s ideas have resonated
well with the work of translation scholars such as Itamar Even-Zohar and
Gideon Toury who, similarly to Lotman, drew considerable inspiration from
Russian Formalism. Even-Zohar has discussed translation phenomena as they
operate in wider contexts forming heterogeneous ‘polysystems’; Toury has
advanced Descriptive Translation Studies and proposed the concept of ‘norm’
to be used with regard to translational behaviour in culture. Toury (1986) also
wrote an entry on translation for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics edited
by Thomas A. Sebeok that was probably the first systematic discussion of the
interrelations between translation and semiotics.3
As a field of research striving to become established as a discipline on its
own, semiotics of translation has been quite likely most advocated for by Peeter
Torop who has on many occasions explained the interrelations between
semiotics, especially semiotics of culture, and translation studies (e.g. Torop
1994, 1998a, 2000a, f, 2001a, 2005a, 2007a, b, 2008c, 2010, 2011b; Sütiste,
Torop 2007). In his original contribution to the study of translation, Peeter
Torop has proposed the concept of total translation that, first, means the
widening of the circle of issues and phenomena included in the subject area of
translation studies, and, second, symbolizes the search for an “understanding
methodology”, or in other words, attempts to methodologically translate the
experience of various disciplines into one unitary interdisciplinarity (Torop
1995: 10).
In his writings Torop has suggested that the main object of translation
studies should be the translation process (Torop 2008d: 377). Translation
process can be reconstructed on the basis of two texts: the input (source) text
and the output (target) text. The comparison of the two has enabled Torop to
build a universal taxonomy of translation process that is devised so as to be able
to account for any kind of translation, in principle (Torop 1995: 12). At the
same time Torop has considered it necessary to allow for various kinds of
translational semiosis and therefore within the framework of total translation
he distinguishes between textual translation, metatextual translation, in- and
intertextual translation, and extratextual translation (Torop 1995: 12–13). In
3
More recently, an article on translation for a semiotics handbook (edited by Roland
Posner a.o.) has been contributed by José Lambert and Clem Robyns (2004).
274 Elin Sütiste
building his theory, Torop has borne in mind that it would take into account
not only the interlingual aspect of translation, but also intralingual, inter-
semiotic as well as intertextual, interdiscursive and intermedial aspects (Torop
2000a). Torop’s views and their evolution have been summarized in his books
Тотальный перевод (Total Translation, 1995; in Italian translation as La
traduzione totale, Torop 2000b, 2nd ed. Torop 2010), Kultuurimärgid (Signs of
Culture, Torop 1999b) and Tõlge ja kultuur (Translation and Culture, 2011b).
Despite the promising perspectives, translation semiotics has so far
remained a rather marginal enterprise both with regard to translation studies
and semiotics in general, and the path of combining the study of translation
with semiotics has been undertaken only by a select few (cf. Hartama-Heino-
nen, this volume). One explanation for this may be that while it is quite easy to
see the obvious convergences in translation and sign action, it takes con-
siderable erudition and a broad field of vision to construe the historical as well
as contemporary rhizomatic relations between the two spheres. Perhaps in
order to make semiotics more visible within translation studies it needs to be
better translated for this discipline, as for instance Ubaldo Stecconi has done
(e.g. Stecconi 2007). There is no doubt Peeter Torop himself deserves to be
more extensively translated – both in terms of his writings such as his seminal
work Тотальный перевод (1995) as well as in terms of interpreting his contri-
bution to the study of translation (cf. Osimo, this volume).
In the present collection, Peeter Torop directs his attention to the broader
phenomenon of mediation and formulates five theses of semiotics of me-
diation. In other essays of this special issue, translation and mediation are
viewed from a variety of perspectives and the usage of the respective concepts
tends to be rather broad as well as intuitive in the sense that the two fields are
usually not strictly separated. In many articles, translation is understood in a
fairly traditional sense, meaning transfer between various natural languages but
also involving transfer between cultures (Terje Loogus), literatures (Anneli
Mihkelev) or their subforms such as poetry (Maria-Kristiina Lotman). The
mediational nature of literary intertexts is discussed in Katalin Kroó’s article.
Dinda Gorlée complements the traditional understanding of translation with a
semiotic commentary, while Daniele Monticelli, Winfried Nöth, Ritva
Hartama-Heinonen and Tomi Huttunen write about translation and mediation
as predominantly deep-structure semiotic phenomena. Ileana Almeida and
Julieta Haidar in their article construe translation foremost as cultural transfer;
Aare Pilv, Ekaterina Velmezova and Harri Veivo write about transfers between
Preface 275
various discourses, such as factual and fictional discourses (Pilv), discourse of

humanities and K. Vaginov’s novels (Velmezova), and different poetic
discourses in Finnish poetry (Veivo). The articles of this collection follow the
spirit of the Tartu School, focusing on topics related to semiotic mechanisms at
work in culture. 60 years is said to be a young age for a humanities scholar, and
it is certainly a young age for an academic discipline – thus we may hope for the
unfolding of interesting developments in semiotics of translation and me-
diation together with Peeter Torop.4
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Elin Sütiste5
5
Author’s address: Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2, 51014 Tartu,
Estonia; e-mail: elin.sytiste@ut.ee
Translation and semiotic mediation
Winfried Nöth
University of Kassel and PUC São Paulo1
e-mail: noeth@uni-kassel.de
Donum natalicium viro doctissimo Peeter Torop sexagenario
Abstract. Translation, according to Charles S. Peirce, is semiotic mediation. In sign

processes in general, the sign mediates between the object, which it represents, and its
interpretant, the idea it evokes, the interpretation it creates, or the action it causes. To
what extent does the way a translator mediates correspond to what a sign does in
semiosis? The paper inquires into the parallels between the agency of the sign in
semiosis and the agency of the interpreter (and translator) in translation. It argues that
some of the limits and limitations of translatability are also the limits of the sign in
semiosis. Since genuine icons and genuine indices do not convey meaning they are
strictly speaking also untranslatable. Nevertheless, icons and indices also serve as
mediators in learning how to translate.
1. Mediation:
The agency of the sign and of its interpretant
This paper presents complementary Peircean perspectives to Peeter Torop’s
Total Translation and to his “Semiotics of Mediation” (Torop 2000, 2012) as
well as to the Peircean theory of translation elaborated by Dinda Gorlée (1994,
2004). In contrast to the studies by these authors, who are concerned with
semiotic aspects of translation proper, the present paper focuses mainly on
translation as a metaphor to elucidate the process of semiotic mediation in
general. Peirce often used the concept of mediation simply as a synonym of the
concepts of sign and representation (cf. Parmentier 1985, Nöth 2011a). Trans-
lators are evidently also agents who mediate between speakers and hearers of
different languages, but what do they have in common with the agency of signs
in sign processes in general?
1
Postal address: Universität Kassel, FB 02, IAA, D-34109 Kassel, Germany.
280 Winfried Nöth
It is well known that the interpretant of the sign must not be confounded
with the interpreter in the sense of the addressee who interprets a message.
Interpretant is Peirce’s term for the third of the three constituents of a sign; it
refers to the ideas which a sign conveys to its interpreters, the mental,
emotional or behavioural effect of the sign on its addressees. In Peirce’s words,
it is “the proper significate outcome of a sign” (CP 5.473, 1907). The two other
agents in semiosis are the sign in the narrower sense, occasionally also called
the representamen, and the object represented by the sign, that is, the dynamical
and the immediate object. The dynamical or real object is the object “as
unlimited and final study would show it to be” (CP 8.183, EP 2: 495, 1909; CP
4.536, 1906); it can therefore only be incompletely represented by its sign. The
immediate object is a mental representation of the dynamical object, an idea,
knowledge, or mere notion which we have of the real object of the sign; in this
sense, it is “the Object as the Sign represents it” (CP 8.343, 1910) or “the
Object as cognized in the Sign and therefore an Idea” (EP 2: 495, 1909).
In the process of semiosis, the sign is a first, the object a second, and the
interpretant a third. This triadic order corresponds to the temporal order in
which the three play their part in the process of semiosis (e.g., CP 7.591, 1866).
The sign comes first insofar as it is the first which we perceive before
interpretation begins. Its object is the second insofar as it antecedes the sign as
the knowledge which we must have to interpret it, whereas the interpretant is
the third because it interprets the sign and its object.
Consider the example of a red traffic light. The sign pertains to the present,
the moment in which a driver perceives it. The object antecedes it since it is the
driver’s knowledge of the traffic regulation and the awareness that the red light
means ‘stop’. The interpretant follows the driver’s perception of the light since
it is the habit of road users to stop when the traffic light has turned red. Peirce’s
semiotics is not a psychological theory of actual sign processing. The sign is not
merely that which is first perceived before it is interpreted. Instead, it is a
“power”, a semiotic potency, which “is of the nature of a mental habit” and
which “consists in the fact that something would be” (MS 675, ca. 1911, quoted
from Balat 1990: 48, fn. 8).
Semiotic mediation occurs whenever “a Third […] brings a First into
relation to a Second” (CP 8.332, 1904), but since both the interpretant and, in
the sense of a triadic relation, the sign, too, are phenomena of thirdness, both
the sign and the interpretant mediate in semiosis, although in different senses.
The sign mediates because it does not only represent its object but also fulfills
Translation and semiotic mediation 281
the task of bringing “the interpretant into a relation to the object, corres-
ponding to its own relation to the object” (ibid.). Peirce uses the trivalent verb
to bring to characterize the agency of the sign’s triadic mediation. The logic of
the verb to bring, just like that of the verb to give, requires the collaboration of
three participants (CP 1.363, 1890); it presupposes a bringer (“a triple relative
term”, ibid.), something that is brought, and a receiver, to whom the object is
transferred. According to this semiotic scenario, the sign is the bringer or
deliverer of something; the object, which is some information about a reality
that precedes the sign, is that which the sign is bringing, and the interpretant is
the receiver of this delivery. To establish a correspondence between two things
is to establish a triadic relation. The interpretant cannot be conceived of
without the two other semiotic agents to which it is related.
In a different sense, not only the sign but also the interpretant is a mediating
agency in semiosis. As a third, the interpretant mediates like all thirds mediate
between a first and a second. More specifically, the interpretant of a sign is “a
mediating representation which represents the relate to be a representation of the
same correlate which this mediating representation itself represents” (CP 1.553, EP
1: 5, 1867, italics in original). In other words: the interpretant mediates by
interpreting the sign as a representation of its object.
Peirce makes explicit reference to the affinity of the semiotic agency of the
interpretant with the work of a translator when he uses the verb to translate to
describe how the interpretant interprets its sign in the process of semiosis and
how thought interprets thought in the process of reasoning:
Thought […] is in itself essentially of the nature of a sign. But a sign is not a sign
unless it translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed.
Thought requires achievement for its own development, and without this develop-
ment it is nothing. Thought must live and grow in incessant new and higher trans-
lations, or it proves itself not to be genuine thought. (CP 5.594, 1903)
Since signs are fallible, the growth of signs through the mediation of their
interpretants is not a growth that manifests itself in each and every individual
translation. Instead, it manifests itself “in the long run”, through the self-
correcting mechanisms inherent in the evolution of human thought, which
evolves in a “community of understanding”, sharing and presupposing a
common “fund of collateral experience”, as Colapietro (2003: 197) puts it.
282 Winfried Nöth
2. The interpretant as an interpreter, semiosis

as translation, and the limits of translatability and
interpretability
In English semiotic terminology, the term interpreter is actually ambiguous. An
interpreter is either ‘an addressee who interprets a message’, or ‘a person who
translates spoken language’. Peirce has studied the semiotic roles of inter-
preters in both senses. In his terminology, the utterer and interpreter are the two
persons engaged in a dialogue (Colapietro 1993: 10). The interpreter in this
sense of an interpreting addressee is also of interest to translation studies (cf.
Gorlée 2004: 248) but interpretation in this sense is not in the focus of this
paper.2 In order to avoid ambiguities, the term interpreter-translator will oc-
casionally be used in the following to refer to the interpreter in the latter sense.
Above, we observed that the interpreter should not be confounded with the
interpretant of the sign, but we also concluded that the interpretant is a
semiotic mediator. If the interpretant is a mediator, its role in semiosis should
be in some respect similar to that of an interpreter-translator, whose role is
evidently also to mediate, namely between speakers of different languages.
When an English interpreter translates a speech delivered by a French speaker
into English, she mediates between the French speaker and the English
audience insofar as her audience depends on her communicating the same
ideas to them as those conveyed by the French speaker (cf. CP 1.553, EP 1: 5,
1867). This characteristic of mediation makes the role of an interpreter-
translator similar to that of the interpretant in semiosis in general. Just as the
interpreter-translator mediates between speakers of two languages, the
interpretant mediates between the object and the sign by interpreting the
message conveyed by the former to the latter (cf. Nöth 2011a). In which sense
is the interpretant, which is a sign itself, a mediating agent in semiosis in general
(cf. Nöth 2009, 2011a)? Is Peirce’s use of this term merely metaphorical?
When Peirce first introduced the term interpretant, he explained it with the
example of someone learning French who uses a dictionary to look up the
2
Notice that in traditional models of communication (cf. Santaella, Nöth 2004) the role
of the interpreter in the sense of the addressee is usually not represented as the one of a
mediator but as the one of a more or less passive recipient. The idea of passivity is also
expressed in the patient suffix -ee of the term addressee. Peirce’s term interpreter, with its
agentive suffix -er in parallel with the one of its terminological counterpart utterer suggests
much more the idea of an agent in semiosis than the term addressee.
meaning of homme and finds that it means man. In this context, the semantic
correspondence of homme with man, ascertained by the dictionary, illustrates
the role of the interpretant as “a mediating representation […] because it fulfils
the office of an interpreter, who says that a foreigner says the same thing which
he himself says” (CP 1.553, W 2: 53–4, 1867). In this example the dictionary
fulfills the same task as an interpreter-translator. Both do not simply mediate by
substituting unknown words of a source language for known words of a target
language; they mediate by establishing relations between signs and the objects
these signs represent in two languages.
Interpretants and interpreter-translators are subject to similar preconditions
of their ability to translate signs. The semiotically most fundamental prerequisite
for translatability is the knowledge of or familiarity with the object of the sign. A
sign cannot convey the idea of an unknown object and cannot make an
interpreter acquainted with such an object. It can only represent an object with
which the interpreter is already familiar. Peirce calls this prerequisite of felicitous
semiosis “collateral observation” and defines it as follows: “By collateral
observation, I mean previous acquaintance with what the sign denotes. […]
Collateral observation […] is no part of the Interpretant. But to put together the
different subjects as the sign represents them as related – that is the main [i.e.,
force] of the Interpretant-forming” (CP 8.179; EP 2: 494, 1909).
Hence, the familiarity with the object of the sign – which we need in order
to understand the sign – cannot be created by an interpretant nor by a
translator-interpreter. Just as the meaning of the colour word vermilion cannot
really be taught to anyone who has never seen a sample of this particular
colour, translators cannot convey the meaning of the words of a source lan-
guage representing cultural idiosyncrasies unknown to an audience only
acquainted with their own culture. For example, the meaning of the English
word Beefeater remains largely concealed when it is translated by means of the
paraphrase ‘traditional guard at the Tower of London’. This paraphrase does
not tell us what the fancy uniforms of these guards look like, and it will not
enable us to identify a Beefeater among a dozen of men in diverse uniforms. The
object represented by a verbal symbol must be known before a hearer can
understand it. This is why familiarity is a prerequisite of the translatability and
interpretability of signs. Collateral experience of the object presupposes prior
lived experience of the object of the sign, which no translation can convey on
its own. For instance, to give another example, the full meaning of the word
passion fruit is untranslatable to someone who has never tasted this fruit.
284 Winfried Nöth
According to the quote above, translators and interpretants have the task of
“putting together the different subjects as the sign represents them as related”,
instead of making the objects of signs familiar. The interpretant and equally the
interpreter-translator have the task to interpret how the signs of objects, whose
familiarity must be presupposed, are related among themselves; how they are
combined and how new meanings are created by combining them.
A trivial prerequisite of translatability and interpretability is the knowledge of
the signs which are to be translated or interpreted and which Peirce refers to as
the prerequisite of “acquaintance with the system of signs”. He distinguishes it
from the prerequisite of acquaintance with the object of the sign as follows: “I do
not mean by ‘collateral observation’ acquaintance with the system of signs. What
is so gathered is not COLLATERAL. It is on the contrary the prerequisite for
getting any idea signified by the sign” (CP 8.179; EP 2: 494, 1909).
The presupposed familiarity with the object of the sign has consequences
concerning the possibilities of their translatability. Strictly speaking, only symbols
are fully translatable. In fact, to learn a second language means to acquire the
habit of associating signs with objects. Symbols are signs based on habits, and
habits can be changed, whereas similarities between signs and their objects, as in
the case of the icon, or existential relations, as in the case of the index, cannot be
changed. Genuine indices and pure icons, therefore, are strictly speaking
untranslatable. An index, such as a gesture of pointing or the indication of a
temperature by a thermometer, needs no translation, nor do iconic signs such as
pictures have to be translated. Translations of icons and indices are only
necessary and possible to the degree that these signs are combined with
conventional signs, such as numbers, words, or cultural symbols. When
translators translate verbal indices, such as deictic words, or verbal icons, such as
onomatopoeic words, they only translate their symbolic components.
It is true that translators can replace a verbal icon in the source language
with a similar verbal image in the target language and a verbal index with a
different index indicating the same object, but, depending on the degree to
which they do so, they run the risk of diminishing translational equivalence.
This does not necessarily mean a loss of meaning since translations can also be
creative and lead to what Peirce calls a “growth of symbols”.
However, as Peirce also points out, symbols, and with them, translations, can
only grow through symbols, and not through icons and indices. Although
symbols “come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from
icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols”, it is also
true that “if a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it
is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow” (CP 2.302, c. 1895).
3. Icons and indices as mediators in translation and

language learning
How mediation and translation contribute to the growth of symbols has been
described by Peirce, who uses examples from vocabulary acquisition in
language learning. Here, the role of the interpreter-translator evidently
corresponds to the role of the teacher. Of course, in language teaching, the
teacher’s mediation is not restricted to translation proper, i. e., to interlingual
translation, as in the old-fashioned translation method of second language
teaching. In the so-called direct method of foreign language teaching, teachers
mediate through intralingual and intersemiotic translation. In intralingual
translation, an unknown word of the source language is mediated through its
synonym or paraphrase, which substitute simpler and known words of that
same language for it; a more basic vocabulary serves to explain the meaning of
new vocabulary. In intersemiotic translation, the teacher teaches new words by
using nonverbal signs, such as pictures, films, scenic enactments, or gestures.
Peirce did not propose a full-fledged theory of translation, let alone a theory
of second language learning. The purpose of his reflections on these topics was
rather to illustrate the role of the sign and its interpretant in semiosis in general
(cf. Nöth 2010b). Nevertheless, in the course of these reflections, he conveys
most interesting insights into the nature of translation and language learning.
Let us consider in detail how Peirce uses the scenario of learning and teaching
to illustrate the affinity of the roles of a language teacher who translates a word
with the role of the interpretant in semiosis. The example quoted above of how
the meaning of homme can be learned from its translation was only a fragment
of the following much more comprehensive reflection on how translations
mediate in vocabulary acquisition:
Suppose we look up the word homme in a French dictionary; we shall find opposite
to it the word man, which, so placed, represents homme as representing the same
two-legged creature which man itself represents. By a further accumulation of
instances, it would be found that every comparison requires, besides the related
thing, the ground, and the correlate, also a mediating representation which represents
the relate to be a representation of the same correlate which this mediating repre-
286 Winfried Nöth
sentation itself represents. Such a mediating representation may be termed an inter-

pretant. (CP 1.553 & W 2: 53–4, 1867)
According to this scenario, the word homme is at first only a potential but not
yet an actual sign to the student of French. It has no effect on the student’s
mind and cannot create an interpretant as long as the student does not yet have
the habit of associating the word with the idea of its object, that is, its
immediate object. The dictionary, like an interpreter, informing that homme
means the same as man, tells the student that both words represent the same
immediate object, the idea abbreviated as the one of a ‘two-legged creature’.
With this immediate object, the student is familiar through the English word
man and other signs representing it; only the habit of associating the French
word with this object has not yet been acquired. Through the mediation of the
dictionary, the unknown word can now be interpreted. The dictionary does not
directly convey information about the meaning of the word homme, which is its
immediate object (CP 2.292, 1903), but only indirectly or mediately through
another sign, the English word, which the dictionary lists as semantically
equivalent. This is why the dictionary provides “a mediating representation”.
The above language learning scenario elucidates the agency of an inter-
pretant in semiosis in general. The interpretant is a mediating representation.
The interpretant represents the sign, which it interprets, as a representation of
the same object which the sign also represents. Applied to the symbol man in
English, we find that the interpretant, is the idea created by this word in a
potential interpreter’s mind. This idea or thought represents the same object
which is also represented by the word man itself, namely the ‘two-legged
creature’ with which we all are more or less familiar.
Above, we discussed Peirce’s insight that a symbol cannot be made
intelligible to an interpreter who has no collateral knowledge of the object
represented by that symbol. When the interpreter knows nothing about the
object, the missing acquaintance with it cannot be compensated for by means
of translating the symbol into another symbol. The acquaintance with an
unknown object can only be made through experience with the object itself or
through new information about it. Symbols cannot convey any new infor-
mation about their objects because they are only connected with their objects
through the habit which associates the one with the other (Nöth 2010a).
Habits lack creativity; this is why they cannot convey new insights.
Acquaintance with an unknown object can only be conveyed through an
icon in conjunction with an index. Indices cannot give any information about
an unknown object by themselves, but they can draw the interpreter’s attention
to the object by saying (so to speak): “There it is!”3 This is the first step in
becoming acquainted with an unknown object. Ostensive definitions are based
on this insight. The second language learner learns what the word carrot means
when the teacher who adopts the direct method points to a real carrot; but the
meaning of a carrot is not inherent in the pointing gesture itself.
The only sign from which new information about an unknown object can
be obtained is an icon in conjunction with an index.4 Knowledge of what a
passion fruit is cannot be fully gained until we see and taste the real fruit, but an
icon depicting this fruit can convey some knowledge about its colour and
shape, and a synthetic simulation of its taste can even inform iconically about
its taste. However, in order to convey the information that these signs are icons
of a passion fruit, they must be accompanied by an index, such as a legend, that
says: “This is a passion fruit.” Without this index, these icons would represent
the mere possibilities of some unknown fruit. A verbal icon, such as a detailed
description of an unknown house, can serve to create a mental image of it and
make us somewhat familiar with the object of this verbal description, but an
index must tell us where this house (CP 2.287, ca. 1893).
The role of icons and indices in mediating knowledge about unknown
objects is a topic which Peirce addresses in another example of language
learning, this time in the context of first language acquisition.
A man walking with a child points his arm up into the air and says, “There is a
balloon.” The pointing arm is an essential part of the symbol without which the
latter would convey no information. But if the child asks, “What is a balloon,” and
the man replies, “It is something like a great big soap bubble,” he makes the image a
part of the symbol. Thus, while the complete object of a symbol, that is to say, its
meaning, is of the nature of a law, it must denote an individual, and must signify a
character. (CP 2.293, 1903)
3
“The index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” It takes hold of our eyes, as it were,
and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops” (CP 3.361, 1885).
4
More precisely, icons can convey information about their object only in conjunction
with indices. Peirce elaborates on them as follows: “Icons may be of the greatest service in
obtaining information – in geometry, for example – but still, it is true that an Icon cannot,
of itself, convey information” (CP 2.314, 1903), and: “A pure icon can convey no positive
or factual information; for it affords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature. But
it is of the utmost value for enabling its interpreter to study what would be the character of
such an object in case any such did exist” (CP 4.447, 1903).
288 Winfried Nöth
In this little first language learning scenario, the man’s pointing gesture is the
index that indentifies the object of the verbal sign balloon. Despite the teacher’s
gesture and the child’s apparent awareness of the balloon in the sky, the child’s
question, “What is a balloon?”, testifies to his or her insufficient familiarity with
the object of the sign. The icon of this object mentally evoked by the teacher by
means of the verbal image of “something like a great soap bubble” contributes
to creating the more fully developed mental image which the learner needs to
associate this word with its object in the future.
Elsewhere, Peirce reflects once more on the nature of mediation in second
language vocabulary acquisition. The language learning scenario seems very
similar, but at closer inspection, we find that the relation between a verbal
symbol and its object in ordinary language usage differs from the one between
the word and its object in vocabulary teaching:
If a person points to it and says, See there! That is what we call the “Sun,” the Sun
is not the Object of that sign. It is the Sign of the sun, the word “sun” that his
declaration is about; and that word we must become acquainted with by collateral
experience. Suppose a teacher of French says to an English-speaking pupil, who
asks “comment appelle-t-on ça?” pointing to the Sun, . . . “C’est le soleil,” he
begins to furnish that collateral experience by speaking in French of the Sun itself.
Suppose, on the other hand, he says “Notre mot est ‘soleil’” then instead of
expressing himself in language and describing the word he offers a pure Icon of it.
Now the Object of an Icon is entirely indefinite, equivalent to “something.” He
virtually says “our word is like this:” and makes the sound. He informs the pupil
that the word, (meaning, of course, a certain habit) has an effect which he pictures
acoustically. But a pure picture without a legend only says “something is like
this:”. (CP 8.183; EP 2: 495, 1909)
Three scenarios of vocabulary teaching are described in the above passage. The
first shows a teacher who teaches the word sun to students who do not yet
know what it means. Whether the learner is a child learning English as a first
language or a student of English as a second language remains unspecified. The
learner apparently needs to be made familiar with the English word that
represents the sun, but the teacher knows that the learner is acquainted with
the celestial body, the sun as such. The student’s familiarity presupposed, the
teacher first uses a nonverbal pointing gesture, an indexical sign reinforced
though verbal indices (See there! That is…), whose object is the sun in the sky.
When the topic of the didactic dialogue turns to the word for the sun in
English and the teacher says “That is what we call the ‘Sun’”, the object of this
complex sign is no longer the sun itself but the verbal sign which represents it,
that is, the English word representing the object previously denoted by the
pointing gesture. This means that the sun previously referred to as the object of
a sign is now considered the sign of a sign, that is, a metasign. In the utterance
“That is what we call the ‘Sun’”, the word sun refers to the word sun as a word of
the vocabulary of English; the same word is no longer used in the sense in
which it appears in everyday usage, that is, in object language, but in the sense
of a sign of a sign. The teacher’s words exemplify language about language, that
is, metalanguage.
The learner still unfamiliar with the English word sun knows the object of
this unknown sign through other signs, the word soleil in the case of second
language learning, or prior experience of having seen the sun in everyday life, as
in the case of the child in first language learning. What is missing is the word
that translates this otherwise well known sign into English. The teacher who
teaches the English word representing an object with which the learner is
familiar from other signs thus teaches the word sun as a metasign.
According to the Peircean semiotic framework, the three phonemes /sʌn/
are uttered by the teacher as a sinsign (or token), that is, as a particular sign
uttered at a particular moment. As such, it also embodies a qualisign, the quality
of how it sounds (cf. CP 2.255, 1903). What this sinsign serves to denote is a
legisign (or type). The term legisign characterizes the word sun as a word of the
sign system of the English language, irrespective of whether it is used in a
particular situation or not. The particular metalingual use of the teacher’s
utterance of the sinsign sun is thus the use of a sinsign to denote a legisign. The
teacher’s metalingual utterance serves the purpose of making the learner
acquainted with a new word. The intended interpretant is the learner’s future
habit of pronouncing this word correctly. The collateral experience necessary
to pronounce the word appropriately is the experience of hearing this and other
pronunciations of it, not the knowledge and experience of the celestial body.
Although the object of the sinsign /sʌn/ uttered by the teacher is not the
sun itself but the word sun as a legisign, the reference to the real sun is not lost
with this utterance since the word sun as a legisign is in turn a sign whose object
is the real sun. In sum, reference to the sun as a celestial body is embedded as a
second object in the object of the sinsign sun, whose first object is the legisign,
the word of the English language.
The next two didactic situations exemplified in the above scenario describe
a lesson in which a teacher teaches the French word soleil to a student of
290 Winfried Nöth
French, whose mother tongue is apparently English. This time, it is the student
who produces two indexical signs denoting the sun, a gesture pointing to the
sun and the utterance of the demonstrative pronoun “ça”. In the first of the two
following didactic subscenarios, in which the teacher replies “C’est le soleil”, she
uses the word soleil as the word of an object language since the referent of the
verbal index ce (C’[est]) is indeed the sun itself. In the second scenario, in
which the teacher says “Notre mot est ‘soleil’”, we are faced with a teaching
situation as above: the teacher produces a sinsign of a legisign.
Peirce now specifies in addition that the sinsign uttered by the teacher in
this scenario is iconically related to the legisign it denotes. In sum, when
language teachers introduce a new word whose referent the students are
familiar with, their utterance of this word is a sinsign embodying a qualisign
which serves as an icon of a legisign.
The object of the iconic sinsign uttered by the teacher is “entirely
indefinite” as long as it represents a mere acoustic quality. Any other word
uttered in any other language would be equally indefinite as long as it remains
only a mere sound. The student must learn to associate this iconic sinsign with
the symbolic legisign as which the word functions in French. Peirce calls this
necessary mental association of the sound uttered by the teacher with the word
of the French language a “legend which the teacher must attach to the icon”.
A legend attached to a picture functions as an index pointing to the picture.
The association that first needs to be made between the sound image and the
symbolic legisign, the word of the French language, is thus an indexical one. In
the long run, as the student’s language competence grows, the association first
made indexically must become a habit, so that in the end the word first learned
through an icon and an index finally becomes a symbol.
4. Meaning, translation, and the interpretant of a sign

Where do we find meaning in the process of translation? Is the translation
delivered by an interpreter the meaning of its source text, and if so, is the
translation then the interpretant of the text which it translates? Or should we
look for the meaning of a sign in the object it represents? Meaning is both a
matter of the object of the sign and of its interpretant. It is a matter of the former
insofar as the object is “that with which the sign presupposes an acquaintance”
(CP 2.231, 1910). The interpreter must be familiar with the object in order to
associate meaning with the sign; otherwise the sign will remain meaningless.
Knowledge of the object of the sign is thus a prerequisite for understanding the
sign. Peirce also associates the immediate object of a symbol, “the Object as the
Sign itself represents it” (CP 4.536, 1905), with meaning. He does so when he
calls “the complete immediate Object” of the symbol its “meaning” (CP 2.293,
1903; see also CP 1.339, 1893 and 2.308, 1901). Mostly, however, Peirce
considers meaning in terms of the interpretation of a sign. “Meaning is the idea
which the sign attaches to the object” (CP 5.6, 1907). The study of meaning
requires “the study of the interpretants, or proper significate effects, of signs” (CP
5.475, 1906). More precisely, what is ordinarily called meaning is a matter of
“the Immediate Interpretant, which is the interpretant as it is revealed in the right
understanding of the Sign itself” (CP 4.536). Peirce explains, for example: “It
seems natural to use the word meaning to denote the intended interpretant of a
symbol” (CP 5.175, 1903). A translation should certainly convey a meaning that
is equivalent to its source text. However, an actual translation and an actual
interpretant created by a sign may fail to fulfill the task and create a meaning that
does not correspond to the meaning of the sign with which they should be equi-
valent. This is why Peirce does not speak of actual interpretants and real trans-
lations but of the “intended interpretant of a symbol”. Notice that the meaning
which he describes as the “intended interpretant” is not the expression of the
intention of the utterer of this symbol but of the purpose of the symbol itself.
That meanings and interpretants have to do with translation is one of the
cornerstones of Peirce’s semiotics. In 1893, for example, Peirce postulates that
“the meaning of a sign is the sign it has to be translated into” (CP 4.132), and
he defines meaning as “the translation of a sign into another system of signs”
(CP 4.127). It was Roman Jakobson (1985: 251) who enthusiastically ac-
claimed this definition of meaning as “one of the most felicitous, brilliant ideas
which general linguistics and semiotics gained from the American thinker”,
asking: “How many fruitless discussions about mentalism and anti-mentalism
would be avoided if one approached the notion of meaning in terms of
translation?”
However, the Jakobsonian “translation theory of meaning”, as Short (2003;
2007) calls it, is not Peirce’s full theory of meaning. Meaning, as linguists use
the term and as Peirce himself uses it occasionally, is only expressed in the form
of some interpretants of a sign.5 That an interpretant is not always the meaning
5
Short (2003: 223) even goes further and tries to solve the riddle of meaning by intro-
ducing a distinction between interpretations (as types of which interpretants are the tokens):
“Thus, our gloss of the interpretant theory of meaning: rightly understood it does not mean
292 Winfried Nöth
of a word is evident from our previous examples. The French word homme is
one possible interpretant of its English equivalent, and it is true that in
common parlance we can say that homme means man. However, as Short
(2003: 218) has convincingly argued, in a strict sense, a word of a source
language cannot properly be said to mean the word in the target language. The
English word man can hardly be said to be the meaning of the French word
homme although the former can help a learner of French to understand the
latter. If all possible translations of the French word were to be considered its
meanings, the word homme would have as many meanings as there are
languages in the world in addition to those few meanings listed in a
monolingual dictionary. We cannot say that the translation of a word or text
into a target language is its meaning although it may serve as a tool to reveal its
meaning. What we have to say more precisely is that the English word man and
its semantic equivalent in French, homme, have the same meaning. Translators
cannot discover the meaning of man in its French translation homme because
they must know the meaning which both words have in common in order to
find the equivalent word in the target language. Occasionally, translators can
translate a word correctly without knowing their meaning. A translator versed
in French phonetics and morphology may well be able to translate the English
expression good governance correctly into French as bonne gouvernance without
knowing what it means, but then translation is even less likely to reveal the
enigmatic meaning of these two expressions which indeed mean the same,
namely the ‘good way in which something is governed’.
What is then the meaning of a word in contrast to its interpretant? Meaning
is not a key concept in Peirce’s semiotics and has no systematic place in it.
When Peirce refers to meaning he likes to use quotation marks (CP 5.475,
1906) or speak of meaning as it “is ordinarily called” (CP 4.536, 1906). In
Peirce’s semiotics, meaning is mainly a matter of the interpretant, but it also
pertains to the object of a sign. In the case of a symbol, for example, it also
pertains to its object since “the immediate object of a symbol can only be a
symbol”, and “the complete object of a symbol, that is to say, its meaning, is of
the nature of a law” (CP 2.293 and fn., 1902). The example of the traffic light
above, whose object is a law, exemplifies this insight.
that meanings are interpretants but, rather, that they are interpretations, albeit interpretations
are not found apart from interpretants. Doubtless, some interpretations are not meanings. For
misunderstandings must be ruled out, and perhaps some other categories of interpretation as
well. The meaning of a sign is how it would be interpreted properly.”
The meaning conveyed by the immediate object of a sign, that is, by our
previous knowledge of the object of this sign, and the meaning conveyed as the
interpretant of a sign are complementary. Without the immediate object, that
is, without a rich experience of what the sign means in reality and not only in
the form of a general dictionary definition, our interpretation of propositions
would have to remain vague and general (cf. Houser 1992: 497). The
interpretant of a sign, says Peirce, “must be conveyed” from its immediate object
“which is by this conveyance the ultimate cause of the mental effect. […] The
meaning of the sign is not conveyed until not merely the interpretant but also
this object is recognized” (MS 318 41–42, alt. draft, 1907; Pape 1990: 382).
On the other hand, Peirce excludes reference of indexical signs to the
objects they designate from the sphere of meaning when he states: “A meaning
is the associations of a word with images, its dream exciting power. An index
has nothing to do with meanings; it has to bring the hearer to share the
experience of the speaker by showing what he is talking about” (CP 4.56, 1893).
Here we see a difference between meaning and translation. Even though
indexical words, for example the demonstrative pronouns this and that mean
nothing but only serve to direct our attention to an object close-by or further
away, these words can and need to be translated. Verbal indices are
unintelligible unless the mental images of the immediate objects which they
represent are evoked to reveal what the signs mean.
The notion of the interpretant also differs from the concept of meaning as
linguists define it in its scope. In 1904, Peirce specifies: “We may take a sign in
so broad a sense that the interpretant of it is not [only] a thought, but an action
or experience, or we may even so enlarge the meaning of sign that its
interpretant is a mere quality of feeling” (CP 8.332). The interpretant of a
verbal sign can hence be a nonverbal sign, a gesture, a drawing, a painting, a
piece of music, an action, or a feeling, or an artefact, but parallel with this broad
concept of interpretant, Peirce’s broad concept of meaning is also apparent
when he speaks about the “dream exciting power” of meanings (CP 4.56, 1893;
see above). Translators-interpreters are not the only agents to convey the full
intended meanings of their source texts. The words of their translations and the
objects which these signs represent contribute to the creation of interpretants
in their audience’s minds with an agency of their own, which is not the
translator’s agency.
294 Winfried Nöth
5. Translations as replicas of signs,

semantic, and pragmatic meaning
Some of Peirce’s remarks on meaning and translation must be understood as
the expression of a logical perspective on meaning, which certainly differs from
the translator’s perspective insofar as the logician, at least in propositional
logic, abstracts from some of the modal distinctions which are of importance to
a good translation. For example, Peirce writes: “What we call the meaning of a
proposition embraces every obvious necessary deduction from it” (CP 5.165,
1902). That which is deductible with logical necessity can obviously only be
one kind of meaning since meaning is often vague and general.
The logical perspective on meaning has Peirce conclude, for example, that
not only interlingual but also intersemiotic translations leave the meaning of
translated signs unchanged: “One selfsame thought may be carried upon the
vehicle of English, German, Greek, or Gaelic; in diagrams, or in equations, or in
graphs: all these are but so many skins of the onion, its inessential accidents”
(CP 4.6, 1906). Since thoughts are signs, what Peirce means here is that
logically, the different interlingual translations of one and the same text are
replicas of one and the same symbol, an idea which he expresses explicitly
elsewhere. He develops this argument several times in 1904: “If two symbols
are used, without regard to any differences between them, they are replicas of
the same symbol” (EP 2: 317). “(For logical purposes) a whole book is a sign,
and a translation of it is a replica of the same sign” (NEM IV: 239), and:
“Replicas need not be alike as things homo, man […] are the same signs” (MS
9: 2, 1904; cf. Johansen 1993: 151).
Logical equivalence is not only what translators strive for since they know
that semantic equivalence is an ideal in interlingual translation that can never
be fully achieved. Translators evidently need to pay attention to the subtlest
distinctions even though these may be logically irrelevant. Among the semantic
differences by which the tokens of one and the same symbol may differ and
which Peirce thus considers as logically “insignificant” are “merely gram-
matical” differences, such as the one between the pronouns he and him, or
“merely rhetorical differences” such as the one between money and spondesime,
a slang word for money in Peirce’s time (NEM IV: 255, 1904). Peirce knew
well that from the point of view of rhetoric such differences were highly
significant. He always paid much attention to matters of terminology and style
and was a translator himself.6 In a footnote on semantic equivalence in

language used in an informal dialogue, he gives a definition of semantic
equivalence from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics: “Two signs whose
meanings are for all purposes equivalent are absolutely equivalent” (CP 5.448,
1905). By this definition, the formal and the slang words for money as well as
the forms of the English personal pronouns in their different cases would
certainly not count as equivalent because they differ in their purpose of use.
Above, we concluded with Short (2003: 219) that a word of a target
language and a word of a source language to which it is semantically equivalent
are two signs expressing the same meaning. Evidently, the same also holds true
for two words which are synonymous, paraphrases, or definitions of each other
in one and the same language. To say that tidy means ‘neat’ or that thief means
‘someone who steals’ is imprecise. A definiendum does not mean its definiens.
Instead, both are different tokens of one type or, as Peirce puts it, merely
“different embodiments of all we believe about that symbol” (MS 731, 7, 1865;
Johansen 1993: 160).
Like translations, synonyms, paraphrases and definitions serve to translate
meanings without being meanings. Peirce gave several examples of how the
meaning of a word can be translated by means of one of its verbal descriptions,
for example, when he reminds his readers that the known characters of a dog
include “it has four legs, is a carnivorous animal etc.” (MS 854: 2–3, 1911;
Johansen 1993: 146) or when he describes the meaning of the word woman as
‘living adult being or having, or having had, female sexuality’ (MS 664: 9, 1910;
ibid.: 147). Let us call this translation approach to the study of meaning the
semantic approach to meaning.
However, in contrast to modern linguistic semantics that reduces meaning
to the translation of complex words into simpler words (in the form of
componential analysis) or referential meaning (in referential semantics),
Peirce’s semantics always takes both modes of revealing meaning into
consideration. He exemplifies the possibility of studying meanings by means of
intralingual translation in his logical decompositions of words into their
“characters” and holds the dimension of reference indispensible when he
postulates the necessity of collateral knowledge. The two complementary
6
Despite his great interest in differences between languages (cf. Nöth 2002), and although
he often worked as a translator himself, Peirce can certainly not be called a scholar in
translation studies. For Peirce as a translator and a critic of translations (see MS 1514–1520),
in particular from German, see Deledalle-Rhodes (1996) and Gorlée (1994: 115–18).
296 Winfried Nöth
aspects of meaning are reflected in his distinction between verbal and

informational knowledge. The study of meaning requires taking into
consideration informational knowledge, which is experientially acquired and
thus pertains to the dimension of the immediate object of the sign, as well as
verbal meaning, which has the form of a translation into a paraphrase or of a
verbalization of its “characters” (semantic features). The meaning of a word
cannot be reduced to either of the two. These are the two sides of Peirce’s
linguistic semantics.
In addition to the semantic theory of meaning, to which this paper had to be
restricted, Peirce has also a pragmatic theory of meaning, which is most
succinctly expressed in his pragmatic maxim that the meaning of a sign lies in
its conceivable practical effects.7 It was the comparison of the semantic and
pragmatic approaches to meaning that finally led the pragmaticist Peirce to the
conclusion that the pragmatic study of meaning is really superior to its
semantic study. The reason is that verbal formulations merely express
meanings and are therefore “very inferior to the living definition that grows up
in the habit” (NEM III.1: 494, 1907; cf. 5.491).
References
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Colapietro, Vincent 1993. Glossary of Semiotics. New York: Paragon House.
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Amsterdam: Rodopi, 189–215.
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7–8. Burks, Arthur W. (ed.) 1958; In-text references are to CP, followed by volume and
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7
For more details concerning this topic see Nöth (2011b). With respect to symbols
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of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning
of the conception” (CP 5.9, 1907).
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Translation Studies 24.) Amsterdam: Rodopi.
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mington: Indiana University Press.
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Перевод и семиотическое посредничество

По Чарльзу Пирсу перевод – это семиотическое посредничество. В знаковых про-
цессах знак действует как посредник между двумя участниками – объектом (который
он репрезентирует) и интерпретантом (вызванной им идеи, созданной им интер-
претацией или обусловленным им действием). В какой мере действия переводчика как
посредника можно рассматривать подобно действиям знака в ходе семиозиса? В
статье рассматриваются параллели между действиями знака в семиозисе и действиями
переводчика в процессе перевода. В статье утверждается, что некоторые границы и
ограничения переводимости совпадают с границами знака в семиозисе. Так как
настоящие иконы и индексы не передают значения, они, строго говоря, непере-
водимы. Несмотря на это, иконы и индексы являются посредниками при обучении
переводу.
Tõlkimine ja semiootiline vahendamine

Charles S. Peirce’i järgi on tõlkimine semiootiline vahendamine. Märgiprotsessides üldiselt
toimib märk vahendajana kahe osapoole vahel, milleks on objekt (mida ta representeerib)
ja interpretant (tema poolt esile kutsutud idee või tema loodud interpretatsioon või tema
põhjustatud tegevus). Mil määral vastab viis, kuidas toimib vahendajana tõlkija, sellele,
mida teeb märk semioosis? Artikkel vaatleb lähemalt paralleele semioosis toimiva märgi
agentsuse ja tõlgi (ning tõlkija) agentsuse vahel tõlkimises. Artikkel väidab, et mõned
tõlgitavuse piirid ja piirangud on ühtlasi märgi piirid semioosis. Kuna tõelised ikoonid ja
tõelised indeksid ei edasta tähendust, on nad rangelt võttes tõlkimatud. Sellegipoolest
toimivad ikoonid ja indeksid vahendajatena tõlkima õppimisel.
Semiotico-translation-theoretical
reverberations revisited
Ritva Hartama-Heinonen
Swedish Translation Studies, Nordica
Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies
Unioninkatu 40, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
e-mail: ritva.hartama-heinonen@helsinki.fi
Abstract. This article examines translating and translations primarily from a sem(e)iotic
viewpoint. The focus is, on the one hand, on a semiotic re-reading of certain translation-
theoretical suggestions (such as the idea of translation being an inherently semiotic
category), and on the other hand, on a translation-theoretical re-reading of certain semiotic
suggestions (such as what signs can be used for representing). Other proposals that receive
a revisiting discussion include, for instance, Roman Jakobson’s translation typology and
Umberto Eco’s notion of semiotics as a theory of the lie. The approach adopted in the
present article advocates a serious re-reading and attitude, but even more, a literal reading
and sometimes, a less serious attitude as well.
Within the fields of semiotics and translation studies we encounter ideas that
are considered to be perhaps so self-evident that the discussion and application
of them remains on the level of referring and asserting and has a tendency to be
mere recycling. One after another, scholars appear to seek support from the
very same views and passages, as if these quotations and proposals with their
diverse ways to approach the given phenomena had already become axioms
with no need for further enhancement, refining, or proliferation through
revisiting, reinvestigating, and rejustifying. This article examines some
translation-relevant suggestions and semiotic vantage points, attempts to re-
analyse these and to focus on what might happen when we do not take these
suggestions and vantage points as given. Instead, let us consider some of these
proposals seriously, sometimes literally, sometimes even to the extreme, and
some even less than seriously. The aim is to shed light in a truly pragmatistic
sense on both the theoretical and the practical consequences of these
300 Ritva Hartama-Heinonen
knowledge claims, such as that translation is a thoroughly semiotic category,

that translation is a textual replacement, or that to translate is to lie.
No kidding
Translation and Interpreting (T/I) Studies is particularly suitable as a theo-
retical discipline for a semiotically oriented investigator. For those interested in
translational and translatorial questions, T/I Studies offers a kind of a test
laboratory, providing an opportunity to experiment with, to observe, and to
practise varied sign-theoretical ideas, views, and approaches. Most essentially,
these include the idea of ubiquitous semiosis that is an inherent melting pot of
such phenomena as representation, mediation, translation, interpretation,
understanding, and the growth of meaning, etc. All of these are crucial with
respect to interlingual translation, or to translation proper, as Roman Jakobson
(1896–1982) called this type of interpretation of verbal signs. But these
phenomena are certainly highly relevant even in relation to non-verbal signs
and sign systems and to the other two Jakobsonian modes of translating, the
intralingual and the intersemiotic one (Jakobson 1966[1959]: 233).
Whereas for a researcher, the aforementioned laboratory is metaphorically
speaking more or less a laboratory of the mind and therefore not a realm of
actual translating actions and of authentic translation practice, the opportunity
is seldom seized to engage temporarily in some playfulness and to embark on
inspiring thought experiments, be they semiotic or other types. This seldom
occurs, even though the field of translation (and thereby, our object of study) is
by definition a field of creation and creativity. In other words, in this respect,
research may benefit from increased flexibility, more imagination and relaxed
non-seriousness. Some support for this claim can be found in the statements by
Theo Hermans, who has pointed out that research on translation very easily
adopts “the traditional construction of translation as a derivative type of
manufacture under cramped conditions” (2006: ix). According to Hermans,
adopting this assumption, for instance, can result in approaching translation
norms as an issue of behavioural constraints, not as solving problems through
imaginative manipulation and selection as strategic tools, as one might expect
an alternative angle of vision to be.
Another reason for this lack of a thought-experimental orientation to
translation studies might be that today, some translation researchers and
scholars themselves have earned degrees in T/I Studies or in closely related
Semiotico-translation-theoretical reverberations revisited 301
subjects. Furthermore, many researchers in translation are also practising

translators and interpreters and have mastered the daily work of a translator, or,
as translation teachers, have close contacts with practitioners in the field. As a
consequence, it might be less tempting to study the practice of translation
(translation processes), the outcome of this processual practice (products, or
translations), or the process- and product-related situations (contexts), as well
as those involved (agents), and to do this from the outside, theoretically,
hypothetically, and virtually, when one can instead approach these from within,
and not speculatively but concretely and empirically, as an active member of
the translating community and as belonging to those who live on translation and
moreover, in translation. In short, the organic link between the theory of
translation, or translation research, and the practice of translation is strong and
inevitably natural, and this is a circumstance that certainly favours empirical
approaches to translation.
Even the age-old view of the translator as a servant or as a copier may have
some impact here, as has the fact that translating is often discussed in a narrow
sense, in terms of meaning preservation (equivalence, sameness, semantic
adequacy, etc.). Yet the target sign, the translated text, cannot be the same as
the source sign, the translating text, and this is due to the unavoidable spatio-
temporal changes and moreover, is imposed by the four parameters listed
above. Besides, any other conclusion would defy logic. Given this, the trans-
lator is somehow obliged to ignore or betray his or her traditional professional
duty, since the preserver role of the translator seems to be hopeless from the
very beginning. In any event, the translator is a betrayer only where the
conception of sameness is prevailing or when sameness is required. Sameness is
thus primarily an intraprofessional, conceptual illusion, which is shared by
those within translation studies, and difference instead dominates in ‘the reality’,
that is, in the practice of translation. And even where research has rejected the
idea of sameness or any other textual-normative tendency or flavour, and has
been satisfied with being able to describe (from Latin describere, ‘to copy off’)
the target-centred aspects of translations and translating, normativeness is still
present in descriptive translation studies. Indeed, normativeness persists as if
there were a hidden agenda, since the results of the descriptive orientation run
the risk of creating, or transforming themselves into, a different translational
and translatorial indicator and behavioural norm and constraint.
Finally, translating has been approached as an act of balancing between the
diverse degrees of fidelity and loyalty, even though the more far-reaching anti-
imitative ideas of re-writing, re-creation, and (r)evolutionary strategic re-

thinking are relatively familiar concepts. Yet these anti-imitative ideas have
been presented primarily concerning the field of literary translation and are
reflected, for example, in such approaches as the cannibalistic translation, the
carnivalistic translation, and the feminist translation.1 The translators of non-
fiction somehow appear to be more restricted, perhaps due to the deep-rooted,
traditional controversy and juxtaposition of faithful and free translation. That
in one way or another, echoes the word–sense distinction and the polarity between
source- or target-orientedness, or to mention some other related powerful
dichotomies and guiding strategic principles, alienating/naturalizing; formal/
dynamic or functional; semantic/communicative; overt/covert; adequate/
acceptable; documentary/instrumental; and foreignizing/domesticating.
In short, this being the state of the play, we can reflect on the extent to
which genuine freedom actually exists in academic research. This includes the
latitude for researchers, freedom of thought and, further, whether there is
currently any need for these features. Perhaps, to the contrary, these aspects of
academic freedom may be something that, things being as they are, only
hamper inquiry and scholarly thinking and progress. In fact, at the moment,
this constitutes a possible conclusion.
1
The history of translation is replete with diverse principles, one of the most striking
being that of Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), proclaimed in the preface to the Pindarique
Odes (1656; as cited in Bassnett 1991: 59): “I have taken, left out and added what I please”.
The national histories of translation contain, correspondingly, rather extreme approaches
to translating. An example from Finland could be the introduction to the translation into
Finnish of Euripides’ play Heracles (Saarikoski/Euripides, Herakles, Otava 1967) written by
Pentti Saarikoski (1937–1983), author, poet, and literary translator. Saarikoski’s arguments
for his high-handedness (Saarikoski 1967: 7) are intriguing: he did not try to imitate the
metres of Euripides, because the result would have been a text that is neither suitable for
the Finnish actor nor pleasing to the Finnish reader; he had omitted passages which he had
considered to be uninteresting or boring for a modern audience, or otherwise useless; and
if he had found a more telling expression, he had employed it without any particular respect
for the original writer. Whereas the purpose of the translation was, for Cowley, somewhat
source-centred, that is, to convey not what was said but how it was said, the aim in
Saarikoski’s translation was rather target-centred, that is, to produce a text that both
readers and theatre-goers would find interesting. According to Saarikoski, his translation
pays tribute to Euripides.
Living in translation
In spite of the rapid development within translation research today and the
increasing references to what have been termed ‘the turns’ of this field of
knowledge, the changes of course and perspective proceed slowly, yet steadily.
A rather conservative, ambivalent, if not reluctant, way of thinking and a
possible impediment to the progress of semiotics is mirrored in what could be
referred to as diverse gatekeeper attitudes towards what translation entails.
Despite increasing signs of rapprochement between semiotics and trans-
lation studies, the nature of translation and subsequently, how it influences
research, currently seem to constitute a watershed. A frequently quoted
statement concerning the relation of translation to semiotics is that by the
translation scholar Susan Bassnett (1991[1980]: 13; her italics): “Although
translation has a central core of linguistic activity, it belongs most properly to
semiotics, the science that studies sign systems or structures, sign processes and
sign functions.” Even within semiotics, we can find corresponding views that
advocate translation as an inherently and thoroughly semiotic category. Such a
position is adopted in the following passage, which was voiced by Susan Petrilli
(2001: 278–279; her italics) when stating that translating and translatability
“are prerogatives of semiosis and of the sign. Translation, therefore, is a
phenomenon of sign reality and as such it is the object of study of semiotics”.
Now that ten or thirty years have passed since these two viewpoints were
originally articulated, it is still quite impossible to find anything that is explicitly
ranked and unanimously acknowledged as semiotic translation studies within
translation studies, or as semiotics of translation within theoretical or applied
semiotics. Nevertheless, we can hardly say that positions of this kind would
consist of empty words. On the contrary, they must be formulated through
deeper reflection by their presenters. However, in the research of their
interpreters, standpoints such as these have not always become the guidelines
of projects, nor have they been translated into action or put to any deeper-
going trial, but are simply repeated and remain as well-known asserting tenets.
To some, these are nothing but platitudes.
This resistance to adopting proposals is actually what the translation scholar
Mona Baker (1998: xvii) refers to in passing when she discusses translation
types: the investigation into the history of translation “reveals how narrow and
restrictive we have been in defining our object of study, even with the most
flexible of definitions”. Referring particularly to the intralingual and inter-
semiotic modes of translation, Baker concludes, which is surprising, at least
from a translation semiotician’s point of view, that even though the possibility
of these modes is recognised, for instance, through the typology of Jakobson,
“we do not make any genuine use of such classifications in our research”.2
After reading this positive approach to the classification by Jakobson,
linguist and semiotician, as well as the advocating of categorisations of this type
that point to a broader conception of translation that ought to be drawn on to a
greater extent, we can turn to a more critical stance expressed by Aline Remael.
The following quotation in part conveys the lack of cross-disciplinary dialogue
in general as well as the lack of the dialogue between the scholars of semiotics
and translation studies concerning the work of Jakobson and his followers and
interpreters (on references to Jakobson within semiotics and translation
studies, see Sütiste 2008).3 In addition, it shows a lack of appreciation for the
achievements of those who have, since the 1980s or 1990s, embraced a
semiotic approach to translation:
The 21st century may well see the advent of the “audiovisual turn” in T[ranslation]
S[tudies]. Initially, TS limited itself to bible translation and literary translation.
Only later did TL research extend to translation of other text types, although it
remained focused on translation of verbal texts in one language into verbal texts in
another language, or, in Jakobson’s terms, interlingual translation or translation
proper (Jakobson 1959/2009). Jakobson also coined intralingual translation (or
rewording) and intersemiotic translation (or transmutation) to refer to related fields,
but his very terminology relegated the terms to translation’s periphery. The current
inundation of text production modes and the ubiquity of image and/or sound in
texts have made it virtually impossible to adhere to such a limited concept of
translation. (Remael 2010: 15; emphases in original)
Those semioticians who are interested in the phenomenon of translation in fact

have long examined the concept of translation in different spatio-temporal
contexts, and have advocated a natural, broad definition of translation for
them. This definition, derived from the views of Jakobson, as well as from those
of many other semioticians before and after him, can be crystallized in the
formulation translation is translation and beyond (Hartama-Heinonen 2008:
2
Likewise, it is surprising that Baker states (1998: xvii, written in 1997) that she knows
“of no research that looks specifically at the phenomena of intralingual or intersemiotic
translation”.
3
The work and impact of Jakobson seems to be a current object of re-evaluation (see
Torop 2008b), and his intersemiotic type of translation receives re-interpretations (see, for
instance, Torop 2000, 2008c or Hartama-Heinonen 2008: 55–66, 268–269).
61). However, as demonstrated above, advocating does not necessarily imply

accepting. Not everyone is ready to accept any definition of translation,4 nor
would merely any definition reach all those involved and interested, as we can
also deduce from the above.
The semiotic approach to translation first leads us to the sphere of texts and
discourses (and this is the world that Remael describes above) that presuppose
the co-existence, interaction, and even the confrontation of different semiotic
systems and signifying practices. These systems, which reach beyond linguistic
boundaries, manifest themselves in varying codes and combinations. These can
be perceived in the interplay between word, (moving) image, or sound (or the
verbal, written or spoken; the kinesic; the visual; or the vocal/auditory) – and
in cases where the diversity of signifying systems, intermediality, and the
intersemiosic interaction is highlighted, as in comics, multimedia, plays, songs,
audiovisual TV and film material, etc., and consequently, in their translations.
Secondly, a sign-theoretical approach can focus our attention on a more
extensive milieu, that is, on the immediate socio-cultural sign environment, and
even further, on the whole semiosphere. Again, the conventional conception of
translation as an event that occurs between natural languages (translation
conceived as interlingual or language-mediated communication) receives a new
facet. Or, as Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) explained the life of a symbol
(CP 2.302, c. 1895): “In use and in experience, its meaning grows”. Such an
extension of the use of the symbol and term ‘translation’ has been advocated
and discussed, among others, by Peeter Torop (for example, see Torop 2001,
2002 and the other Torop references). To Torop, the translation process
presupposes not only a translating mind, but translation is a process that takes
place even “within language, culture, and society” (Torop 2008c: 377; cf.
2008a: 228). As Torop observes, within cultural semiotics, it is considered to
be natural “to say that culture is translation, and also that translation is culture.
4
Not to know is one thing, to know another. As a case of knowing and deliberately
rejecting, I would like to refer to Peter Newmark (1916–2011) and to his statement in his
Paragraphs on Translation (1993: x): “As an excuse, I can always have recourse to Ramon
[sic] Jakobson’s and George Steiner’s thesis that virtually any mental process is translation,
though I do not personally subscribe to this thesis.” What appears to have been unknown
to Newmark is that even Juri Lotman (1922–1993) used translation in a non-translation-
technical sense when stating (where else but in the currently often quoted passage) that
“translation is the elementary act of thinking” (Lotman 1990: 143).
[…] translation activity is also an activity that explains the mechanisms of

culture” (Torop 2002: 603).
And thirdly, according to the widest semiotic interpretation, not only
translators and translation scholars in the strict (interlingual) sense of the word
live on translation and in translation. Indeed, living in translation concerns all
of us. While every translation involves a sign process (with human translating
being sign processing), every sign involves a translation process, at least from
the Peircean perspective. Or, as Peirce asserts, “But a sign is not a sign unless it
translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed” (CP
5.594, 1903). Life, when approached from this vantage point, is manifested as
a chain or flow of translations, or as an unlimited and ubiquitous process of
translation, also known as semiosis, and we all turn into translators. Yet if we
take this very idea of translation to the extreme to see the possible con-
sequences (and it is this pragmatistic aspect that I want to emphasize here as
well as the direction that I attempt to promote with my article), there is, as a
matter of fact, no actual translatorial in-betweenness (no translator-mediated
communication). The above quotation attests to the claim that in a Peircean
world, in this universe of signs, signs translate themselves.
Sign translation, or representing, lying,

substituting, and replacing
The present article has thus far provided a point of departure and constructed a
rather big picture of the semiotico-translation-theoretical objective and the
frame of discourse. In the following, the original purpose of revisiting earlier
semiotic and translation-theoretical proposals is continued, while the focus is
shifted to more detailed features of signs. I consider this to be a justified and
expected line of approach: surrounded by competing and contradictory views,
we should probe them in a pragmatistic vein to be able to grasp their potential.
Hence as semioticians and/or as translation scholars, if we are convinced
that translation as both a product and a process is a matter of semiotics, we
need not only to assert this view in our inquiry, but we need to live up to this
conviction, and to investigate actively the inherent implications and con-
sequences such an approach entails, as well as the proposed semiotic way of life
that it may in general encompass. Peirce himself was a case in point as to this
pragmatistic attitude and, furthermore, a living proof of what dedication to the
semiotic cause can imply. In 1908 at the age of 69, Peirce (PW: 85–86) stated
that since the day that he began to read Whately’s Logic, which was when he
was twelve or thirteen years old, “it has never been in [his] power to study
anything […], except as a study of semeiotic”. For Peirce, semeiotic, the study
and theory of signs and semiosis, or dynamic sign action and meaningful sign
interpretation, became a lifelong vision, commitment, and duty. Devotion of
this kind may be necessary for any philosopher who wants to practise his or her
philosophy. And this is what Peirce definitely did. When he put his semeiotic
mission into practice, Peirce lived out his approach and beliefs; today, such
fervour and ambition is probably exceptional.5
At first glance, translation can be reduced to an issue of language. Or, as the
translation scholars Eugene A. Nida (1914–2011) and Charles R. Taber
(1928–2007) expressed this (1982[1969]: 4), thereby foregrounding their
trust in the nearly all-embracing power of translating: “Anything that can be
said in one language can be said in another, unless the form is an essential
element of the message”. This maxim finds a parallel in the ideas put forward
by the linguist and semiotician Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965), but here it is the
language that is nearly omnipotent:
In practice, a language is a semiotic into which all other semiotics may be trans-
lated – both all other languages, and all other conceivable semiotic structures. This
translatability rests on the fact that languages, and they alone, are in a position to
form any purport whatsoever; in a language, and only in a language, we can “work
over the inexpressible until it is expressed.” (Hjelmslev 1969[1961]: 109)
While verbal signs appear to be something that we start from in interlingual

translating, they are certainly not all that counts, at least not today. Within
translation studies, it has become gradually more apparent as well as well-
established that the verbal, language and linguistics, is not sufficient in our
increasingly multimodal age. This is revealed, for instance, in the following
prediction as to how the translator profession will develop, followed by the
unavoidable conclusion and consequence for translation research: “[…] most
of the future documents to be translated will be not only increasingly
5
For support for the latter claim, see Klemola 2004: 17–23. Timo Klemola discusses the
importance of practising philosophy instead of theorizing, and argues that modern academic
philosophy mainly consists of theoretical discourse and tends to ignore the possibility of
philosophy as a way of life and due to the lack of this conscious exercise, is estranged from
both practice and life.
multisemiotic, but will also include more and more different media. It is time to
train researchers beyond the traditional ‘textual’ paradigm” (Gambier 2009:
24). Within semiotics, this beyondness is evident and inherent. According to
Els Wouters (1997; my emphases), semiotics explores “the larger contexts of
signs” and the direction of the disciplinary evolution reaches “towards a global
semiotics that envisages an understanding of signs in human behaviour and in
nature in general. In this pansemiotic view, the emphasis will be on the sign
outside linguistics”.6
Semiotically speaking, translation approached as sign production means
sign translation, or sign-mediated communication. The translating sign stands
for something, with the translated sign standing for this translating sign.
Proceeding from one sign to another sign – producing a sign out of a sign
through translation – refers by definition to intersemiotic activity, a process
between signs, and this concerns all types of signs and sign uses. In addition,
translation can be described as an abductive truth-seeking action; paradoxically
however, to translate also means to lie (for further, see Hartama-Heinonen
2008 and 2009). This holds true if we follow Umberto Eco’s conception of the
scope of semiotics: to study whatever there is that can be interpreted as a sign
or can act as a substitution and furthermore, and this is the all-inclusive object
of semiotic study, all that could be used for lying (Eco 1979: 7). This very idea
of semiotics, which is what Eco refers to as a theory of the lie, is an excellent
argument for the claim that the versatile phenomena of translations and
translating belong to semiotics. For translating is in essence no more than the
production of representing illusions, translated texts that endeavour to take the
place of, replace, their original versions, yet being themselves merely represen-
tations of representations. As a sign, the translation stands for, refers to,
represents, and signifies the original text and primary sign, though without
being that text and that sign.
The aforementioned Eco-derived semiotic ideas of substituting and lying
(and then the semiotically relevant, subsequent questions of whether a trans-
lation as a sign stands for the source text or whether it counts as the primary
text) are in principle found within translation research. As we have seen,
however, there are semiotic impacts in translation-theoretical literature,
impacts that, for some reason, have not grown into a full-blown semiotics. It
may be that these impacts are purely coincidental, having nothing to do with
6
See Wouters, Els 1997. Sign. In: Östman, Jan-Ola; Verschueren, Jef (eds.), Handbook
of Pragmatics Online. Available at: www.benjamins.com/online/hop.
semiotics proper, such that in the end, the interpretation of there being
something semiotic is only in the eye of the beholder.
Whatever the case, the definition of translation offered by Petrus Danielus
Huetius (1630–1721) deserves mention because in my interpretation, it draws
on overtly semiotic thinking in its formulation: a translation is “a text written in a
well-known language which refers to, and represents a text in a language which is
not as well known” (Huetius 1992[1683]: 86; my emphases). Another intriguing
fact, however, is André Lefevere’s (1945–1996) close reading of this passage
(1992: 1) and the way he addresses the questions based on the idea of
representation that turn into questions of language, culture, power, ideology, and
patronage. For example, there is the question whether a foreign text should be
represented in another culture. Another issue regards who selects what is to be
represented and who makes this representation. The third question concerns
how the target culture receivers know that a text is properly represented. Finally,
the problem is determining the reason for producing these referring-to texts
instead of simply writing original ones. None of these questions and issues arises
from the semiotic in the definition (namely, aliquid stat pro aliquo), yet they are
all no doubt central to translation theory even today.
The evolution of the following translation definition proposed by Jenny
Williams and Andrew Chesterman (2002: 1; my emphasis) is also intriguing:
“a translation is a text in one language which is produced on the basis of a text in
another language for a particular purpose.” This was first slightly redefined in
2003 (Chesterman 2003) and the italicized passage was changed to counts as
another text which is reminiscent of the semiotics-related aspect of lying.
Subsequently, several years later, it was changed to a more explicitly semio-
tically oriented wording represents a text. As in the definitions of translation in
general, even here we see how the choice of expression alters the perspective
and creates varying interpretations, semiotic but also less semiotic. (See also,
Hartama-Heinonen 2008: 51 fn. 1, 2008: 70–71 fn. 1.)
Instead of substitution we could adopt the designation replacement. A semio-
tically oriented manifestation of the idea of replacement qua sign replacement
(or qua replacement of signifiers) can be found, for instance, in a definition of
translation by Lawrence Venuti (1995: 17) as a process in which a chain of
signifiers in an original text in one language is replaced by a chain of signifiers in
another language. Replacement has been, however, used earlier and in a more
general sense by J. C. Catford when he defined translation to entail “the
replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual
material in another language (TL)” (Catford 1965: 20, 48–49), with equivalence
requiring interchangeability in a given situation and the relation of the target
language meanings to source language meanings involving substitution.7
However, this proposal that translation is a textual replacement, written or
spoken, can also be taken literally, and thus not interpreted in the precisely
original Catfordian sense. The idea of replacement in the sense that a
translation factually takes the place of its original could be applied to the
translations of certain multimodal genres, such as picture books and comics.
But this literal interpretation of the proposal is highly apparent and concrete as
well as physically inseparable in form in certain types of audiovisual translation,
such as dubbing and narration.8 In these types of translation, whole texts and
discourses are, in a word, replaced.
Multimedial intersemioses
As a matter of fact, audiovisual translation offers an apposite field for practising
the laboratory approach to both translation studies and translation semiotics.
The multimedia material provides a specific expression for a whole spectrum of
sign systems and semiotic manifestations. These range from diverse charac-
teristics that are multimodal, multisemiotic, and multisystemic as well as inter-
7
This idea of translation as a replacement or a substitution appears to live within
translation studies. In a short introduction to translation, Juliane House (2009) repeats the
notion that translation is “the replacement of an original text with another text” (p. 3), “the
process of replacing an original text, known as the source text, with a substitute one, known
as the target text”, or “a process of replacing a text in one language by a text in another” (p.
4). Even when it comes to the Jakobsonian three types of translation, the common
denominator appears to be replacement, “the replacement of one expression of a message
or unit of meaningful content by another in a different form” (p. 4).
While to represent, to lie, to substitute, and to replace express, in our translational context,
the same type of activity, these expressions might not, however, be mutually inter-
changeable. The first two perhaps have a rather sign-theoretical origin, the last two a rather
translation-theoretical anchorage.
8
The main types of audiovisual translation are subtitling and revoicing, the latter
consisting of dubbing, narration, and voice-over. In narration, the source-language
narration text in a documentary programme is translated and edited and then read by a
target-language narrator. Special attention is paid to synchrony and timing. Furthermore,
the source language narration in the soundtrack of the original production is replaced by
the new target language narration.
semiotic and intersemiosic to the resultant translational constraints. Different

modes, codes, and channels create different problems and some of these can be
reduced to mere technical questions. Nonetheless, the translator works with
the verbal, yet the verbal both interacts with and is dependent on the visual and
the aural. All these have their own specific messages to convey. These messages
then hopefully intersect and interact and, through integration, create an
intersemiosically signifying universe of interpretation – an intersemiosic space.
Subtitling includes particular verbal and visual challenges, as well as
temporal and spatial constraints. Subtitling also entails not only interlingual
transfer, but transition from the spoken mode to the written, with both modes
being simultaneously accessible to the audience. By contrast, dubbing requires
synchronization and transition from one language to another; still, the mode
remains spoken as is the case with narration. However, in narration, the
dialogue parts in an otherwise narrated programme can be rendered by
subtitles. In both dubbing and narration, the viewers do not have access to the
original dialogue or to the original narration since it has been replaced.9
In the translated version of a narrated programme, the visual and the non-
replaced aural parts (in Finland, the tracks with dialogue, sound effects, and
music) remain as they are in the original production, and only the narration is
replaced. This is a fact that somehow highlights the complementary nature and
role of this textual material (on the complexity of the notion of text, including
the notion of a complementary text, see Torop 2008a: 234–235).
9
Within the field of Finnish audiovisual translation, the grand old man is Esko Vertanen
from the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE). In Vertanen’s numerous lectures to
potential TV-translators, he paid attention to how the programme conventions may differ,
noting that something that is natural and expected in one culture can be disturbing in
another. For instance, an animal can be personified in a nature documentary, but the
Finnish audience considers that solution to be childish. Whereas the original has not
evoked a negative reaction, the translation should not do that either. According to
Vertanen’s experience, this situation can give rise to substantial changes in the translation
employed in narration (cf. Saarikoski’s above-mentioned view of passages that cannot
possibly interest the audience). The question Vertanen poses is whether changes can
actually be made, to what extent, and on what grounds.
Translating includes problem-solving and decision-making which reflect the trans-
lator’s sense and degree of responsibility. The question of what a translator is allowed to do
is ultimately a question of ethics, professionalism, and trustworthiness and, furthermore, of
copyright regulations. One of the objectives of the present article is to provide a semeiotic-
derived theoretical approach to the problem of how to argue for these types of translatorial
interventions.
From the point of view of a new audience, subtitles could be considered to

promote the reception of the multimedial original by complementing it in a
mediated and condensed way. By comparison, narration both in the original
and in its translation aims at complementing the visual and the aural and does
this more directly. The narrated textual passages in the original and in the
translated version act like captions. Demonstrating the indexicality involved,
they offer us information on how to read the visual, the image. Roland Barthes
(1915–1980) uses the term anchorage for this type of a text–image link that
diminishes both the interpreter’s choice and the inherent polysemy of images
and consequently controls and directs interpretation. Moreover, as syntag-
matic fragments, text and image can complement each other, the text acting as
a relay, “by setting out, in the sequence of messages, meanings that are not to be
found in the image itself” (Barthes 1985[1977]: 197–198).
The issue of interpretation-directing choices is interesting since as to
interlingual translation, on the one hand, it can refer to the choices made when
translating, but on the other hand, it can even refer to producing the original. In
both cases, the question concerns selecting representations. These represen-
tations can be ‘the same’ but they can also differ in terms of strategies. If we
examine the issue from more a translation-theory-centred perspective, the
strategies are semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic. When our approach is more
semiotics-centred, however, they are paradigmatic and syntagmatic.
Signs in growth, or anything goes!

The freedom of choice in audiovisual translation seems to be taken to the
extreme in the following quotation. In this passage, we might perceive a less
serious tone, yet a realistic attitude towards the translating of multimedial
material as well. We might also witness a reflection of the practices and
attitudes at different times and places:
“To all these questions … the synchronization specialists respond that anything
goes that makes the point … And the point is considered made if the audience
reacts to the synchronized film in the same way that the audience reacted to the
original film, even if it involves fresh inspiration.” Mounin’s statement here about
film synchronization may be expanded to apply to all forms of audio-medial texts.
(Reiss 2000: 46, fn.70; emphases and omissions in original; the quotation is a
translation of Georges Mounin, Die Übersetzung: Geschichte, Theorie, Anwendung, p.
145 [Nymphenburger 1967])
This quotation emphasizes the deep-rooted translation-theoretical notion of

‘equivalent response’ (see Nida; Taber 1982[1969]: 24), including a functio-
nalist explanation which suggests the possible strategy of creative translating.
Here creation is associated with freedom and “fresh inspiration”, but creation
can also suggest knowledge creation and consequently, the growth of know-
ledge through the growth of signs.
The concept of growth is relevant and particularly conspicuous in docu-
mentaries because they can provide the viewers with new information and an
opportunity to learn. If a nature documentary deals with polar bears, lions, or
kangaroos, the novelty value cannot currently be expected to be very high.
However, if the programme presents Irukandji, a diminutive and extremely
dangerous box jellyfish which is not particularly well-known even to
scientists,10 the viewers can concretely experience what Peirce meant when he
stated, for instance, that symbols grow (CP 2.302, c. 1895), that the sign
becomes, when translated, “more fully developed” (CP 5.594, 1903), or that “a
sign is something by knowing which we know something more” (CP 8.332 =
PW: 31–32, 1904).
At first glance, the principle of ‘anything goes’ may appear to be highly
provocative and an indication and promise of translatorial empowerment. Yet
the continuation, ‘that makes the point’, illustrates that the translator is not
given a free hand, but is bound by what in the above citation is described as
sameness of reactions. We can, nevertheless, take this proposal seriously, as we
have done in the preceding sections of this article, and in addition, literally.
This means that we can examine this proposal and its truthfulness and
applicability in more detail to provide it with a semiotic foundation. While
doing this, we attempt to resume the ideas that run through the present article:
revisiting and thought experiments; translation, semiotic views of translation,
and sign translation; as well as representation, mediation, and selection.
The notion of selection now receives a new interpretation. I mentioned
earlier that the author of the original and the translator of this original select
representations. Nevertheless, a Peircean approach to sign translation
introduces a novel, primary actor that must be taken into account. This actor is
the catalyst for both sign action and sign interpretation, in short, for every
semiosis – the object of the sign.
10
An example of a documentary on Irukandji is Killer Jellyfish (2006). I participated in the
translation/editing of the Finnish version, Tappajameduusa – Killer Jellyfish, in 2007.
According to the Peircean conception of the sign, a sign is “anything which

on the one hand is so determined by an Object and on the other hand so
determines an idea in a person’s mind, that this latter determination, […] the
Interpretant of the sign, is thereby mediately determined by that Object” (CP
8.343, 1908; emphasis in original). In this unlimited process of mediation and
determination, the sign, or actually a sign-vehicle or a representamen, is
generated and specified by the object. This suggests that the sign turns into a
mediator working for its two-sided object. Of these, the immediate object is
not central, since it is only what the imprecise sign appears to represent, refer to
and tell about, “the Object as the Sign represents it” (CP 8.343, 1908; see also,
PW: 196, 1906). Therefore, the immediate object does not constitute the
reality behind the sign, yet it is information on this reality that any translation-
oriented sign analysis ought to attain. However, this reality is not totally un-
approachable but is accessible in the other object, the “really efficient but not
immediately present” dynamical object (CP 8.343, 1908), which cannot be
translated but which can be referred to mediatedly by new signs, interpretants,
or a series of interpretants.
In any case, it is the object that matters most: the object “is the semeiotic
cause”, “the cause of the sign”, that is to say, a real context and situation the
significance of which needs a sign and is conveyed by this sign (Savan 1994:
73–74; his emphasis). And as David Savan (1916–1992) argues, drawing on
Peirce, this significance could be transmitted by a range of diverse signs: “[…]
each interpretant is itself a further sign, and hence a translation of an earlier
sign. It is essential not only to language but to all signs that they be translatable,
and that what any one sign stands for, an indefinite variety of other signs may also
stand for” (Savan 1987–88: 17; my emphasis). Thus, not any sign but, and this
is translation-theoretically crucial, not merely those signs that have initially
been chosen, on the contrary, “an indefinite variety of other signs”. Savan’s
observation crystallizes the problem of translation, when expanded to concern
both the primary sign, or the original text, and the secondary sign, the
translation. At the same time, this observation also indicates what makes
translating in its intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic forms possible.
This semeiotic perspective introduces a relative and realistic view of
translation. Here the emcployed sign-vehicle, which represents the object,
could be some other sign-vehicle as well. In this view, it is the object that has a
free hand and is independent, when it “addresses somebody, that is, creates in
the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign”
(CP 2.228, c. 1897). Nonetheless, if we pose the earlier question concerning

what can be used for representing, lying, substituting, or replacing (in actions
also known as translating), we can conclude that the answer is: almost any sign.
Yet precisely how the translator is involved here remains unclear. Even so,
Peirce appears to provide the translator with a role, actually not as a mind that
is translating and interpreting actively, but as someone who is addressed by a
sign and who lets his or her mind be addressed.
The message to the author of the original is “Almost anything goes”, but this
is also the message to the translator, even when the former has made his or her
choices. In interlingual translation, it has not been the word (letter) that is
crucial but the sense (spirit). In the same way, according to Peircean sign
translation and perhaps paradoxically, it is not the (originally chosen) sign as
such that is central, but the object and cause of the sign: it is the causes that are
to be transmitted. This suggests that there are several ways to refer, for
instance, to the above-mentioned Irukandji such that this Irukandji, as a real
object (and as a sign as well), “may gain more significance, more meaning, may
be better understood, may yield more information” (Savan 1994: 73). Further-
more, this also constitutes the semeiotic argument for translatorial inter-
ventions (solutions that promote the semeiotic cause of the sign) and makes
any otherwise radical solution less radical. And when the object has found a
signifying manifestation, the task of the sign as a mediator and translator is
completed, at least temporarily.
New translations
The present article has probed, to some extent, the limits of translation by
studying what is obvious through Peirce-inspired thought experiments.
Because thoughts are signs (CP 5.594, 1903), the life of thoughts is a life of
signs. And it is this life of signs that semioticians are interested in.
When Peirce scholarship is interested in signs, it focuses, in fact, on
translations. Semeiotically, this is self-evident, because the prerequisites for
signhood are to represent and to be able to create an interpretation and an
interpretant – representability and interpretability/translatability, and some-
times even that of actually being interpreted and translated. Just as symbols can
grow, so can thoughts and theoretical constructions, “in incessant new and
higher translations” (ibid.). This is what renders revisiting inquiry necessary.
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Новый взгляд на переводо-семио-теоретические отголоски

Статья рассматривает процесс перевода и сами переводы прежде всего с сем(е)иоти-
ческой точки зрения, фокусируясь, с одной стороны, на семиотическом перечиты-
вании определенных понятий теории перевода (напр., понимание перевода как
исконно семиотической категории), с другой – на перечитывании с точки зрения
теории перевода некоторых семиотических установок (например, какого типа знаки
можно использовать для репрезентации). Среди разных пересматриваемых концеп-
ций находятся и типология перевода Романа Якобсона, и определение Умберто Эко
семиотики как теории лжи. Подход, принятый в настоящей статье, призывает к
серьезному перечитыванию и отношению к тексту, даже к буквальному прочтению, но
временами и не к столь серьезному отношению к нему.
Uus pilguheit tõlke-semiootilis-teoreetilistele järelkajadele

Artikkel käsitleb tõlkimist ja tõlkeid eeskätt sem(e)iootilisest vaatepunktist. Fookus on
ühelt poolt teatud tõlketeoreetiliste arusaamade (nagu ettekujutus tõlkest kui olemuslikult
semiootilisest kategooriast) semiootilisel ülelugemisel ja teiselt poolt teatud semiootiliste
arusaamade (nagu mis laadi märke saab kasutada representeerimiseks) tõlketeoreetilisel
ülelugemisel. Teiste kontseptsioonide seas, mida samuti värske pilguga vaagitakse, on
Roman Jakobsoni tõlketüpoloogia ja Umberto Eco käsitus semiootikast kui valeteooriast.
Käesolevas artiklis kasutatud lähenemine propageerib tõsist ülelugemist ja suhtumist, kuid
enamgi veel, sõnasõnalist lugemist, ja vahetevahel ka vähem tõsist suhtumist.
Challenging identity:
Lotman’s “translation of the untranslatable”
and Derrida’s différance
Daniele Monticelli
Department of Romance Studies, Tallinn University
Narva mnt 29, Tallinn 10120, Estonia
e-mail: daniele.monticelli@tlu.ee
Abstract. The concept of “cultural identity” has gradually replaced such discredited
concepts as “race”, “ethnicity”, even “nationality” in the conservative political discourse of
recent decades which conceives, represents and performs culture as a closed system with
clear-cut boundaries which must be defended from contamination.
The article employs the theories of Derrida and Lotman as useful tools for
deconstructing this understanding of cultural identity, which has recently become an
ideological justification for socio-political conflicts. In fact, their theories spring from a
thorough critique of the kind of internalizing self-enclosure which allowed Saussure to
delimit and describe langue as the object of linguistics. The article identifies and compares
the elements of this critique, focusing on Derrida’s and Lotman’s concepts of “mirror
structure”, “binarism”, “numerousness”, “textuality” and “semiosphere”.
An understanding of mediation emerges which is not reducible to any kind of definitive
acquisition, thereby frustrating the pretences of identity, constantly dislocating and
deferring any attempt at semiotic self-enclosure. My comparison suggests that Lotman’s
“translation of the untranslatable” (or “dialogue”) and Derrida’s différance can be con-
sidered analogous descriptions of this problematic kind of mediation. The (de)construc-
tive nature of culture, as described by Lotman and Derrida, challenges any attempt to view
cultural formations as sources of rigid and irreducible identities or differences.
This article represents the first systematic attempt to compare Juri Lotman’s
(later) thinking with Jacques Derrida’s theory of différance. The risks associated
with this undertaking become apparent when one considers that the two
thinkers never (as far as I can tell) referred to each other or were even
acquainted with each other’s work. In other words, their texts offer neither
explicit guidelines nor subtle hints to assist in the development of a
320 Daniele Monticelli
comparative analysis. This is probably why it is unlikely to encounter the name

of Derrida in the field of “Lotman studies” or the name of Lotman in the field
of “Derrida studies”.
In the literature on Lotman’s later theory of the semiosphere, references to
the analogy (explicitly emphasized by Lotman himself) with Vernadsky’s
theory of the biosphere, Prigogine’s description of biological processes (see, for
instance, Mandelker 1994, Sánchez 1999, Aleksandrov 2000) and Bakhtin’s
thought (see Shukman 1989, Reid 1990) have recently been integrated with
comparisons with Peirce’s semiotics and related developments in biosemiotics
and global semiotics (e.g. Sebeok 1998; Merrell 2001; Kotov 2002; Kull 2005).
In the introduction to her monograph on Lotman, Edna Andrews stresses the
need to recognize that “the works for which Lotman is best known in the West
are not necessarily the most indicative of his mature thought” (Andrews 2003:
xiv) and tries to “update” Lotman by positioning his theory within the broader
semiotic perspective elaborated by thinkers such as Peirce, Jakobson and
Sebeok.
A recent collection of articles, Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and
Extensions (Schönle 2006; see also Schönle 2002), signals an important shift in
the contextualization of Lotman’s later thinking, opening it to further
comparison with important thinkers in cultural studies and poststructuralism:
Bakhtin, Benjamin, de Certeau, Foucault, Gramsci, Jameson, Kristeva, etc. My
research partakes in the spirit of this innovative approach to Lotman studies
and embodies the idea, stated by Andreas Schönle and Jeremy Schine in their
introduction to the collection, that Lotman’s later thinking not only needs a
new interpretation, but also further “extension” and integration, which would
facilitate its potentially heuristic encounter with contemporary currents of
thought within the humanities and social sciences – poststructuralism and
cultural studies in particular (Schönle, Schine 2006: 7).1
As for Derrida, providing an overview of the huge amount of literature on
the concept of différance would be a Herculean task. It is enough to state that
the main thinkers referenced in this kind of research – such as Heidegger (see
Donkel 1992, for instance), Levinas, Nancy, Deleuze (e.g. May 1997),
Foucault (see Boyne 1990; Lucy 1995: 48–71, for example), Lyotard and
1
In any event, it is also difficult to find any reference to Derrida in Schönle’s collection.
Only Amy Mandelker mentions his name in connection with the possible influence of a
Jewish background on Lotman’s (and Derrida’s) thinking (see Mandelker 2006: 72).
Challenging identity 321
Rorty (e.g. Gasché 1995)2 – are almost completely absent from academic
articles and books on Lotman’s later work. However, even if recent writing on
Derrida sometimes fails to mention this, the fundamentals upon which the
elaboration of the concept of différance was established were developed by a
theorist to whom Derrida himself often referred, the same theorist who created
the framework along which Lotman’s work in particular and semiotics in
general would develop. Obviously, I am referring to Ferdinand de Saussure.
And it is from Saussure that I will shortly begin my comparison between
Derrida and Lotman.
Before I proceed, I would like to make explicit the extra-theoretical
background of this research and how I position myself within it. As is often (if
not always) the case when undertaking research, the motivation for my
comparison of Lotman and Derrida is not merely theoretical curiosity, but a
concern for what is happening around us. The concept of “cultural identity”
has gradually replaced such discredited means of identification as “race”,
“ethnicity”, and even “nationality” in political, sociological and public language
in recent decades. Nevertheless, the cultural identity discourse has inherited to
some degree the political function of these terms and has become a
fundamental instrument of the conservative shift that has hegemonized
Western politics in our times. A clear example of this understanding of cultural
identity is provided by the recent European polemics on integration and
immigration policies. Chancellor Angela Merkel has revived the notion of
Leitkultur as opposed to postwar Germany’s multicultural path to integration.
President Nicholas Sarkozy promoted a national discussion with the aim of
2
David Wood writes that a “Society of Friends of Difference would have to include
Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levinas, Deleuze, and Lyotard
among its prominent members” (Wood 1988: ix). Other approaches are more specific:
Todd May, for example, suggests that “the articulation of an adequate concept of
difference” should be considered as “the overriding problem that occupies recent French
thought”, which implies the generation associated with the terms “poststructuralism” and
“postmodernism”: Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Levinas, Lyotard,
Lacoue-Labarthe, LeDoeuff, Nancy (May 1997: 1–2). It is interesting that according to
May’s approach, the chronology of the “theory of difference” coincides with that of Tartu-
Moscow cultural semiotics; the writings of the generation of French thinkers mentioned
above started to appear in the late 1960s, and the publication of the first issue of Sign
Systems Studies (Труды по знаковым системам) in 1964 can be considered as the impetus
which led Tartu–Moscow scholars to the new theoretical framework known as “cultural
semiotics”.
determining “what it means to be French”, thus setting the boundaries of

French cultural identity. Prime Minister David Cameron criticizes the “passive
tolerance” of recent years and predicates the need for an active, “muscular”
liberalism which would be the basis for a stronger British identity. We can of
course consider these kinds of attitude as crude demagogical attempts to garner
a political profit from the xenophobic feelings spreading all over Europe. In any
event, we must recognize that the basis and consequences of these attitudes are
more profound than the results of an election. In contemporary politics,
cultural identity is conceived and described as a closed system of values with
clear-cut boundaries that have to be defended from contamination. This
concept of identity supports the idea that the main socio-political conflicts of
our times are actually based on culture.3
Even the multiculturalist position, which can be viewed as a reaction to the
risks of cultural conservatism, seems to presuppose an unquestioned
conception of cultural identity, in which the emphasis is placed on the need to
accept and promote the peaceful co-existence of different cultural identities
within the same social space. The result has been that, rather than becoming a
means of critiquing conservative conceptions of cultural identity, multi-
culturalism is regarded as a kind of project which should unite people of good
will. The lack of critical reflection thus weakens the multiculturalist position
and makes it difficult to dispute Merkel’s declaration of the death of multikulti
or Cameron’s demonization of “state multiculturalism” as responsible for the
rise of Islamic extremism in Western countries.4 The claim that conflicts
inevitably emerge when people living in the same social space possess different
value systems is merely a platitude. But should we therefore agree with Merkel
and Cameron that, in order to ensure security and peace, all differences should
be assimilated into the dominating culture (Leitkultur)? And furthermore, is
such assimilation achievable; is a univocal cultural identity even possible?
Postcolonial and cultural studies have recently challenged clear-cut notions
of cultural identity by introducing the concept of “hybridity”, which blurs the
boundaries between “one’s own” and “the foreign”, the “dominating” and the
3
This idea has often been expressed as the Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations”: “It is
my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be
primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and
the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (Huntington 1993: 22).
4
For a critique of multiculturalism from an anti-conservative position see Žižek (2011:
43–53).
“dominated”. The hypothesis that by adopting the colonizer’s cultural patterns,

the colonized inevitably contaminates and transforms those patterns, clearly
contradicts the presumed autonomy and primacy of a hegemonic Leitkultur.5
To return to Lotman and Derrida, I will explore in the following another
way of questioning the notion of (cultural) identity. The question is not simply
how existing cultural identities interact to engender a third, hybrid identity, nor
how persons with different cultural identities might live together peacefully.
My comparison of Lotman and Derrida will lead to the conclusion that the
function of culture and, more generally, of human communication should not
be primarily understood in terms of identity.
Therefore, this article is intended to challenge the notion of “identity” from
a theoretical point of view. It also means that my research was conceived as a
thorough critique of the conservative cultural identity discourse to which I
have briefly referred above. Theoretical work in any empirical field is always an
intervention into that field. Tartu–Moscow scholars already pointed to this
inevitably double nature of theoretical constructions in their Theses on the
Semiotic Study of Culture (1973): “any scientific idea may be regarded as an
attempt to cognize culture and as a fact of its life through which its generating
mechanisms take effect” (Ivanov et al. 1998: 60).6
The following comparison could not and is not meant to be a close reading
of Derrida and Lotman. My intention is to establish a general framework for
more detailed analyses by describing what could be considered as a kind of
isomorphism between the general logic of Lotman’s and Derrida’s approaches.
The central concepts of their theories arise, in my opinion, from similar
problematic horizons and also point to similar ways of positioning oneself in
relation to them.
5
As Arjun Appadurai observes, “at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises
are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized”, being “absorbed into
local political and cultural economies” (Appadurai 1996: 42, 32). We should add that
today, immigrants to Western countries also “foreignize” indigenous “forces” by
introducing other issues and accents. Postcolonial scholars sometimes use the concept of
“creolization”, which also plays a central role in Lotman’s cultural semiotics, as a synonym
for hybridity.
6
This is why, as Peeter Torop explains, “the dynamism of culture as a research object
forces science to search for new description languages but the new description languages in
turn influence the cultural dynamics as they offer new possibilities for self-description”
(Torop 2009: xxxiii).
The inside and the outside:

impelling Saussurean separations
As I have already mentioned, a preliminary analysis of Derrida’s and Lotman’s
works reveals that, in spite of the huge differences between the intellectual
environments in which their work developed, the two thinkers share what
could be called the starting point of their theoretical enterprise. This common
starting point can be said to be Derrida’s and Lotman’s critical rethinking of the
fundamentals of Saussurean semiology.7 In essence, we could say that Derrida
and Lotman developed the Saussurean notion of difference into an (anti-
structuralist) critique of the internalizing self-enclosure, which allowed
Saussure to delimit and describe langue as a system separate from parole.
Saussure established the fundamentals of his linguistics (and semiology) by
means of a theoretical process I have elsewhere described as a “procedure of
totalization” (see Monticelli 2008). The definition of a linguistic system is, in
other words, a question of delimitation – the setting of relevant boundaries
which allows an actually partial aspect of language to coincide with the object
of study “in its entirety” (Saussure 2000: 8; see also Derrida 1997: 33–34). A
consequence of this delimitation of boundaries is the opening8 of an internal
space (langue) – structured and intelligible according to an intrinsic law –
separate from external space (parole) – a series of disparate, heterogeneous
elements which do not immanently conform to the constraints of the systemic
law. Saussure insisted on the essential need to keep the internal and external
points of view distinct, and to never “blur the boundaries which separate the
two domains” (Saussure 2000: 20–23).
7
This is quite clear for Lotman as a “semiotician” (see also Lotman 2000: 4–6).
However, as Andrews observes in the introduction to the English translation of Culture and
Explosion, “Lotman wanted to present his ideas as fundamental not only to a semiotic
approach to language, culture and text, but as more general concepts that are applicable
within a variety of methodological approaches” (Andrews 2009: xx). Conversely, for
Derrida as a “philosopher” or “(French) thinker”, it was of the greatest importance to re-
frame the entire Western philosophical tradition within the new horizon opened up by
semiological research in the field of language and signification; in Of Grammatology he
writes that “our historico-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the
totality of its problematic horizon” (Derrida 1997: 6).
8
“[…] the opening of the field […] also amounts to a delimitation of the field” (Derrida
1982: 140).
Structuralism extended the procedure of totalization that Saussure had

applied to the study of language to the study of other sign systems and texts.9
The so-called “semiotic reductionism” can be described as the delimiting
separation of a given semiotic space (structure, system, code or text) and its
transformation into an isolated, discrete whole with its own distinct
boundaries. This separation is assumed to make possible the exhaustive study
of the meaning and identity of the phenomena that belong to the internal
space, while disregarding external elements as irrelevant. It is from this
methodological standpoint that it becomes possible to place (as did Derrida)
structuralist semiology into a broader theoretical context, and to discern the
areas where it resonates with Western metaphysics.
Derrida and Lotman called into question Saussure’s procedure of totalization,
the separation, closeness and interiority of linguistic and other semiotic
systems.10 As Lotman programmatically stated in the opening lines of Culture
and Explosion, “the fundamental questions relating to the description of any
semiotic system are, firstly, its relation to the extra-system, to the world which lies
beyond its borders...” (Lotman 2009: 1). In Of Grammatology, Derrida criticized
Saussure’s (and many others’) understanding of writing (écriture) as “the external
representation of language”, which is not essentially related to the internal
linguistic system; similarly to Lotman, he contested this separation and
highlighted the complex interplay between the internal and the external: “The
outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple
exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside,
imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa” (Derrida 1997: 35). The process
of deconstruction does not “destroy structures from the outside” (as it is often
simplistically described), but rather erodes the borders of the structure by
generating short-circuits between the internal and the external.11
9
Lotman enumerates as the bases of “traditional structuralism” systemic closeness, self-
sufficiency, separation, and isolation in time and space (see Lotman 2009: 13).
10
I agree with Andreas Schönle and Jeremy Shine when they describe Lotman’s later
works as attempts “to go beyond the Saussurean foundations of his earlier semiotics”
(Schönle, Shine 2006: 7).
11
In Positions Derrida described grammatological thought as “the thought for which there
is no sure opposition between outside and inside” (Derrida 1981: 12). Derrida’s work has
often been understood as completing the transition from the metaphysics of interiority –
“the era of consciousness” – to the privileging of exteriority – the “era of textuality” (see
Strozier 1988, for instance). Instead of this opposition between the inside and the outside,
I am emphasizing the Derridean problematization of the relationship between them.
An initial examination of the strategies followed by Lotman and Derrida in

their respective attempts to contest the Saussurean delimiting separation
between the outside and the inside reveals an important discrepancy between
the two thinkers’ approaches, which we have to keep in mind in the following
discussion. Describing the discrepancy from a general and abstract point of
view, we could say that Lotman concentrated on phenomena at the systemic
level; heterogeneity, asymmetry, binarism and the related notion of translation
are applicable to the relationships between complex systems such as texts,
languages, or other sign systems. In his theory of différance, Derrida seemed to
focus mainly on single elements such as signs, signifiers and signifieds. In any
event, the kind of isomorphism that I have mentioned above and will now
describe emerges between these different levels of analysis. This is why my
work is an attempt not only to compare but also to reciprocally integrate
Lotman’s and Derrida’s theories.12
Rethinking totality: semiosphere and textuality

As noted above, Saussure described the linguistic system (langue) as a “self-
contained whole” (Saussure 2000: 10), the closure and autonomy of which are
achieved on the basis of a separation between an internal and an external space
and the consequent exclusion (“disregard” is the word Saussure used) of a
series of “facts of language (langage)”. Hence the paradox: the linguistic system
emerges as a whole – “Langue, seen from an internal point of view is…
PERFECTLY WHOLE” (Saussure 2006: 57) – only insofar as another
presupposed totality (“all manifestations of human language”) is dis-
membered, set apart, liquidated. This paradox is also the reason why critiquing
Saussurean delimiting separation led both Lotman and Derrida to
reconceptualize the relationship between unity and totality, the part and the
whole, limitedness and openness. The basis for this revision is what Derrida
called “numerousness” in “Dissemination” and Lotman termed “(at least)
12
In any case, the difference in Lotman’s and Derrida’s levels of analysis has to be
conceived as a theoretical tendency not as a systematic and exclusive choice. For instance,
if the above-mentioned refusal of Saussurean separations is generally presented by Lotman
in systemic terms, we can also find in his texts formulations of this refusal which relate to
single elements such as signs: “The idea that the starting point of any semiotic system is not
the simple isolated sign (word), but rather the relation between at least two signs causes us
to think in a different way about the fundamental bases of semiosis” (Lotman 2009: 172).
binarism”: totality is not one, but at least two; not unity, but numerousness or
plurality.
Thus, for Lotman, “the smallest functioning semiotic mechanism” cannot be
a singular system like Saussure’s langue, but must consist of “at least two semiotic
mechanisms (languages) which are in a relationship of mutual untranslatability,
yet at the same time being similar since by its own means each of them models
one and the same extrasemiotic reality” (Lotman 1997: 10; see also Lotman
2009: 4–6). Lotman described this paradoxical situation as a union of symmetry-
asymmetry that he called a “mirror structure”, producing “untranslatable, yet
similar reflections” (Lotman 1997: 10). Insofar as extrasemiotic reality is in itself
inapprehensible, we are left from the outset with the play of its reflections
between reciprocally untranslatable languages. In Of Grammatology, Derrida
used a similar strategy to introduce his critique of Saussure’s “phonologo-
centrism” and marginalization of writing. At a crucial point in his argument, we
find a passage that resembles Lotman’s “mirror structure”:
representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where [...] one thinks as
if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the
representer. […] In this play of representation the point of origin becomes
ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference
from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple
origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its
image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of
the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law
of addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one
plus one makes at least three. (Derrida 1997: 36)
According to Lotman, the mirror structure reveals that what was thought of as
originary unity and self-identity is actually characterized by difference from the
very beginning:
The dialogue partner is located within the “I” as one of its components or,
conversely, the “I” is part of the constitution of the partner […]. The need for the
“other” is the need for the origin of the self; a partner is needed insofar as he/she
presents a different model of the familiar reality, a different interpretation of the
familiar text. (Lotman 1990: 409; my translation – D. M.)
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Lotman also employed, on the systemic

level, Derrida’s numerical idea of splitting. Lotman used it to conceptualize the
relationship between similarity and difference, on the one hand, and between
the whole and the part, on the other. In fact, the constitutive dualism of any
semiotic mechanism is transposed and reproduced within each of its parts,
each active language being continuously bisected and itself constituting a
binary system (Lotman 2002: 2650–2659). The situation therefore arises in
which being part of a whole – a binary system – implies being a whole in itself –
a binary system (Lotman 1997: 12). And conversely, the fact that any whole is
constituted of (at least) two parts also means that any whole is also part of a
bigger whole. Transformation into a part requires completion or supple-
mentation of the whole (Derrida 2000: 56), but this makes separation and self-
enclosure impossible.
This is why Lotmanian binarism cannot be reduced to the structuralistic
notion of binary opposition. On the contrary, the binary maintains within the
semiotic continuum an irreducibly “plural” character, functioning as a
mechanism for the multiplication of languages: “binarism, however, must be
understood as a principle which is realized in plurality since every newly-
formed language is in its turn subdivided on a binary principle” (Lotman 2000:
124). Here, as in the quotation from Derrida, one plus one makes (at least)
three. This is, in my opinion, the fundamental intuition at the heart of
Lotman’s conception of the semiosphere. If “three” is the mediating number,
mediation leads here to unbounded proliferation – an “avalanche”, as Lotman
writes (see Lotman 2002: 2654), or “dissemination” in Derrida’s terms.
The earlier Tartu–Moscow theory of language and culture as primary and
secondary modelling systems, respectively, which focuses on the relationship
between separate semiotic systems and external reality, should be reconsidered
in the light of Lotman’s later theory of the semiosphere, which focuses instead
on the position of different systems along a semiotic continuum. Even if a
semiotic system remains, in Lotman’s words, “a generator of structurality”,
which transforms “the open world of realia into the closed world of names”
(Lotman, Uspenskij 2001: 42), this is possible only because any semiotic
system, culture and language presupposes an open semiosphere in which the
play of reflection (binarism, asymmetry and heterogeneity) constantly dis-
places and reconfigures the relationships between semiotic units and realia.
Derrida similarly concluded that writing is not an irrelevant externality in
respect to the interiority of language, but, on the contrary, that (archi-)writing
as an open field of textuality “comprehends” and “goes beyond the essence” of
language (Derrida 1997: 7). It is in this context that we should interpret the
famous and ubiquitously quoted claim of Derrida: “there is nothing outside the
text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte) (see, for instance, Derrida 1997: 163). It would
be incorrect to understand textuality as an internal space, a self-enclosed
totality in terms of Saussure’s langue. On the contrary, (archi-)writing as a
space of textuality should be understood neither as absolute exteriority nor
total interiority, but precisely as the impossibility of conclusively separating
and delimiting an interiority from exteriority. In my opinion, the same can be
said for Lotman’s semiosphere.13
In Derrida’s theory of archi-writing/textuality and Lotman’s theory of the
semiosphere, the focus shifts from (structuralistic) totalization, by which a
given semiotic system is made into a separate whole with clear-cut boundaries,
to an infinite and open totality, which “comprehends” any system and makes it
vulnerable to the effects of numerousness and plurality. Laying the foundations
for this revisited conception of totality, Lotman’s binarism/plurality and
Derrida’s numerousness function as instruments for the deconstruction of
originary unity – such as the Saussurean “natural bond” between the signifier
and the signified (on which Derrida focused), or the Saussurean self-enclosure
of the linguistic system (to which Lotman turned his attention).14
The construction of identity: metalinguistic

self-description and the transcendental signified
Although Lotman and Derrida established that any semiotic space must be
understood in terms of plurality and heterogeneity rather than oneness and
sameness, they nevertheless analyzed the mechanisms by which our culture has
tried to construct unity and self-identity out of originary plurality/nume-
rousness. This can be described in Derrida’s terminology as an attempt to
“exorcize” the mirror structure. Once again, Derrida focused on a single
element that he called the “transcendental signified”, while Lotman identified a
systemic unit that he termed the “metalanguage of self-description”.
13
Peeter Torop writes about a “new understanding of holism” which emerges from the
Lotmanian opposition of a “communicating whole” to a “delimited whole” (Torop 2005).
14
It is important to highlight an interesting difference between Lotman’s theory of the
semiosphere and Derrida’s theory of textuality. If Derrida’s space of textuality coincides
with the “total structure” of archi-writing, which is based on discreteness/spacing,
articulation, and demotivation, for Lotman, this kind of structuring force enters within the
semiosphere into dialogue/collision with another kind of structuring force that is based on
iconicity, continuality, and motivation.
According to Derrida, the onto-theological exorcism of the mirror structure

occurs through “reference to the meaning of a signified thinkable and possible
outside all signifiers” (Derrida 1997: 73). Such a “transcendental signified” is
that which “in and of itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier, would
exceed the chain of signs, and would no longer itself function as a signifier”
(Derrida 1981: 19–20). The transcendence of the transcendental signified is
therefore due to its particular position in respect to all the other elements of the
structure – as Derrida explained, “the centre is paradoxically within the
structure and outside it” (Derrida 2004: 352), and is the only element of the
structure which, while governing that structure, escapes “structurality” and is
safe from the play of reflection and numerousness. This is why resorting to a
transcendental signified brings about a centralization, hierarchization and
delimitation of the boundaries of the field of textuality, the “chain of signs”
which is thus given a stable foundation, origin, and end.
According to Lotman, the semiotic space is centred and structured into a
homogeneous totality by a process in which one of the languages of the
semiotic space acquires a dominant position (see Lotman 1990: 254–255).
This language thus becomes a metalanguage which enables the different
systems of the semiotic space to be counted as one. It is the “nuclear structure”
and occupies the “core” of the semiotic space, but it possesses a different status
from all the other systems of that space; it functions as “the transcendental unity
of self-consciousness” (employing a Kantian concept adopted by Lotman).
The semiotic space is thus organized into a homogeneous structural whole, in
which the plurality of systems is reduced to a “single, definitive truth” (Lotman
1990: 254–255; Lotman, Uspenskij 2001: 65). Lotman wrote of “the
idealization of a real language” which leads to an “ideological self-portrait” or
“mythologized image” of culture as opposed to “real cultures” and “real texts”
which are always characterized by oscillation between at least two different
systems (Lotman 1990: 408; 2000: 129; Lotman, Uspenskij 2001: 132–133).
The metalanguage of self-description is subtracted from the play of
reflection and differentiation, and is also, in Derrida’s terminology, an “outside-
within” of the semiotic space. Anyway, for Lotman this transcendence is not
firstly attached to presumably originary meanings, but described as a “central
codifying mechanism”, functioning, one might say, as a generator of trans-
cendental signifiers which are imposed as universal and homogenizing forms of
expression onto the various contents circulating within the semiotic space
(Lotman 1990: 407–408; 2000: 222; Lotman, Uspenskij 2001: 39–68).15 In

Marxian terminology, we could describe the metalanguage of self-description
regulating the communicative exchange within the homogenized semiotic
space as a kind of “general equivalent” (see Marx 1967)16 which establishes and
warrants the principle of “universal translatability” (see Lotman 1985: 89)
within the internal space, and excludes from the latter all elements which
cannot be translated into the metalanguage. Derrida attributed the same
function to the transcendental signified: “the theme of a transcendental
signified took shape within the horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent and
unequivocal translatability” (Derrida 1981: 20). In his Specters of Marx, he
characterized this kind of translation in the following way:
Guaranteed translatability, given homogeneity, systematic coherence in their

absolute forms, this is surely (certainly, a priori and not probably) what renders […]
the other impossible […]. There must be disjunction, interruption, the
heterogeneous if at least there must be, if there must be a chance given to any “there
must be” […]. (Derrida 2006: 42)
Lotman wrote in the same vein of the risks of metalinguistic self-description

exhausting the reserve of indeterminacy of a given semiotic space, which may
thus lose its dynamism, become inflexible and incapable of further
development (Lotman 1990: 266; 2000: 134).
Deconstructing identity: dialogue and différance

The transcendental and idealizing centring of semiotic space (the space of
textuality) described by Lotman and Derrida transforms the plurality that
constitutes any semiotic system into a closed unity, a totality with clear-cut
boundaries: the Derridean “play of the signifiers” is effaced by the
15
Still, the “central-codifyng mechanism” strongly relates to and leads to transcendental
signification also in Lotman’s case: “The law-forming centre of culture, genetically deriving
from the primordial mythological nucleus, reconstructs the world as something totally
ordered, with a single plot and a supreme meaning” (Lotman 2000: 162).
16
Marx described in his genealogy of exchange value and money the mechanism by which
an immanent and real element of a given set becomes a transcendental and ideal equivalent of
all other elements of that set: “Gold is money with reference to all other commodities only
because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity” (Marx 1967: 70).
transcendental signified; the Lotmanian heterogeneity and pluralism of the

semiotic space is effaced by metalinguistic self-description. The mediation
effected by the transcendental signified and the metalanguage of self-
description resembles the Hegelian logic of Aufhebung in which the three (or
the third) no longer functions as an index of plurality but becomes the point of
access to the unity of the one.
Lotman’s conception of dialogue (or translation of the untranslatable) and
Derrida’s concept of différance present us with a process of mediation which
maintains plurality and numerousness, is not reducible to stable or definitive
sublation/acquisition and frustrates the pretence of self-identity by constantly
dislocating and counteracting any attempts at semiotic closure.
According to Lotman, the most fundamental mechanism of the semio-
sphere is translation, but there are different types (and different topoi – places)
of translation which correspond to different kinds of mediation. The meta-
language of self-description functions as a universal translational device at the
centre of the semiotic space and univocally determines its boundaries: on the
inner side, what is translatable, and on the outer side, what cannot be
translated. The other possibility Lotman considered was to conceive of the
boundary rather than the centre as the place of translation. This implies the
redefinition of the notion of boundary.
Connecting (or translating) boundaries cannot be viewed as mono-
dimensional lines of separation; they are, on the contrary, multidimensional,
complex spaces which Lotman also described as “bilingual belts” (Lotman
1999: 16). From the standpoint of metalinguistic (transcendental) self-
description, the boundary serves to separate the semiotic space from what is
external to it. From the point of view of its “immanent mechanism”, the
boundary as a bilingual belt connects different semiotic systems and opens
them to an interplay which Lotman defines as “dialogue” or “translation in
cases of untranslatability”, where translatability is not guaranteed (recalling the
quotation from Derrida), but hindered or even impossible from the perspective
of the metalanguage of self-description.17
17
This is why Lotman’s conception of “dialogue” is not reducible to the kind of wishful
thinking that often accompanies the understanding of multiculturalism as a project to be
undertaken. Lotman’s characterization of dialogue as a kind of impossible but inevitable
translation reveals the difficulties and problems (including possible conflicts) with this
kind of mediation. It is therefore not surprising that he chooses the word “tension” (which
Translation of the untranslatable, which clearly differs from the universal

translatability described above, crosses the boundary between different
semiotic systems. Whereas metasystemic translation is expected to be
complete, exhaustive, and the only correct and possible option, eliminating all
untranslatable residues by relegating them outside the boundaries of the
semiotic space, intersystemic translation (translation in the bilingual
periphery) is always difficult, inadequate and partial. This implies that different
translations are all equally correct (or equally incorrect) and that each
translation generates an untranslatable residue which will always be the point
of departure for new (similarly inadequate and partial) translations. Mediation
does not lead to univocity, unequivocalness and homogeneity. On the
contrary, the translational exchange continuously and incrementally adds to
the potential meaning by actualizing it in ways that are different and
unpredictable (see Lotman 1990: 405–406; 1985: 86, 121–124).
The two main properties of Lotmanian translation in cases of untransla-
tability are, therefore, (1) inexhaustibility: since the untranslated residue is
never eliminated, new and unpredictable texts are always emerging in the
process of translation, thus deferring the establishment of a final, definitive
text; and (2) irreversibility: if we translate the text back, or, in other words, if
we cross the boundary in the other direction, we never regain the original text,
but always obtain a new one.
These properties of Lotman’s “translation of the untranslatable” coincide
significantly with the concept of différance as employed by Derrida to
deconstruct the transcendental signified. First of all, Derrida, like Lotman,
clearly relates the theme of différance to a kind of “inadequation” that triggers
the opening of a border-space: “The liminal space is thus opened up by an
inadequation between the form and the content of discourse or by an
incommensurability between the signifier and the signified” (Derrida 2000:
18).18 It is on the basis of this inadequacy or “difference between the signifier
and the signified” that Derrida writes of “the impurity of translation” and
contrasts it to the transparency and unequivocalness of the ideal translation
operating through the transcendental signified: “We will never have, and in fact
may generate “explosions”) to describe dialogue as the contact and collision of different
systems within the semiotic space.
18
Lotman writes in a similar vein of the periphery as the place where “our language” is
“someone else’s language” and “someone else’s language” our own (Lotman 1985: 110;
Lotman, Uspenskij 1984: 4).
have never had, to do with some ‘transport’ of pure signifieds from one
language to another, or within one and the same language, that the signifying
instrument would leave virgin and untouched” (Derrida 1981: 20).
The two conceptual sides brought together by Derrida in his neographism
correspond to the two main properties of Lotman’s translation of the un-
translatable. As Derrida explains in the essay Différance (republished in Margins
of Philosophy, 1982: 1–28), the first conceptual side of différance is “deferring”
(“detouring, delaying, relaying”) the determination of meaning (the continual
generation of new translations in Lotman’s theory) which implies the
inexhaustibility of the translational residue. Derrida terms the latter the
“supplement” or “reserve”.19 The second conceptual side of différance is the
more common “differing”: “to be not identical, to be other, discernible” – the
non-self-identity of that which was supposed to be original, and, therefore, its
non-originary status (in Lotman’s framework, the new “originals” or reverse
translations).20
It is important to emphasize that both Lotman and Derrida assert the
primacy of dialogue and différance (which also means the primacy of plurality
and numerousness) over sameness and homogeneous unity. In Lotman’s
words, “[…] dialogue precedes language and gives birth to it. [...] Without the
semiosphere, language not only does not function, it does not exist” (Lotman
2005: 218–219). The “semiotic situation” – or “dialogic situation” – precedes
the instruments of semiosis and the semiotic act (Lotman 2000: 144; see also
Andrews 2003: 32), insofar as it enables the articulation of the heterogeneous,
which is essential to any language and communication.
Derrida is saying fundamentally the same thing when he claims that there is
no presence before or apart from semiological difference (Derrida 1982: 12).
19
Lotman also uses the concept of “reserve (of indeterminacy)” to describe the
translational residue (Lotman 2000: 227).
20
Semiotic non-identity, or difference, is, according to Lotman, the essential pre-
condition of dialogue: “[...] the text to be translated must already contain elements of
transition to the new language. Otherwise dialogue is impossible” (Lotman 1999: 24; my
translation – D. M.). It is interesting to observe that, as in différance, translation of the
untranslatable is characterized by the paradoxical topology of the periphery and also
introduces a paradoxical temporality in which (future) deferral always deconstructs (past)
originality. This is why Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere should be viewed in the light of
his later observations on history (see Lotman 2009). In my dissertation, I provided a
detailed analysis and some comparison of Derrida’s and Lotman’s concepts of temporality
(see Monticelli 2008: 88–109).
This primacy of différance does not imply origin or beginning; Derrida himself
often warns against this kind of interpretation. Différance should, on the
contrary, be conceived as a process which he calls “play” or “production of
differences”:
Therefore one has to admit, before any dissociation of language and speech, code and
message, etc. (and everything that goes along with this dissociation) a systematic
production of differences, the production of a system of differences. (Derrida 1981: 28)
The Lotmanian “dialogic situation” should be understood in the same “pro-

cessual” terms.21
Conclusion
The logic of Derrida’s and Lotman’s theories is comparable primarily because
both theoretical constructions are inspired by what I would define as an
“opening orientation of thought”. Instead of regarding identity-generating
delimitations as the original function of culture, Lotman and Derrida describe
them as attempts to efface the constitutive plurality and heterogeneity of the
semiotic space. A critical revision of the Saussurean conceptual model leads
them to describe an open totality based on plurality and difference which
enables the emergence of any particular semiotic system (language, text,
culture, etc.) and precludes any definite self-enclosure of those systems.
Whereas Derrida (1997: 7) writes of “archi-writing” and the production of
differences as “comprehending and exceeding” language,22 the “immersion” of
any singular system into the semiosphere means, in Lotman’s view, the
inescapable contact of the system with its alterity, which is responsible for the
endless re-articulation of the system itself.
To conclude, and return to the approach and terminology employed at the
beginning of this article, we can assert from a reading of Lotman and Derrida
that before (and, of course, still after) being expelled from any given cultural
space as a dangerous alterity which must be avoided or, in the worse case,
destroyed, difference and translation of the untranslatable constituted (and
21
This is also the reason why hypostatizing interpretations of the semiosphere should be
avoided. The semiosphere is the methodological device Lotman used to represent the
theoretical primacy of the dialogical situation over the “instruments of semiosis”.
22
“The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all signifieds in
general, affects them always already, the moment they enter the game” (Derrida 1997: 7).
continue to constitute) the most essential mechanism by which cultural

identity continuously constructs and deconstructs itself.
This is why a comparison of Derrida and Lotman may provide important
lines of reasoning with which to contest from a theoretical standpoint the
conservative understanding of cultural identity that is currently being used as
an ideological justification for social and political conflicts. The intent of this
article was to sketch the general outlines of a comparison which needs to be
developed into more detailed analyses concentrating on particular aspects and
discussing not only the similarities but also the important differences between
Lotman’s and Derrida’s theories.23
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23
The article was written with the support of Estonian Science Foundation grant
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Вызов идентичности:
лотмановский “перевод непереводимого” и
différance Деррида
В политическом и социологическом дискурсе, а также в публичной риторике послед-
них десятилетий понятие культуры постепенно стало заменять такие дискредити-
рованные и непригодные более к употреблению понятия, как “раса”, “этнос”, в не-
которых случаях даже “нация”, при этом прибегая к этим понятиям в консервативных
политических программах. В современном консервативном дискурсе идентичности
культура понимается как закрытая система с четкими границами, которую надо
защищать от внешних влияний. Такое понимание культуры служит идеологическим
основанием для социально-политических конфликтов.
Теории Дерридa и Лотмана служат полезными инструментами для деконструкции

этого понимания культурной идентичности, которое в последнее время стало
идеологическим обоснованием социально-политических конфликтов. Фактически, их
теории исходят из основательной критики типа интернализации самоопределения,
которое позволило Соссюру выделять и описывать язык как объект лингвистики. Оба
мыслителя развивают свои теории языка и культуры, исходя из антиструкту-
ралистской позиции, отрицая возможность закрытости и отделения языковых (и
других семиотических) систем. Автор статьи сравнивает основные компоненты этого
теоретического направления в трудах Лотмана и Дерридa, сосредотачиваясь на
понятиях зеркальной структуры, бинаризма, численности, текстуальности и семио-
сферы. На основе сравнения вырисовывается концепция целостности, границы и
опосредованности, которая подтачивает претензии дискурса идентичности, так как в
лотмановской семиосфере и в поле текстуальности
Väljakutse identiteedile:
Lotmani “tõlkimatuse tõlge” ja
Derrida différance
Viimaste kümnendite poliitilises ja sotsioloogilises diskursuses ning avalikus retoorikas on
kultuuri mõiste järk-järgult hakanud asendama selliseid diskrediteeritud ja kasutamis-
kõlbmatuid mõisteid nagu “rass”, “etnos”, mõnel juhul isegi “rahvus”, pärides samas nende
mõistete koha konservatiivsetes poliitilistes agendades. Tänapäeva konservatiivses
identiteedidiskursuses mõistetakse kultuuri kui kindlate piiridega suletud süsteemi, mida
tuleb kaitsta väliste mõjutuste eest. Selline arusaam kultuurist toimub ideoloogilise
põhjendusena sotsiaal-poliitilistele konfliktidele.
Derrida ja Lotmani võrdlev käsitlus pakub olulisi teoreetilisi vahendeid sellise
kultuurikontseptsiooni kahtluse alla seadmiseks. Mõlemad mõtlejad arendavad oma keele-
ja kultuuriteooriaid lähtudes antistrukturalistlikust positsioonist, mis eitab keeleliste (ja
muude semiootiliste) süsteemide suletuse ja eraldumise võimalikkust. Artiklis võrreldakse
sellise teoreetilise suunitluse peamisi komponente Derrida ja Lotmani töödes, keskendudes
peeglistruktuuri, binarismi, arvulisuse, tekstuaalsuse ja semiosfääri mõistetele. Võrdlusest
joonistub terviklikkuse, piiri ja vahendatuse kontseptsioon, mis õõnestab identiteedi-
diskursuse pretensioone, kuna Lotmani semiosfääris ja Derrida tekstuaalsuse väljas
tasakaalustab igasugust süsteemse sulgemise katset teine, vastupidine ja olemuslikum jõud.
Lotmani “tõlkimatuse tõlget” ja Derrida différance’i analüüsitakse artiklis kui sarnaseid viise,
kirjeldamaks süsteemi piiridel toimuvat avavat vahetust.
Kultuuri (de)konstruktiivne loomus, nii nagu seda kirjeldavad Lotman ja Derrida,
vastandub katsele näha kultuuri paratamatult antud ja lõplikult fikseeritud identiteetide /
erinevuste allikana.
Goethe’s glosses to translation
Dinda L. Gorlée
Van Alkemadelaan 806
NL 2597 BC The Hague, The Netherlands
e-mail: gorlee@xs4all.nl; http://gorlee.home.xs4all.nl/
Abstract. The logical and illogical unity of translation with a triadic approach was
mediated by Peirce’s three-way semiotics of sign, object, and interpretant. Semio-
translation creates a dynamic network of Peircean interpretants, which deal with artificial
but alive signs progressively growing from undetermined (“bad”) versions to higher
determined (“good”) translations. The three-way forms of translation were mentioned by
Goethe. He imitated the old Persian poetry of Hafiz (14th Century) to compose his
German paraphrase of West-östlicher Divan (1814–1819). To justify the liberties of his own
translation/paraphrase, Goethe furnished notes in Noten und Abhandlungen and Parali-
pomena (1818–1819). Through his critical glosses, he explained information, adaptation,
and reproduction of the foreign culture and literature (old Persian written in Arabic script)
to become transplanted into the “equivalent” in German 19th Century verse. As critical
patron of translation and cultural agent, Goethe’s Divan notes are a parody mixing Orient
and Occident. He built a (lack of) likeness, pointing in the pseudo-semiosis of translation
to first and second degenerate types of object and sign.
1. Friendship
When I find myself recollecting some instances of meeting Juri Lotman, I
vividly remember the turmoil between East and West, making us captive of the
political history and alienizing all personal contact. Lotman’s effective appeal to
my invitation to become, together with Thomas A. Sebeok, key speakers of the
First Congress of the Norwegian Association of Semiotics in Bergen (1989),
became a semiotic extravaganza, unforgettable for all present. Translation was a
crucial issue, but it seemed to work between semiotic friends. Sebeok
addressed Lotman “mostly in German, with snatches of French, interspersed
by his shaky English and my faltering Russian” (Sebeok 2001: 167). During
one of the events of the congress, Lotman whispered to me in French, as I
Goethe’s glosses to translation 341
guess, that translation was on the program in the semiotic school in Tartu. I
thought that the brief remark was a smart anecdote, but I had misunderstood
Lotman’s cryptic words, alas!
The semiotic approach to translation – semiotranslation – had for many
years been my lonely adventure. To write the methodology of Charles S.
Peirce’s semiotics in a doctoral dissertation was against the opinion of my
university superiors, so I worked on the enterprise alone. Later, under the
inspiration of Sebeok, Peircean translation had turned into my “mono-mania”.
In October 1999, if I remember well, I met for the first time Peeter Torop
during the 7th International Congress of the International Association for
Semiotic Studies in Dresden. Immediately, we became friends, although we
had in the beginning no real language in common, but needed to communicate
through half-words, body movements, and gestures. We have stayed honest
friends until today (and hopefully tomorrow). My words of friendship are a
simple yet affectionate statement but, in a time of professional wilderness, I
fully realize that having a real friend overcomes our active busyness to trust in
the truth and luxury of the language of friendship.
Lotman’s hidden and secret words were realized in the friendship between
Peeter and myself. A friendship between two semiotic translation theoreticians
exists in our case to challenge the “old” rules of linguistic translatology into
producing a new semiotic theory about the plural and manifold activity of
making sense of a source text into a target text. Translatology – translating
(process) and translation (product) – starts from the original, Romantic unity
of the ego breathing his or her individual fashion of translation traversing the
fixed and normative unity of language-and-grammar, but the perspective has
now changed into the revolutionary advance of the plurality of the translator’s
signatures. Translating (process) and translation (product) create a living and
radical form of Roman Jakobson’s transmutation, inside and outside the source
text, producing new target reactions of the “chaotic” symbiosis of language-
and-culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the Romantic poet-dramatist-
novelist-philosopher and scientist (anatomy, botany) of German culture, came
close to defining the modern version of translatology. In his days, he saw
translation – including annotation, retranslation, and even lexicography – of a
literary work in the German language as a means of performing a vital service
for particularly classical literature. Goethe introduced the concept of world
literature, building and mediating the cultural and political identity of the
342 Dinda L. Gorlée
German princedoms into one national home (Venuti 1998: 77–78). However,
at informal kinds of causeries with his younger secretary Johann Peter Ecker-
mann (1792–1854)1 – indeed, early forms of “interviews” occurring in
1
This footnote is an informal excursus to punctuate formally the acute angle to
understand the two ways of Goethe’s work in formal and informal writings, as argued here
separately and in mediation. Semiotically, both reflect knowledge and metaknowledge,
unfolding in the formation of reasoning in Peirce’s three categories: argumentative
deduction, experimental induction, and hypothetical abduction reflect the two concepts of
formality and informality, that are not separate but interactive in whole and parts. The
formal mind is the pure cognition of semiosis (logical Thirdness, with nuances of
Secondness and Firstness) and the informal mind is the degenerate pseudo-semiosis (real or
fictional Secondness, with nuances of Firstness and Thirdness). In literary genres, Peirce’s
categories represent description, narration, and dissertation. Formal works are the flow of
text-oriented thought-signs, to have essentially one interpretation, whereas informal works
embody culture-oriented “factors – the bodily states and external conditions – and these
interrupt logical thought and fact” (Esposito 1980: 112). The informal stories are the
picaresque variety of narrative genres. The flow of episodes, plots, anecdotes, and other
impressionistic and causal narrations can embrace many meanings, even ambiguous and
contradictory senses.
In Lotman’s cultural semiosis, the “constant flux” (1990: 151) of knowledge and
metaknowledge throws light on the dialogic interaction of different human semiospheres
(1990: 125ff.). The structural boundaries of formal cultural (moral, ethical, ideological)
space may be crossed by all kinds of informal human (self-)expressions reflecting various
cultures. In literary language, the crosswise dialog between formal and informal codes
demonstrates how and when human cultures (and subcultures) move away from domestic
codes to shift to adopting new and strange codes. Lotman exchanges the formal
“stereotype-images” into the informal image of what is described as “the unknown Dos-
toevsky” or “Goethe as he really was” to give a “true understanding” of literary personalities
and their works (1990: 137). See also metaknowledge in the encyclopedic information of
Sebeok (1986: 1: 529–534) and Greimas (1982: 188–190, 192).
Goethe’s formal attitude about literary translation will focus on his creative translation
of his West-östlicher Divan. His informal view will be argued about his own self-explanatory
notes, explaining the complexities of his German translation of the Arabic verse.
In this article, Goethe’s informal attitude about literary translation will be discussed:
firstly, in the editor’s “table-talk literature” (1946: viii) of Goethe’s Conversations with
Eckermann, and secondly, Goethe’s self-explanatory notes, explaining the German
translation of his Divan verse. The latter, the Divan and the notes, shows the difference
between Lotman’s terms of “central and peripheral spheres of culture” (1990: 162). The
Divan is “the central sphere of culture … constructed on the principle of an integrated
structural whole, like a sentence”, whereas the notes are “the peripheral sphere …
organized like a cumulative chain organized by the simple joining of structurally
Goethe’s study of the Weimar Palais, during dinner, in the library, in the
garden, or taking walks together – Goethe interpreted as “translator” of his own
experiences, the similarity between botanical form, shape, or pattern to:
[…] a green plant shooting up from its root, thrusting forth strong green leaves
from the sturdy stem, and at last terminating in a flower. The flower is unexpected
and startling, but come it must – nay, the whole foliage has existed only for the sake
of that flower […]. This is the ideal – this is the flower. The green foliage of the
extremely real introduction is only there for the sake of this ideal, and only worth
anything on account of it. For what is the real in itself? We take delight in it when it
is represented with truth – nay, it may give us a clearer knowledge of certain things;
but the proper gain to our higher nature lies alone in the ideal, which proceeds from
the heart of the poet. (Eckermann 1946: 155; see 327)
Goethe’s footnotes to the phenomenon of translation explained the organic

form of translation, attaining the long-cultivated ambition to blossom and fruit.
Anticipating the idea of intersemiotic translation, Goethe’s approach seemed in
some ways to anticipate biosemiotics. Indeed, the wilderness of the thistle path –
shooting up from the wild rhizomes, thrusting forth thorny weeds with sharp
spines and prickly margins – comes alive in the nomadic wanderings into the
translator’s semiosis or pseudo-semiosis (Kull, Torop 2003, Gorlée 2004a). As
a warning against the business of “a thousand hindrances” of translation,
Goethe’s proverb said, “one must not expect grapes from thorns, or figs from
thistles […]” (Eckermann 1946: 385, 199). After his botanical analogy,
Goethe added in spirited inspiration: “The like has often happened to me in
life; and such cases lead to a belief in a higher influence, in something
daemonic, which we adore without trying to explain further” (Eckermann
1946: 385). Friendship, I guess.
2. Semiotranslation
The conventional view of translation is the dual (or dyadic) approach that has
tended to predominate the whole of translation studies. This comprehensive
theory of translation studies was used as a systematic guideline and, semio-
independent texts” (Lotman 1990: 162). Lotman adds that “This organization best
corresponds to the function of these texts: of the first to be a structural model of the world
and of the second to be a special archive of anomalies” (Lotman 1990: 162).
tically, was based on the twofold concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure’s language

theory – signifier and signified, langue and parole, denotation and connotation,
matter and form, sound and meaning, as well as synchrony and diachrony. The
semiologically oriented language theory was in agreement with Saussure’s
system of contrastive terms, while the dual dichotomies produced, for example,
Hjelmslev’s expression and content, form and substance, and Jakobson’s code
and message, selection and combination, metaphor and metonymy, whole and
details. However, Sebeok’s inner and outer, vocal and nonvocal, verbal and
nonverbal, linguistic and nonlinguistic signs and sign systems, as well as Lot-
man’s primary and secondary modelling systems, internal and external com-
munication, closed and open cultures, cultural center and periphery, tended
not towards Saussure’s contrastive oppositions, but reflect a continuum,
echoing a relational structure of evolutionary progress. They grasp aspects of
dynamic modes of expression, as found in Peirce’s threefold (or triadic) doctrine
of semiotic signs.
Within the threefold categories, the two-step model of translation studies of
the linguistic (or multilingual) relation between the production and the
producer, or the producing activity and reproductive activity, loses the primary
importance. So does the ideal of perfect equivalence produced in the target
language stand for the “same” place in the source language. The “old” model of
classical equivalence has produced the paradigm of evaluating in the lines of
the argument a yes/no response. The dual explanation judges translation
according to the dual dichotomies of language: translation studies and trans-
lation practice, translation process and translation product, translatability and
untranslatability, prescriptive (normative) and descriptive translation, co-tex-
tual and contextual translations, as well as source-oriented and target-oriented
translations, faithful and free translation, linguistic and artistic translation,
naturalizing and alienating translation, exotization and acculturation of transla-
tions, historization and actualization (assimilation) of translations, accuracy
and receptibility of translations, and many others emanating from semiological
(structuralist) approaches to translation studies (Greimas 1982: 351–352).
Semiotranslation is the “new” methodology, characterized as Peirce’s doct-
rine of detecting and analyzing signs as a “progressive” thinking method, diffe-
rent from Saussure. Hijacked by Peirce, as my situation was, away from the
camp of Saussure, the outlook of translation studies and the translation of
meaning was based on the division and subdivision of the framework of
Peirce’s logical terms. The semiotic sign or representamen, object, and
interpretant, divided into various threeway elements, correspond to Peirce’s

categories of Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness. The threeway elements are not
separate but interact with each other in semiosis, when possible. Translators, as
human interpreters, work with pseudo-semiosis or Peirce’s degenerate semiosis
(Gorlée 1990; see fn. 1), as argued here. Semiotranslation channels a dynamic
network of Peircean interpretant-signs, considered as artificial “sign-things”
which are still alive, and thus progressively growing in time. A translation is a
(re)creative work by a translator (or various translators), going through
successive moods, aspects, and phases of the never-ending acts of translation.
Simplifying the complex tasks of the translator, the vague and impromptu
translations, made by so-called “bad” translators bringing in unintegrated and
illogical impressions, could under the fortunate circumstances of “good”
translators grow to become clear translations, giving higher determined and
logical features – or performing any interpretant-messages whatsoever between
“good” and “bad” (Gorlée 2004a: 167, 2004b) in what can be called inter-
mediate types.
Peirce’s mental activity of threeway subdivisions had the cultural flavor of
detecting all kinds of signs and nonsigns, analyzing both linguistic and non-
linguistic (graphical, acoustic, optical, and other) messages (see Sebeok 1985)
interplaying with each other in the outer and inner speech expressed in the
sensation, emotion, and attention of the new media. Between Saussure – in
agreement with Nida’s formal and dynamic equivalence (1964) – but tending
toward Peirce, Jakobson’s three types of translation (1959) gave widening
significances to the traditional concept of translation, defined as: (1) Intra-
lingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
other signs of the same language, (2) Interlingual translation or translation
proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language, and
(3) Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal
signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. (Jakobson 1959: 233)
Jakobson’s threefold division of translations gives the translational concept
new and extralinguistic horizons beyond merely the accurate “rewording” and
less accurate “translation proper” to the free and unbounded “transmutation”
(Gorlée 1994: 156ff.). The wider phenomenon, including an “unconventional”
repertoire of extensive forms of translations, was either supported or rejected,
by purely linguistic translation theoreticians, as being non-empirical and
“radical”. Jakobson’s On linguistic aspects of translation (1959) is now included
in The Translation Studies Reader (Venuti 2004: 138–143), but in this recent
manual of translation studies, semiotics is not (yet) mentioned as a metho-

dology of translation studies.2
The criticism of semiology (in the French tradition: structuralism) and its
symbiosis with translation studies may be summarized in the following three
points: (1) the linguistic imperialism, in which a linguistic model can be
applied to nonlinguistic objects in a metaphorical replacement, without doing
justice to the nature of the nonlinguistic objects, (2) semiology is basically the
study of signifiers, and does not ask what signs mean but how they mean, the
object that refers to the sign; meaning becomes wholly a sign-internal affair,
while Peirce’s interpretant-sign falls outside the sign and is not studied and not
described, and finally (3) binarism, the division into a priori dual oppositions is
presented as the instrument for exhaustive analysis, claiming to lead to ob-
jective, scientific conclusions; without analyzing the meaningful aspects of lan-
guage and culture, time and space of the dynamic idea-potentiality of the sign
in the human mind, that is identified and translated into the interpretant-sign
(see Savan 1987–1988: 15–72).
Peirce’s semiotics argues that any scientific inquiry is best conceived as a
dynamic truth-searching process, that is goal-directed (teleological) but with no
fixed results, no fixed methods, no fixed redefinitions, and no fixed agents. All
results, methods, and agents are temporary habits, which are repeatable and
nonrepeatable patterns of behavior. The same is also true for interpretative
translation – or semiotranslation. Peirce’s idea dramatically changes the whole
traditional approach, that as argued concentrates heavily on the basically
unverifiable dichotomies labeled as a dogmatic form of dual expression.
Semiotranslation offers answers of an evolutionary and sceptical nature about the
possibility (or impossibility) of translatability and untranslatability, equivalence
and fidelity/infidelity, the function and role of the intelligence, will, and emotion
of the translator’s fallabilistic mind, translation and retranslation, the fate of the
source text, the destiny of the target text, and other semiotic questions.
Sebeok’s encouragement deepened my interest in Peirce’s semiotics, but it
dawned on me that Jakobson’s organic concept of translation adhered a unified
whole in Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture. The natural inclination to
visualize translation from Peirce’s logics was capitalized in Lotman’s universe
2
Jakobson’s cardinal functions of language can be pairwise attached or matched to the
triad of Peirce’s categories, though they are not identical to them and their correlation is
interactive and may vary upwards and downwards with the communicational instances and
textual network (Gorlée 2008).
of translation that joined language and culture into what I call the concept of
linguïculture (Anderson and Gorlée 2011).3 The expansive system of semio-
translation includes culture and becomes linguïculture, grown and developed in
Peeter Torop’s concept of total translation (in 1995, in Russian, with following
publications), celebrated in the seminar Culture in Mediation: Total Trans-
lation, Complementary Perspectives (2010) in his honor. Torop’s linguïculture
and his semiotranslation are actively involved in reaching the ultimate goal of
Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation transferred to the forms and shapes of
interartistic and interorganic transmutation.
Returning to humanist Goethe, long ago he visualized intersemiotics in the
conversational approach to Eckermann, stating that:
The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at last with the flower and the seed. In the
animal kingdom it is the same. The caterpillar and the tape-worm go from knot to
knot, and at last form heads. With the higher animals and man, the vertebral bones
grow one upon another, and terminate with the head, in which the powers are
concentrated […]. Thus does a nation bring forth its heroes, who stand at the head
like demigods to protect and save […] many last longer, but the greater part have
their places supplied by others and are forgotten by posterity. (Eckermann 1946:
292)
Goethe, with his brother-in-arms Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), belong

to the Geniezeit, expressing the strong belief in the progress of individual work
to turn into cultural and scientific heroes – an opinion that was relevant in the
epoch of the progress of the industrial revolution. Goethe mentioned the
practical and theoretical evolutionism of literature, mineralogy, and meteoro-
3
Linguïculture is coined from “language” and “culture” to suggest their direct connection at
a cognitive-intentional-intuitive level beyond that of the mere word, sentence, or discourse.
Linguïculture, as language-cum-culture, follows an earlier term, languaculture (Agar 1994a,
1994b), according to Agar himself an “awkward term” (1994b: 60) meaning language-and-
culture. Languaculture is used by Agar to argue his anthropological fieldwork (1994b: 93,
109ff. 128, 132, 137, 253f.), discussing the patterns of linguo-cultural expressions, happening
in personal (low-content) or collectivistic (high-content) messages (Agar 1994a: 222).
Linguïculture broadens languaculture to other areas and directions, different from Agar with a
semiotic approach (Agar 1994b: 47f.). In the linguistic etymology of the binomial
construction, the first unit must be affixed to the second: instead of Agar’s Latin root, half-
translated into French, “lengua” into “langua” (languaculture), the proposed “lingui-” in the
transposition linguïculture, derived from Latin “lingua” with final affix –i attached after the
root, will capture the speech units together with the attached cultural clues.
logy (Eckermann 1946: 292–294), but as we see, his genre of semiotranslation

bears fruit from one to another language and stands for the continuity in the
future.
3. Truchement
During the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) years of Goethe’s youth,
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) (Störig 1963: 38–70; trans. Lefevere
1977: 66–89 retrans. by Susan Pernofski in Venuti 2004: 43–63) dual or dyadic
idea of translation of Greek and Latin literature was the standard definition for
translators and critics of translations. Schleiermacher took a distance from in-
formal “newspaper articles and ordinary travel literature” where he argued that
translation is “little more than a mechanical task” (Venuti 2004: 44f.) and
concentrated on the formal peculiarities of “old” literature. The new world with
strange words and obscure sentences, rhymed in antique hexameter had to be
transmogrified to a version of German, the native tongue, adorned with
classical insights to imitate a “true” approximation of the classical authors and
the sacred writings. The translator needed to be a philologist, a poet, and a
classical or theological scholar, to respond to the complexities of the pro-
fession. The alternative attitudes of the translator were characterized by
Schleiermacher as Verfremdung – imitating the source language, creating a
foreignness of the German translation – or Verdeutschung – approximating the
target language and producing a germanization of the translation. In
Schleiermacher’s (and Goethe’s) day, only a tiny elite of the readers had access
to the knowledge of foreign languages, in the sense that real paraphrases or
imitations can lead to misconceptions and misunderstandings. Schleiermacher
stressed that language is a creative game and “no one has his language mecha-
nically attached to him from the outside as if by straps” (trans. qtd. in Venuti
2004: 56f.). Translation is for translators not so claustrophobic as it seems a
bootstrapping operation (Merrell 1995: 98).
Goethe’s priorities started indeed from the work of classical authors
(Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, Cicero), the sacred writings (Old and
New Testaments), and traditional epics (Nibelungenlied). Since Goethe was
the multilingual humanist of the old Western secular culture, he broadened the
landscape to the socio-literary discussion of more modern or contemporary
writers, such as Alighieri Dante, Jean-Baptiste Molière, William Shakespeare,
Lord George Byron, and Walter Scott. Goethe had a classical mind, but his
unique genius and his global significance were universal and transdisciplinary.
He was strongly attentive to old and new developments in music, theatre,
opera, architecture, Serbian songs, Chinese novels into what he called the
global ideal of the “higher world-literature” (Eckermann 1946: 263). Goethe
knew French, English, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and had
translated works by Denis Diderot, François Voltaire, Benvenuto Cellini, Lord
Byron, and others. Translation was Goethe’s special concern; he had been a
translator himself and was fully aware of the troubles with the critical
translation of literary works.4 Together with the brothers August Wilhelm and
Friedrich von Schlegel (1767–1845, 1772–1829), who broadened the signifi
oriental cances of translation to Indian literature, Goethe introduced Oriental
literature to Western readers.
Goethe’s spiritual revolt out of his artistic and political life was writing Faust,
his masterwork, in which the final volume II was completed in the last years of his
life, during his conversations with Eckermann. In a quasi-autobiographical
history, Goethe told the words and actions of a heroic man of enlightenment
struggling between God and Mephistopheles. Bemused with magical dreams and
wild passions for charming or even fatal women – recalling the Cartesian duality
of mind and body – Faust sought energy and redemption through love, study,
and good works. Before Faust, Goethe’s first escape was his pilgrimage from
bourgeois civilization to the “otherness” of the cultures of Oriental life, that was in
Germany otherwise regarded than the British and French explorations of the
East (Said 2003). In Goethe’s Germany, the Orient was an imaginative and
unknown world of mysteries, with the alien customs of a Muslim continent and
speaking Arabic, the language of the cryptic but sacred Islam.
Goethe was transmogrified into a Western Orientalist – although a salon
Orientalist, since he never traveled to the East to study Arabic in situ. He
composed the German translation of the Persian ghasal lyric of Hafiz5 (14th
century), written in Arabic script. In the years of Goethe’s translation of Hafiz,
4
In Goethe’s informal Conversations with Eckermann (1946), an intralingual translation of
the actual conversations, the phenomenon of interlingual translation is repeated and dis-
cussed many times: specifically (1946: 65, 78, 160, 163ff., 199, 309, 320, 341, 385, 395, 396,
400, 410) and references to Goethe’s intersemiotic translation (1946: 135f., 303, 320).
5
Hafiz (original name: Shams ud-din Mohammad) (c.1325–1390) was a Persian poet
(Shiraz, now Iran) of the ghazals or odes. Belonged to the order of dervishes and was a
member of the mystical Sufi sect. Hafiz has been the subject of an enormous and still
growing scholarship of Oriental studies, but will here only be indicated in some details.
the study of Orientalism changed his Western scale of art into a paradise of
Oriental art (Said 2003). The basic elements are not the familiar Western
“Skulptur und Bild, sondern Ornament und Kalligraph” (sculpture and image but
rather ornament and calligraphy, my trans.) (Solbrig 1973: 84). The mystical
understanding of the recitation of the Quran, the metaphors of a beautiful rose
with hundred leaves, and the nightingale’s song had to be symbolized, fictio-
nalized, and to a certain degree allegorized (Solbrig 1973: 96). The rhetorical
symbolisms of Hafiz’ mystical trance, drunk on the wine of the beloved sultana,
were translated into Goethe’s own sensual desire worded in his love poetry.6
Goethe mediated not in person, but in fine arts between East and West. His
German West-östlicher Divan was no ordinary translation but he composed a
retranslation and reversion, or better a:
Truchement [which] derives nicely from the Arabic turjaman, meaning “interpreter”,
“intermediary”, or “spokesman”. On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as
literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the
West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical
reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which
together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West,
for the West. (Said 2003: 166; see Paker 1998: 571)
Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (tr. West-Eastern Divan) (1814–1819)7 is the

formal paraphrase of the Oriental narratives of Hafiz.8 However, Goethe was
6
See Thubron (2009). Sufi poetry was religious and didactic verse, but is at times full of
mystical satire with parodies and travesties. The criticism of the complexity of Islam society
can turn into a flirt “with public obloquy and social danger, as if to prove that their love of
God was wholly disinterested, uninfluenced by, indeed, contemptuous of, the social
approval sought by the outwardly pious. Wine, forbidden to Muslims, becomes the
emblem of divinity: homoeroticism (forbidden in theory, though not always in practice) is
a recurring theme, where the divine is manifested in the beauty of beardless boys”
(Ruthven 1997: 65–66).
7
For the German original of the West-östlicher Divan including Noten und Abhandlungen
and Paralipomena (Goethe1952, published in East Germany) and without Paralipomena
(Goethe 1958, published in West Germany). For Noten und Abhandlungen, see Störig
(1963: 35–37). For the English translation of West-östlicher Divan, see Goethe (1998), of
Noten und Abhandlungen, see Lefevere (1977: 35–37), retranslated by Sharon Sloan in
Venuti (2004: 64–66). The English translation of Paralipomena (Goethe 1952) is my own.
8
The Oxford English Dictionary refers that the Persian word “divan”, untranslated into
German and English, was “[o]riginally, in early use, a brochure, or fascicle of written leaves
or sheets, hence a collection of poems” (OED 1989: 4: 882).
acquainted with Hafiz through the German translation of Divan (1812),

written by the Austrian diplomat and Orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-
Purgstall (1774–1856). As Goethe explained in his Divan (1952: 183–185,
1958: 302–304), he had from 1814 read von Hammer-Purgstall’s recent
translation of Hafiz’ ghazals. This reading aroused so vividly his deeper
emotions, that he felt encouraged and stimulated into making his own
retranslation. Indeed, Oriental studies was in Goethe’s days a pioneer project,
so that Hammer’s translation in German was a bold experiment in Oriental
scholarship.9 Hammer-Purgstall had sent his translated book to Goethe, with
the artistic dedication “Dem Zaubermeister das Werkzeug” (“a tool for the magi-
cian”, my trans.) (Solbrig 1973: 13, 37). Hammer’s translation was basically an
interlinear version, a word-for-word imitation retaining the Arabic words and
their different meanings (polysemy) for the learned audience of Orientalists.
Yet in Goethe’s vision, Hammer’s philological translation became a dynamic
exhortation to develop further into elegant poetry for Western man and
woman.
Hammer’s poetic simplicity was compared by Henri Broms to a forgotten
treasure of “rough diamonds”, although in his beautiful metaphor Broms
recognized that “their roughness is no fault, it is, rather, as if these original, simple
rhythms might give a clearer sight of Hafiz’ world than many later inter-
pretations” (1968: 46–47). Eastern and Western man and woman do not use the
same structures and their minds use different logics (Broms 1990). Goethe was a
visionary poet and his duty was to animate Hafiz’ lyrical poems for the “popular”
elixir of Western life (Eckermann 1946: 271). He read Hammer’s poetically
rough translation as a tool to mix his meanings in the retranslation. There was in
those days no affair of plagiarism, claiming responsibility for Goethe’s copying or
stealing Hammer’s words or ideas. Indeed, Goethe highly appreciated Hammer‘s
translation – “mit Achtung und Anerkennung” (“with esteem and recognition”, my
trans.) (Solbrig 1973: 16), “höchster Lob” (“highest praise”, my trans.) (Lentz
1958: 21) – and vice versa. He consulted Hammer-Purgstall’s treatise again and
again to solve many of his translational problems. At the same time, Goethe
never wrote about the lack of artistic value of the alien words and ambiguities
used by Hammer-Purgstall, that, as it seemed to Goethe, were “created” for his
poetic verse (Lentz 1958: 24).
9
Joseph Hammer-Purgstall was a multilingual scholar. Beyond his native language,
German, he knew Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, English,
Hebrew, and Russian (Solbrig 1973: 45).
Goethe had been deeply interested in Zoroastrianism, Mohammad’s Quran,

and Bedouin poetry. Yet his thoughts must have remembered when he was a
boy and heard the Oriental storytelling of the beautiful and captivating princess
Sheherazade, whose marvelous fantasies of Oriental wealth, food and drink,
and sex were to pleasure her husband, the king of Samarkand. The original
stories of the popular (but unfinished) collection, Thousand and One Nights or
Arabian Nights (Mommsen 1981: ix–xxiii, 101–118, 290–295), had been
written in Arabic, but were translated to French in 12 volumes of Abbé Antoine
Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (1704–1717) and then retranslated from French
into other European languages, including German (Mommsen 1981: xv).
The popular Arabian tales, and the variants and imitations of this Western
pilgrimage, had nothing to do with the impoverished life of Eastern men and
women confined to the desert and held in low repute by the Muslim code of
the Islamic Middle East (Said 2003: 64f., 193ff.). From the informal coffee-
house pleasure to the formal amusement of Goethe’s genius, as man of Western
taste, he turned, with his intimate narration and wealth of local color, the Divan
into a dramatic imagery between reality and romance, a travesty in which
romance was stronger than reality. Despite the religious war of Christendom
and Islam, Goethe felt free in the poetic retranslation to identify himself with
his prophetic “twin brother” Hafiz. He also took the liberty to disguise
Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860), his mistress, to play the role of poetess
Suleika (Nicoletti 2002: 349-376).
Goethe followed the poetic verse of Hafiz’ ghazals (from Arabic
“spinning”), that were Sufi-inspired poems of varying length and made up of a
number of 4 to 14 couplets, all upon the same rhyme, playing together a
pattern of variations on the main theme. The rhyme is repeated throughout the
poem, but the off lines are unrhymed (aa, ab, ac, etc.). In the final couplet, the
poet signs his name. The continuity of ghazals is, for Western eyes, rhapsodic
and incoherent. To give the hidden meaning a sense, Goethe had expanded the
couplet into a stanza up to 30 lines and made the ghazal a logical unity. In
terms of style, he did not use the style of “old” quasi-Oriental writing, the
historicizing or retrospective approach, en vogue in the Western world to
approximate the Oriental world-picture to the West. Goethe abandoned his
earlier two-step model of either exoticizing or naturalizing translation and tried
to give the translated cycle of the poetic verse and essays a new, modernized,
and actual expression in the German Divan.
The target-oriented truchement meant that the translator Goethe had to a

certain degree modified linguistically and culturally the source text to suit his
reality, taste, and critical standards, attributing modern ideas, persons, things,
etc. to the target readership (Gorlée 1997: 162). Taking some scientific
distance from Hammer-Purgstall’s philological translation, Goethe wrote with
what sounded like the suddenly liberated translator of bridging socio-cultural
differences (Fink 1982). Despite the traditional models, Goethe was free and
followed his own lyric-prosaic “Spielformen” (Scholz 1990), that is playful
forms of abductive literature, including the free mixture of foreign and native
elements. As a globalized botanist, Goethe offered “something like a rhizomatic
model” of “the desert and the oasis [...] rather than forest and field” (Deleuze,
Guattari 1987: 18; see Gorlée 2004a). Goethe’s Divan collection is not
Hammer’s monolog but a role-playing dialog, or even trialog.
4. (Meta)statements
In Goethe’s Divan cycle, the formal story went hand in hand with the informal
asides: the Noten und Abhandlungen (tr. Notes and Essays) and then Parali-
pomena (1818–1819). In both marginal glosses10, Goethe coped with the
doubles entendres of the Divan’s rewording, paraphrasing, amplifying, re-
interpreting, condensing, parodying, and commenting of the revision and (re)-
translation. The comments, redactions, adjuncts, phrases, paragraphs, frag-
ments, and at times even misplacings and misunderstandings are published to
better understand the techniques, plots, motifs, and types of the German
Divan. Goethe’s informal marginalia reflected his own metastatements – Mer-
rell’s “counterstatements, counterpropositions, counterarguments, and co-
untertexts” (1982: 132) – about the analytical differences with respect to the
statements of creative translation (Popovič 1975: 12–13; see fn. 1).
One of the last glosses features Goethe’s new opinion: the threefold model of
translation. Goethe’s concept of translation manifests the information, and
reproduction, and adaptation of the real and fictitious specificity of Western
“orientalized” translations from Oriental literary works. In a selection of the
paragraphs of the Notes, Goethe stated that:
10
A gloss (from Greek glossa “tongue”, “language”) – used in the title as keyword of the
article – is an intellectual or naive explanation, by means of a marginal note of a previous
text; sometimes used of the foreign or obscure word that requires explanation.
There are three kinds of translation. The first acquaints us with the foreign
countries on our own terms; a plain prose translation is best in this purpose. Prose
in and of itself serves as the best introduction: it completely neutralizes the formal
characteristics of any sort of poetic art and reduces even the most exuberant waves
of poetic enthusiasm to still water. The plain prose translation surprises us with
foreign splendors in the midst of our national domestic sensibility; in our everyday
lives, and without our realizing what is happening to us – by lending our lives a
nobler air – it genuinely uplifts us. Luther’s Bible translation will produce this kind
of effect with each reading.
Much would have gained, for instance, if the Nibelungen had been set in good,
solid prose at the outset, and labeled as popular literature. Then the brutal, dark,
solemn, and strange sense of chivalry would still have spoken to us in its full power.
Whether this would still be feasible or even advisable now is best decided by those
who have more rigorously dedicated themselves to these matters of antiquity.
A second epoch follows, in which the translator endeavors to transport himself
into the foreign situation but actually only appropriates the foreign idea and
represents it as his own. I would like to call such an epoch parodistic, in the purest
sense of that word. It is most often men of wit who feel drawn to the parodistic. The
French make use of this style in the translation of all poetic works: Delille’s
translations provide hundreds of examples. 11 In the same way that the French adapt
foreign words to their pronunciation, they adapt feelings, thoughts, even objects;
for every foreign fruit there must be a substitute grown in their own soil.
[…] Because we cannot linger for very long in either a perfect or an imperfect
state but must, after all, undergo one transformation after another, we experienced
the third epoch of translation, which is the final and highest of the three. In such
periods, the goal of the translation is to achieve perfect identity with the original, so
that the one does not exist instead of the other but in the other’s place.
This kind met with the most resistance in its early stages, because the translator
identifies so strongly with the original that he more or less gives up the uniqueness
of his own nation, creating this third kind of text for which the taste of the masses
has to be developed.
At first the public was not at all satisfied with Voss12 (who will never be fully
appreciated) until gradually the public’s ear accustomed itself to this new kind of
translation and became comfortable with it. Now anyone who assesses the extent of
what has happened, what versatility has come to the Germans, what rhythmical and
metrical advantages are available to the spirited, talented beginner, how Ariosto and
Tasso, Shakespeare and Calderon have been brought to us two and three times
over as Germanized foreigners, may hope that literary history will openly
acknowledge who was the first to choose this path in spite of so many and varied
obstacles.
11
Abbé Jacques Delille (1738–1813) translated Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid into German.
12
Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826) translated Homer into German hexameters.
For the most part, the works of von Hammer indicate a similar treatment of
oriental masterpieces; he suggests that the translation approximate as closely as
possible the external form of the original work.
[…] Now would be the proper time for a new translation of the third type that
would not only correspond to the various dialects, rhythms, meters, and prosaic
idioms in the original but would also, in a pleasant and familiar manner, renew the
poem in all of its distinctiveness for us. […]
The reason why we also call the third epoch the final one can be explained in a
few words. A translation that attempts to identify itself with the original ultimately
comes close to an interlinear version and greatly facilitates our understanding of the
original. We are led, yes, compelled as it were, back to the source text: the circle,
within which the approximation of the foreign and the familiar, the known and the
unknown constantly move, is finally complete. (Venuti 2004: 64–66; original
Goethe 1952: 2: 186–189, 1958: 5: 304–307)13
As discussed by Venuti (2005: 801), Goethe’s first phase concerns the radical
domestication of the target language (Verdeutschung), making the reader forget
that the text really is a translation of a previous work. The source text has
“disappeared” and the translation is a totally Germanized version. The second
phase is a duality of domestication and foreignizing (Verfremdung). The
translation loses the closeness to the source text and becomes an alienated
world formulated and reformulated in a somewhat biased translation between
source and target texts. The reader of franglais and other mixtures of languages
is aware that the translator has mediated between both texts and becomes
puzzled. The third phase is a manipulation to accord with some ideology,
prejudice, dogma, or belief. The source text has been modified, even mutilated,
peripherically, or almost beyond recognition. Indeed, such manipulation, away
from the source center, may happen (fn. 1), and be accepted, welcomed, or
simply ignored in the target culture, due to the linguistic and cultural distance
between the codes involved, the temporal and/or spatial distance between the
text-to-be-translated and the translated text, and/or for other reasons, be they
social, political, religious, institutional, commercial, and so on.
13
The 1952 edition offered a non-philological edition of Goethe’s unchanged “original”
style in old-German, without rectifying capitalization, punctuation, parentheses, gram-
matical misconstructions, and so forth (Goethe 1952). The 1958 is a standard edited
edition. For discussion of Goethe’s Notes, see chronologically Pannwitz (1917: 240–243),
Lentz (1958), Radó (1982), Wertheim (1983), Steiner (1975: 256–260), and Nicoletti
(2002).
Goethe offered an alternative to Schleiermacher’s dual approach of

translation to a third “move” (Robinson 1998: 98) from the historical context
of German culture to the nostalgia of exotic life and the erotic love of the
Orient, as delicately restructured by himself. The orientalized metempsychosis
of two fictional cultures had challenged Goethe’s new vision in the informal
glosses to translation: was the Arabic Divan retranslated into German language
more than a nomadic enthusiasm for Oriental religion and culture? Was
Goethe’s triadic mention of translation a linguistic-anthropological symbol
mixing Orient and Occident? Was Goethe, the greatest cosmopolitan of his
days, in terms of sheer erudition and mastery of the Eastern material, a cross-
cultural critic of East and West?
The Paralipomena are metacomments of his own comments. They work as
Goethe’s catalogue-type information for his own use and are merely un-
mediated fragments, plagued by spelling mistakes and grammatical errors (see
fn. 13). Without their later unedited publication (in Goethe 1952), the
simplicity of Goethe’s metadata would have been lost and “forgotten”.14 The
whole text is as follows:
Three kinds
1, To reconcile foreign productions and the fatherland.
2, Further attempt against the foreign to achieve a middle situation.
3, final attempt to make translation and original identical
of all three the Germans can indeed show examples of exemplary pieces.
more than approaching the foreign situation we should certainly note,
to cheer loudly on the works of von Hammer, directing us on this way.
even warmly welcoming the hexameter and pentameter from the first concept of
translation.
The strangeness of the transfigurations into Greek and Latin of the excellent
Jones,15 recalls the foreign country, customs, and taste, meaning that the study of
the content totally destroys the originality of the poems.
14
The plural Paralipomena (from Greek paraleipein “to leave aside”, “to omit”) signify
“forgotten” postscripts, supplements, or reflections of a previous book or fragment.
Goethe’s Paralipomena has hardly been discussed.
15
Sir William Jones (1746–1794), an English polyglot with knowledge of twenty-eight
languages, was an eminent Oriental and Sanskrit scholar. Jones was interested in Hafiz and
translated the sacred texts of Eastern religions. He pronounced the genealogical
connection of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin, and the languages of Europe.
The grotesque enterprise of Mr. [any name] to rework Firdusi16 in the sense of
alienating it from the Orient without bringing it close to the West.
A prose translation should be far better than one transformed into an alien
unsuitable rhythm.
Von Hammer translation, retaining line by line of the original, is on its own
correct, perhaps can Mr. [any name] decide now to accept these intents and
purposes, to accomplish for himself and the bookseller in charge of the printing a
flourishing business.
The translator will not harvest any thanks and the publisher no profit. (My
trans. from Goethe 1952: 3: 130–131)
The chaotic Paralipomena naturally uses a different style of writing than the
ordered paragraphs of the Notes. The informal tone reflects the emotional voice
of Goethe’s personal words, but his dry and business-like actions speak louder.
The pitch of Paralipomena lay in the postscript: how to cook Goethe’s West-
Eastern Divan into a success story. Goethe focused on the production’s costs:
to win the spectacular bestseller the business went at the expense of his
associates (including the translator).
East and West mingle in bizarre juxtaposition, but they do not mix in
Goethe’s labyrinth of fragments. Guided by the spatiotemporal distance to
Hafiz, Goethe mediates semiotically in cultural differences of morals and
scholarship as a human and spiritual alternative. His agenda of the Notes
reflects a psychological and anthropological understanding of Eastern ideas,
concepts, meaning, and nuance. The public interest of cross-cultural
scholarship is translated into the free association of poetry. The results are
striking, including a new vision of translation. At the same time, Goethe’s
hidden agenda arises in the bottom line of Paralipomena to determine the
effectiveness of the agreement. The “negotiation” of bridging cultures and
national experiences becomes on dark spots an over-confidence, changing into
a purely commercial affair – an unhappy return to bourgeois civilization.
16
Firdusi (transliterated as Firdausi, Ferdowsi, or Firdowski) (932–1020) was the
Persian poet who wrote the Iranian national epic, the Shahnamah.
5. Semiotic Mediation
Goethe’s caravan of sign translation – from information and reproduction until
adaptation – makes the target text become more and more visible in Peirce’s
interpretants, and the source text more and more invisible. Goethe’s various
“epochs” – Peirce’s Secondness indicating the spatiotemporal object under the
force of haeccity (MS 909: 18 = CP: 1.405, 1890–1891) – were transported to
signify the whole sign of the trajectory of translation. Semiotic signs play the
role of a mediator between thought and reality, so that the “bringing together”
of translation is grounded not on genuine Thirdness, but rather on the “middle,
medium, means, or mediation” of the original sign (Parmentier 1985: 42 and
passim) to produce mediate interpretants.
Goethe’s and Jakobson’s three types of translation are the same in gram-
matical number, but differ on “such distinctions as objective and subjective,
outward and inward, true and false, good and bad […]” (MS 304: 39, 1903).
From a more external viewpoint, Goethe valued the three degrees of possible
equivalence between source and target texts, whereas Jakobson’s intralingual,
interlingual, and intersemiotic translations took the lack of equivalence for
granted as the standard “equivalence in difference” (1959: 233). From an
internal viewpoint, Goethe’s truchement disguised translation in a liberated
mode of a subjective translation, while Jakobson judged externally the distance
between source and target language. Then Jakobson broadened their mutual
translatability outside “ordinary language” (1959: 234) to translate the cultural
(inter)relations (unmarked and marked forms and functions) into the target
version (Mertz 1985: 13–16). Jakobson stated that the bilingual and bicultural
dilemma of implying linguïculture defied all efforts of translatability, repre-
senting the “Gordian knot by proclaiming the dogma of untranslatability”
(1959: 234). Semiotranslation can untie the intricate knot, cutting through
untranslatability to claim Jakobson’s degrees of a relative translatability – not
arriving at Goethe’s genial work, but an effort to solve the complexities.
Translation is freedom with a bold (re)action of the translator to reach his
or her signature of the “same” meaning. The sign action is semiotic mediation,
acting under the forces of reality and thought. In translation, Firstness – sign –
and Secondness – object – are linked to connect to the “medium” of Thirdness
(CP: 1.337, 1909). Peirce wrote that:
As a medium, the Sign is essentially in a triadic relation, to its Object which

determines it, and to its Interpretant which it determines. In its relation to the
Object, the Sign is passive; that is to say, its correspondence to the object is brought
about by an effect upon the Sign, the Object remaining unaffected. On the other
hand, in its relation to the Interpretant the Sign is active, determining the
Interpretant without being itself thereby affected.
But at this point certain distinctions are called for. That which is communicated
from the Object through the Sign to the Interpretant is a Form; that is to say, it is
nothing like an existent, but is a power, is the fact that something would happen
under certain conditions. This Form is really embodied in the object, meaning that
the conditional relation which constitutes the form is true of the Form as it is in the
Object. In the Sign it is embodied only in a representative sense, meaning that
whether by virtue of some real modification of the Sign, or otherwise, the Sign
becomes endowed with the power of communicating it to an interpretant. It may
be in the interpretant directly, as it is in the Object, or it may be in the Interpretant
dynamically, as [the] behavior of the Interpretant […] (MS 793: 2–5 = (in
different version) EP: 2: 544, 1906)
Thirdness in translation is no purely intellectual interaction of First and Second

into Third, but becomes a fantasy of a Second in relation to a First, without a
real Third. Peirce wrote that:
A man gives a brooch to his wife. The merely mechanical part of the act consists in
his laying the brooch down while uttering certain sounds, and her taking it up.
There is no genuine triplicity here; but there is no giving, either. The giving consists
in his agreeing that a certain intellectual principle shall govern the relations of the
brooch to his wife. (CP: 2.86, 1902)
The jewel of Goethe’s creative and recreative work West-östlicher Divan actively
involves the knowledge of Hafiz and von Hammer-Purgstall, but the “mere
congeries of dual characters” (MS 901: 13 = CP: 1.371, 1885) are brought in
such a way that the synthesis (Thirdness) lies on Goethe’s way of translation,
and particularly on himself as the translating poet.
In a literary work, the triadicity is dissolved into the “true duality” (MS 909:
11 = CP: 1.366, 1890–1891) of sign and object to embody the German
interpretants in verse of Hafiz’ Arabic Divan. Goethe’s “alienated” treasure-box
reflects his will and effort of mediation, based not alone on knowledge of
foreign languages, but on his artistic genius and aesthetic life. Peirce returned
to an Oriental tinge, when he continued as followed about semiosis and
mediation:
The merchant in the Arabian Nights threw away a datestone which struck the eye
of a Jinnee. This was purely mechanical, and there was no genuine triplicity. The
throwing and the striking were independent of one another. But had he aimed at
the Jinnee’s eye, there would have been more than merely throwing away the stone.
There would have been genuine triplicity, the stone being not merely thrown, but
thrown at the eye. Here, intention, the mind’s action, would have come in.
Intellectual triplicity, or Mediation, is my third category. (CP: 2.86, 1902)17
In the understanding of Goethe’s Divan and the “spontaneous” discovery of

applying a triadic translation, the “good”, “bad”, and “intermediate” sign-events
of translation modify and mediate the literary form of the accidental inter-
pretants, made by pure chance and effort (CP: 1.337, 1909). Goethe’s
intermediate (re)translation reflects not genuine semiosis – the “perfect” sign of
Thirdness – but offers “imperfect” signs. Pseudo-semiosis is represented in the
translation composed by human interpreters. The “quasi-minds” (MS 793: 2,
1906 = EP: 2: 544, 1906) create new but biased quasi-translations, on the
ground of quasi-signs made by the quasi-thought of a quasi-mind (Gorlée
2004b).18 Quasi-translations bring forth not the intellectual mind, but rather
some unanalyzable, unpredictable, unsystemic, and controversial qualities of
the feeling and mind of the interpreter-translator, manifesting instead of the
high-level mental semiosis the lower-level idea of Goethe’s wicked travesty of
the real facts.
Quasi- or pseudo-Thirdness is called “Betweenness or Mediation in its
simplest and most rudimentary form” (CP: 5.104, 1903). This degenerate sign
relation brings together and takes apart – semiotically, deconstructs and
17
The passage of Arabian Nights about accidental Thirds is repeated in Peirce’s episode:
“’How did I slay thy son?’ asked the merchant, and the jinnee replied, ‘When thou threwest
away the date-stone, it smote my son, who was passing at the time, on the breast, and he
died forthright.’ Here there were two independent facts, first that the merchant threw away
the date-stone, and second that the date-stone struck and killed the jinnee's son. Had it
been aimed at him, the case would have been different; for then there would have been a
relation of aiming which would have connected together the aimer, the thing aimed, and
the object aimed at, in one fact. What monstrous injustice and inhumanity on the part of
that jinnee to hold that poor merchant responsible for such an accident!” (MS 909: 12 =
CP: 1.365, 1890–1891) and mentioned again in “the date-stone, which hit the Jinnee in the
eye” (CP: 1.345, 1903).
18
Quasi-signs, see Gorlée (2004b: 66f., 87, 129f., 137, 148); quasi-thought, see Gorlée
(2004b: 145, 203ff., 206ff., 214, 217ff.); quasi-mind, see Gorlée (2004b: 66f., 87, 129f.,
137, 148).
constructs – Goethe’s glosses on the plurality of translation (CP: 2.89ff., 1902).

The deterioration of the triadic relation into a dyadic or degenerate semiosis can
define the varieties of intermediate types. The thought-off content of Goethe’s
Notes is regulated by the duality of first degenerate signs, but the ramified lines of
the Paralipomena agree with second degenerate signs (Parmentier 1985: 39f.).19
In first or singly degenerate signs, the interpretant points directly to its object, but
does not interact with the sign. For Peirce, the interpretant “forcibly directs [...]
to a particular object, and there it stops” (CP: 1.361, 1885) without giving a
specific reaction. The reaction is degenerate Secondness with a nuance of
Firstness and Thirdness. In second or doubly degenerate signs, the interpretant
relates to the sign and the object in separate sign-events, to make its own sense
representing the interpreter’s personal meaning. The degenerate Firstness with
a nuance of Secondness and Thirdness gives “a pure dream – not any particular
existence, and yet not general” (CP: 3.362, 1885).
Goethe was steadily accustomed to bilingual and bicultural identities in the
“radically new sort of element” (CP: 1.471, 1896) of his project, connecting
and disconnecting Hafiz and von Hammer-Purgstall within his German Divan.
He thus practiced in the definitions of the Notes a scientific proposition,20
identifying related and otherwise unrelated things about the types of translations
in his experience. Peirce’s proposition was a singly degenerate arrangement,
made “in a living effort to make its interpreter believe it true” (MS 646: 16,
1910). Goethe asserted that the dyadic connection of active sign and passive
object (CP: 1.471, 1896) was known as Schleiermacher’s duality of paraphrases
and imitations. Yet Goethe’s “triad brings a third sort of element, the expression
of thought, or reasoning, consisting of a colligation of two propositions, not
mere dyadic propositions, however, but general beliefs; and these two
propositions are connected by a common term and tend to produce a third
belief” (CP: 1.515, c.1896). Goethe wanted to affect the readers by the
freedom of his third agent, adaptation – a germane but extraneous element to
the interactive duality. In a proposition, Peirce stated that:
19
See Buczyńska-Garewicz (1979, 1983), Gorlée (1990), and Merrell (1995). Peirce’s
formal concept of degeneracy and its informal examples were specifically explained in his
later years, from 1885 and ending in 1909; see Peirce’s informal letter to Victoria Lady
Welby (1837–1912) with a glossary of intermediate types (PW: 194, 1905).
20
“Proposition” is one of Peirce’s favourite terms, omnipresent in his writings about
language, interpretation, utterance, and meaning.
[…] there are in the dyad two subjects of different character, though in special
cases the difference may disappear. These two subjects are the units of the dyad.
Each is one, though a dyadic one. Now the triad in like manner has not for its
principal element merely a certain unanalyzable quality sui generis. It makes [to be
sure] a certain feeling in us. (CP: 1.471, 1896)
Contrary to scientific method, “[…] it is to be understood that proposition,

judgment, and belief are logically equivalent (though in other respects different)”
(MS 789: 2, n.d.). Despite the doubts that “a proposition is nothing existent, but
is a general model, type, or law according to which existents are shaped” (MS
280: 29, c.1905), Goethe took his responsibility of the propositional
announcement, supporting the three types of translation as a general idea.
Peirce announced that “[i]n science, a diagram or analogue of the observed
fact leads on to a further analogy” (MS 909: 12f. [see 42] = CP: 1.367, 1890–
1891). The approximative approach of the “reactionally degenerate” (CP: 5.73,
1902) glosses of the Notes is again deconstructed in the doubly degenerate list
of Paralipomena. The separate lines depend not really on intellectual perfor-
mance (Thirdness), but sketch the design of the “qualitatively degenerate”
(CP: 5.73, 1902) moods and tones of thought of Goethe’s own self. Goethe’s
images of self-depiction in the edited version “address themselves to us, so that
we fully apprehend them. But it is a paralyzed reason that does not acknowledge
others that are not directed to us, and does not suppose still others of which we
know nothing definitely” (MS 4: 49, 1904; my italics). Goethe’s “airy nothing-
ness” (CP: 4.241, 1902) means that the sign of “Brute Actuality of things and
facts” (Secondness) has weakened beyond the meaningful occurrence into the
undetermined and vague quality of “suchness” (Firstness) (CP: 1.303, c.1894,
CP: 1.326, c.1894, CP: 1.304, c.1905), independent from the object (Gorlée
2009). To illustrate the empty pages of “Translations” in Paralipomena, Peirce
wrote something analogous, saying that:
Combine quality with quality after quality and what is the mode of being which
such determinations approach indefinitely but altogether fail ever to attain? It is,
as logicians have always taught, the existence of the individual. Individual existence
whether of a thing or of a fact is the first mode of being that suchness fails to
confer. (CP: 1.456, c.1896)
The mere Firstness is a “rough impression” (SS: 194, 1905) reflecting the
“Sign’s Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary
between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such
the life, the power of growth, of a plant” (CP: 6.455, 1908). Grasping the
possibility of understanding the hidden idea of a “dark instinct of being a germ
of thought” (CP: 5.71, 1902), the reader is brought “face to face with the very
character signified” (NEM 4: 242, 1904), with the expressions and emotions of
Goethe’s own self-portrait.
With “only a fragment or a completer sign” (NEM 4: 242, 1904) in
Goethe’s Paralipomena, the last and final point of intermediate types has been
argued in bricolages (Firstness) (Gorlée 2007: 224ff.). Translation started out
as pure intellectual Thirdness, but was accurately and sharply weakened into
mixed concepts of Secondness and Thirdness, mingling with Thirdness.
Pseudo-translation is degenerate thought, mediated into a representation of
the fact according to a possible idea. Goethe’s images of translation are not
reasoned, but rely on experience and education. In the Notes and the Parali-
pomena, degenerate translation gave in Peirce’s perspective “just one un-
separated image, not resembling a proposition in the smallest particular [...];
but it never told you so. Now in all imagination and perception there is such an
operation by which thought springs up; and its only justification is that it
subsequently turns out to be useful” (CP: 1.538, 1903) – like Goethe’s thing of
beauty in West-östlicher Divan.
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Комментарии Гете по поводу перевода

При объяснении логической и алогической общности триадического метода перевода
в статье опирались на пирсовскую семиотическую модель–триаду знак, объект и
интерпретант. С помощью семиоперевода создается динамическая сеть пирсовских
интерпретантов, в которой искусственные, но развивающиеся знаки прогрессируют
от неопределенного («плохого») перевода ко все более определенному («хоро-
шему») переводу. Три типа перевода выделял и Гете. В произведении «Западно-
восточный диван» (West-östlicher Divan, 1814–1819) он подражает персидскому поэту
14 века. Использование свободного перевода/парфразирования Гете оправдывал в
своих работах «Заметки и очерки о «Западно-восточном Диване»» (Noten und
Abhandlungen) и Paralipomena (1818–1819). С помощью критических комментариев
он объясняет передачу, адаптацию и репродуцирование информации, представленной
в чужой культуре и литературе (на староперсидском языке арабским шрифтом)
способом, позволившим ее трансляцию в «эквивалентный» стихотворный немецкий
язык 19 века. Будучи критическим представителем перевода и культурного посредни-
чества, Гете представляет свои комментарии к «Западно-восточному дивану» как
пародию, соединяющую Запад и Восток. Гете создал (не)похожесть, указывая в ходе
псевдосемиозиса на первый и второй дегенерированный тип объекта и знака.
Goethe kommentaarid tõlkimise kohta

Triaadilise tõlkemeetodi loogilise ja ebaloogilise ühtsuse vahendamisel tugineti Peirce’i
kolmetisele, märgiks, objektiks ja interpretandiks jagunevale semiootilisele mudelile.
Semiotõlkega luuakse Peirce’i interpretantide dünaamiline võrgustik, milles kunstlikud,
kuid arenevad märgid progresseeruvad määratlematust (“halvast”) versioonist järjest
määratletuma (“hea”) tõlke poole. Kolme tõlketüüpi eristas ka Goethe. Teoses West-
östlicher Divan (1814–1819) imiteerib ta Pärsia poeedi Hafizi (14. saj) töid. Kasutatud
vaba tõlget / parafraseerimist õigustas Goethe oma töödes Noten und Abhandlungen ja
Paralipomena (1818–1819). Kriitiliste kommentaaride abil selgitab ta võõras kultuuris ja
kirjanduses (araabia tähestikus esitatud vana-pärsia keeles) esineva informatsiooni
edastamist, adapteerimist ja reprodutseerimist viisil, mis võimaldaks selle transleerimist
“ekvivalentsesse” 19. sajandi saksa värsikeelde. Tõlkimise ja kultuurivahendamise kriitilise

eestkostjana esitab Goethe oma teost West-östlicher Divan käsitlevate kommentaaride näol
ida- ja õhtumaid ühendava paroodia. Goethe vormis sarnasuse (puudumise), viidates tõlke
pseudo-semioosis objekti ja märgi esimesele ja teisele degenereerunud tüübile.
Culture-related decision conflicts

in the translation process
Terje Loogus
Jakobi 2, 51014 Tartu, Estonia
e-mail: terje.loogus@ut.ee
Abstract. Translators as members of a certain culture, generally that of the target culture,
base their translation-relevant decisions on their own culture, while the decisions are
motivated by the (alien) source culture. In the translation process, cultural differences may
lead to various decision-making conflicts and the translator has to find a compromise
between the author of the source text, the target recipient and finally, of course, the
translator him/herself. In this article, proceeding from functionalist approaches to
translation, the discussion focuses on the decision conflicts related to translating culture-
specific elements. Culture-related decision conflicts, as considered here, refer to the
translator’s inner indecision with reference to his/her goals, interests, values, beliefs,
methodological approach, or any consequences thereof, attributable to the different
cultural embeddings of the source text and the target text. In general, decision conflicts are
perceived as subjective translation problems. The translator has to be able to constantly act
between separate perspectives, continuously see things from different viewpoints. The
conflicts arise when the translator attempts to bring together two incongruent cultures
without prejudice to any of the parties involved in the process. Acting within the interface
of two different cultures, bearing in mind the interests of several participants, is what makes
translation-relevant decisions a highly complex matter.
1. Translation and culture

In translation studies, culture became an object of study in the 1970s, when,
owing to the pragmatic turn, researchers started to pay more attention to the
function of verbal expression and correlate linguistic forms with aspects of the
lifeworld. As a result of the “cultural turn” (Lefevere, Bassnett 1990: 1) or even
“cultural turns” (Bachmann-Medick 2006), the cultural embedding of com-
munication gained momentum in the 1980s. Accordingly, translation is not
370 Terje Loogus
regarded as just a simple transfer from one language into another, or from a
source text into a target text, but also as a transfer between cultures (see
Vermeer 1986). Therefore, it is only natural that, before any linguistic expres-
sion is formulated, the cultural context needs to be considered.
The word “culture” can be interpreted in different ways and from different
points of view. According to Michael Agar (2006: 2), “culture is one of the
most widely (mis)used and contentious concepts in the contemporary vocabu-
lary”. In the humanities, culture is normally viewed either from a social-
theoretical perspective, which considers culture in connection with social
order, social changes or identity of societies, or from the perspective of action
theory or communication theory, according to which culture allows orientation
in the form of background expectation and cognitive patterns (Loenhoff 1992:
114). Accordingly, the notion of culture relevant to translation studies can be
looked at on three different levels, while the borders between the levels often
overlap:
(1) The material dimension of culture, i.e. culture as an entity of artefacts
which become bearers of sense and meaning.
(2) The mental dimension, i.e. culture as explanatory and activity-oriented
knowledge systems, cognitive patterns and culture-specific competence
systems. By reference to real existing problems, culture functions as a
meaning framework and a pattern of interpretation and thus allows the
building of collective orientations.
(3) The pragmatic dimension, i.e. culture as concrete actions and communi-
cations which produce, reproduce and employ culture. (Loenhoff 1992:
139, 144)
A traditional definition of culture, widely discussed in translation studies up to

now, is based on a broad anthropological sense of the term, defined by the
American ethnologist Ward H. Goodenough:
As I see it, a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in
order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that
they accept for any one of themselves. Culture […] must consist of the end
product of learning: knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term. By
this definition, we should note that culture is not a material phenomenon; it does
not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of
these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for
perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (Goodenough 1964: 36)
Culture-related decision conflicts in the translation process 371
This definition – in a slightly modified form – has been introduced into the
study of intercultural communication by Heinz Göhring (1978) in Germany
and has served as a general starting point for functionalist approaches to
translation (Nord 2001: 24). Culture is considered here as an orientation
system which is typical for groups or societies. Culture implies common shared
knowledge, which serves as a collection of recipes for problem solving, and
enables people to behave and act in a culturally accepted manner and in
accordance with rules and regulations. According to this definition, different
cultures are more or less delimited, often ethnically defined social units whose
members share common background knowledge, which through norms and
conventions determines their common action, and which compared to other
cultures appears as different1 (see Altmayer 2002: 6). However, Göhring
(1998: 112) stresses the fact that in intercultural communication individuals
are free either to comply with the behaviour patterns accepted in the other
culture or to bear the consequences of behaviour that is inconsistent with
cultural expectations.
Recent years have brought along a trend that deviates from perceiving
cultures as distinct and homogenous units, and which stresses their complexity
and complementarity instead of differences between cultures. The new notion
of culture is also revealed in the concept of transculturality, which aims at
phenomena common in different cultures. According to Welsch (1999: 198),
transculturality is a consequence “of the inner differentiation and complexity of
modern cultures”. Welsch (ibid.) emphasizes that transculturality does not
only apply to the macrocultural level, but also to the individual’s micro-level. In
the world of globalization, for many people multiple cultural connections are
instrumental for the formation of their cultural identity. This also applies to
translators who often have multiple enculturation.
As noted before, translation involves mediation between different languages
as well as cultures. Language is an intrinsic part of culture and, in order to
emphasize the interdependence of language and culture, Agar (1994: 60) has
introduced the notion of “languaculture”. According to him, the culture
boundary is marked by “rich points” (Agar 1994: 100), which are differences in
behaviour that cause culture conflicts or communication problems between
1
See Claus Altmayer’s article ‟Kulturelle Deutungsmuster in Texten. Prinzipien und
Verfahren einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Textanalyse im Fach Deutsch als Fremdsprache”
(Altmayer 2002: 6), in Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht [Online],
6(3), available at http://zif.spz.tu-darmstadt.de/jg-06-3/beitrag/deutungsmuster.htm.
372 Terje Loogus
two communities in contact. It needs to be stressed, however, that rich points

or culture-specific differences are always relative, e.g. the contact of Estonian
and English reveals rich points that a contact of Estonian and Finnish might
not reveal. Cultural differences become visible only when they appear with
reference to an outsider who comes into contact with the “other” culture, and
they always depend on the cultural background of the newcomer (Agar 2006:
5). Therefore, it is important to stress, as Agar (ibid.) does, that “the shape that
culture takes depends on the of whom/for whom boundary”. Not all boundaries
generate the same amount of rich points.
2. Translating and decision-making process

Since the 1980s, translation scholars have also been paying more attention to
mental processes and psycholinguistic issues. The aim of the descriptive
process-oriented research into translation is to find out “what goes on in the
translator’s head” (Krings 1986), i.e. how he/she translates and which
decisions he/she makes while translating (Lörscher 1992: 159).
Translation is a complex decision-making process, involving certain
problem-solving activities and comprising reception, understanding and inter-
preting of the source text, as well as creating a target text which is consistent
with the author’s intentions and considers the needs of possible recipients. A
decision problem occurs when the translator is faced with an issue which
demands some form of choice. To some extent, the translator’s discretion may
be restricted since his/her decisions are always rooted in the existing source
text, but this does not diminish the translator’s liability for the consequences of
the decisions made.
Based on the fundamental process-oriented model of descriptive decision
theory (see Pfohl, Braun 1981: 102), five stages may be distinguished in the
process of taking translation decisions:
(1) identifying the problem;
(2) gathering information;
(3) finding possible options for resolving the problem;
(4) evaluating the available options;
(5) selecting the best option, and resolving the problem. (See Loogus 2008a:
170–173)
Decisions made in the course of translating are part of a complex information-

processing procedure, which includes cognitive as well as intuitive processes.
Solving different translation problems involves making decisions of diverse
cognitive complexity. Some decisions are easy to make and do not require
considerable cognitive effort (routine decisions); others, in contrast, demand
thorough information gathering and processing (decisions directed at
problem-solving). Translation entails both “sure” (Mag 1990: 7; see also Wilss
2005: 9) and “unsure” (see Jungermann et al. 2005: 143) decisions. The trans-
lator’s indecisiveness may derive from a poor command of the language, from
inadequate knowledge of cultural aspects or of the subject matter, and also
from a lack of pragmatic information concerning the translation brief.
Decision-making process is a multi-stage, goal-oriented, calculating and
conflict-conscious process. This process is not always easy; it often involves the
risk of making a “wrong” decision. As any choice contains an element of risk,
decisions often involve a feeling of uncertainty. A decision conflict occurs when
the translator is faced with a situation where he/she has to make a choice, but –
for some reason or other – is not able to do this.
3. Culture-related decision conflicts

The translator as a mediator between two cultural groups is at the centre of
transfer between cultures that, due to language barriers, could not have come in-
to contact with each other. It is intrinsic to translation that the parties between
whom the translator acts as a mediator – both languages and cultures – differ
from each other. The incongruity of cultures may derive from different lin-
guistic systems or different extra-linguistic domains or also from different
natural environments (Frank, Schultze 1988: 96). In order to bring the two
parties into contact, the translator has to go through a multi-step decision-
making process. That means that the translator, in his/her double role as a
recipient of the source text and the producer of the target text, makes complex
decisions which often involve internal conflicts. As used here, culture-related
decision conflicts mean the translator’s inner indecision in relation to his/her
goals, values, beliefs and methodological approach, or any consequences
arising from different cultural embeddings of the source text and the target text.
The reasons for the emergence of culture-related decision conflicts can be
described as follows (see also Loogus 2008b: 234 ff.). In today’s globalizing
world, most people identify themselves in more than one way, i.e. their lives are
374 Terje Loogus
ordered through different identities. The same applies to translators who, due
to their profession, come into contact with at least two languages and cultures,
are ideally encultured in both cultures and, accordingly, have multiple affilia-
tions (Turk 1996: 15). Translating means comparing cultures. Translators
interpret source-culture phenomena in the light of their own knowledge of this
culture, which means that there can be no neutral standpoint for comparison
(Nord 2001: 34). Everything they perceive as being different from their own
culture depends on their culture of primary enculturation and on their previous
knowledge of the other culture. The double enculturation or multiple affilia-
tions mentioned may lead to decision-making conflicts while translating, if
there is an internal disparity between ideas, values, motives or goals. As with
many other action situations, translation involves a clash between various
perceptions and viewpoints that attempt to gain power.
The translator who brings two cultures together is in a double role: on the
one hand, the translator is a recipient of a text – usually a foreign language
text – that he/she receives from the perspective of his/her own culture and the
text-world of which he/she tries to fit into his/her real world; on the other
hand, the translator is a producer of the target text. At the reception stage, the
two opposites meet: the author of the text and the translator, each of them
embedded in their respective culture. In the translation process, the author of
the text appears as a passive participant; the translator, in contrast, takes on an
active role and has to negotiate solutions. The author has compiled a text
bearing in mind particular goals and specific addressees who, as may be
assumed, at least partly share the author’s pre-knowledge, certain collective
background knowledge that enables the addressees to understand the text as it
has been intended. The author does not have to be explicit about everything;
many things can be omitted since he/she may presuppose that the text is more
or less consistent with the presupposed understandings of the addressees.
What the author as a representative of the source culture expresses in the text is
certainly influenced by this culture. The translator receives the source text on
the basis of his/her own culture, while being aware of and taking into account
cross-cultural differences. In a way, the translator is responsible to those who
depend on the service provided by him/her; therefore, the translator has to
make efforts so as to receive the text in line with the author’s intentions. That is
how the translator is a meeting point of two perspectives – that of both the
source culture and the translator’s own culture.
Apart from being a receiver of the source text, the translator is also a
producer who transfers the text created in the source culture into the target
culture. In this role, the translator acts as a representative of the source-culture
author and takes care that the latter’s intentions are expressed in the target text.
Translations as target texts maintaining a relationship with a given source text
(Nord 1989: 102) are also produced for a certain purpose and particular
addressees, except that the target text addressees usually do not belong to the
same cultural and linguistic community as the source text addressees. In most
cases, the target text addressees lack the background knowledge that the author
of the source text has expected the addressees to have. Instead, the target text
addressees may, owing to their different cultural background, have completely
different expectations of a given text. That is where the translator’s role as an
active cultural intermediary begins, since the translator does not act in his/her
own interests but for the benefit of the target addressees, whose conditions of
reception the translator has to consider. The translator has to pave the way for
the target addressees’ prerequisites of understanding, because the purpose of
the target text may be achieved only if the text corresponds with the target
addressees’ expectations. Consequently, the source text needs to be transferred
to the target culture, taking into account the requirements of the target lan-
guage and target-cultural prerequisites of understanding. Depending on
cultural differences, the translator has to alter the information contained in the
source text so that it can be interpreted in accordance with the intentions of the
source text author. Jiří Levý (1969: 72) describes a translation as a mixed,
hybrid composition because it comprises both the purport and formal shape of
the original, as well as the whole system of characteristic features of a given
language that have been added to the text by the translator. The two layers
brought together in a translation are conflicting and can be negotiated only as a
compromise between the meaning of a certain source text element and
reproduction options and conditions of the specific text element mentioned.
Clashes of two cultures may lead to the translator’s internal conflict
between two different perspectives. As a rule, the translator feels at ease in both
cultures and can position himself/herself in both perspectives, but, while
translating, still has to choose between them. The conflicts arise when the
perspectives that the translator tries to bring together cannot be consolidated
without prejudice against one of the two sides. Acting on the interface of two
different cultures, bearing in mind the interests of several participants – the
author of the source-culture text as well as the target-culture recipients and, last
376 Terje Loogus
but not least, the commissioner of the text – makes translation-relevant

decisions a highly complex matter. The translator has to be able to act between
different perspectives and constantly shift between different viewpoints.
Changing the perspectives and looking at the same incident from different
standpoints may cause the emergence of internal decision conflicts that are
connected with culture-specific translating.
4. Categories of intraindividual decision conflicts

Intraindividual conflicts occur in the translator’s mind and cannot be observed
from the outside. Nevertheless, by analyzing translations it is possible to obtain
insights into potential conflicts having arisen in the translation process. Trans-
lation always implies solutions to problems, and frequently translations reveal
whether the solutions have been effective. Based on the typology of conflicts
widely used in decision theory (see Pfohl, Braun 1981: 437), four types of
decision conflicts may be distinguished in connection with translation:
conflicts of purpose, values, beliefs and methodology (see also Loogus 2008b:
238 ff.).
4.1. Conflicts of purpose

By “conflicts of purpose”, the translator’s internal state of imbalance in
connection with the set objectives is meant. These conflicts relate to texts, their
function and mutual relationship, and they influence the overall strategy
chosen by the translator. At the heart of the translator’s considerations is the
question: what does the translator seek to achieve with the translation? In
culture-specific translation, the translator is drawn between two functional
objectives: on the one hand, he/she wants to inform the readers of the source
culture and its distinctive features. As a representative of the source culture in
the target-culture environment, the translator’s goal is to maintain the source-
cultural specificity to an extent which enables the readers to share in the source
culture as much as possible. The translator’s purpose is to provide the addres-
sees with profound knowledge of the other culture and thus enrich the target
culture by making available new notions, concepts and worldviews. On the
other hand, the translator attempts to produce a text which achieves its
purpose in the target culture. For a target text to have a similar effect on target
addressees as the original text has on the source culture readers, the translator
has to take account of the recipients’ prerequisites of understanding and match

the contents of the source-cultural text with the conditions of reception. The
translator should not overburden his/her readers with the specifics and
detailed circumstances of the other culture. Observing this purpose may lead to
the elimination of the specificity of the source culture, since an attempt to
produce a genuine target-cultural text also implies a neutral presentation which
is not source-culture oriented. It is in the nature of conflicts that the two
objectives described cannot be equally achieved. Quite the contrary – fulfilling
one of the objectives, for example, providing the target culture with new no-
tions, inevitably means abandoning the other purpose, i.e. adapting the source-
cultural particularity to target-cultural conditions of reception. Solving the
conflicts of purpose depends on the choice made between two alternative types
of translation – domesticating or foreignizing translation.
4.2. Conflicts of values

Conflicts of purpose are directly related to conflicts of values. Value conflicts are
meant to include all intraindividual conflicts relating to principles that involve
translation norms, as well as the translator’s personal values or moral norms.
Similar to conflicts of purpose, value conflicts occupy two opposing positions in a
translator. While the conflicts of purpose are caused by the translator’s inability
to choose between different functional objectives, the conflicts of values also
include an ethical dimension: there is a conflict between the translator’s liability
to the source text and to the target addressees. Accordingly, value conflicts
include all tense situations which, one way or another, derive from showing more
respect either towards the original text and its author or towards the target-
culture addressees. The translator has to decide in favour of one side, because
he/she cannot serve two masters at the same time.
In order to illustrate a conflict possibly caused by moral norms, an extract
from the novel Ma armastasin venelast (I Loved a Russian) by the Estonian
writer Maimu Berg (1) and its translation into German (1a) (translated by Irja
Grönholm) might be considered. There is a passage in the novel which
describes a social gathering of writers of different nationalities, where a
Romanian writer is teaching the others a Romanian Christmas song:
378 Terje Loogus
(1) Laulus kordub sõna „hui“, vene keele oskajaid […] ajab hirmsasti naerma,
kuidas kõik Lääne omad püüdlikult seda sõna kordavad ja laulavad. (Berg
2004: 123)
[In the song, the word “hui” is repeated; it gives those who know Russian […]
a good laugh at how all Westerners carefully repeat and sing the word.] (My
translation – T. L.)
(1a) Im Lied wiederholt sich das Wort „hui“; diejenigen, die Russisch können
[…] müssen schrecklich lachen, wie all die Westler dieses Wort – „Hure”
– voll Ernst und Eifer singen. (Berg (Grönholm) 1998: 215)
[In the song, the word “hui” is repeated; it gives those who know Russian [...] a
good laugh at how all Westerners seriously and enthusiastically sing the word
“whore”.] (My translation – T. L.)
In German, the Russian obscene word denoting male genitals has been
replaced with the word Hure (whore), which does not sound so embarrassing,
yet, even though in a less pronounced manner, still communicates the comedy
of the situation. In the original Estonian text, the word in Russian has not been
translated because the author obviously assumes that the readers can under-
stand it. The translator, however, cannot presuppose that the target readers will
have such a “thorough” knowledge of Russian and, therefore, has to find a
translation equivalent. She has replaced the obscene word with a more
moderate equivalent. We cannot be sure why the translator has come to this
solution; we can only assume that the translator’s choice may have been
influenced by the linguistic or ethical norms of the target culture, or by the
translator’s or the editor’s personal moral norms.
The same novel has also been translated into Finnish (1998, by Hannu
Oittinen) and Swedish (1997, by Enel Melberg) and in both translations, the
word in Russian has been neither translated nor explained. So we can assume
that most Finnish and Swedish readers would not understand the comedy of
the situation. Neglecting a problem can also be a possible solution for a
decision conflict of values.
4.3. Conflicts of beliefs

Conflicts of beliefs relate to the translator’s internal conflicts concerning factual
information about reality. The borderline between value conflicts and the
conflicts of beliefs is very narrow, because every belief simultaneously also
reflects the individual’s moral concepts. Conflicts of beliefs, however, centre
not on the ethical considerations of the translator, but the translator’s personal
knowledge-based beliefs, the truth claim of which is in conflict with that of the
source-text author or the commissioner. A conflict may arise when the com-
missioner insists on getting a translation that closely follows the original,
whereas the translator’s experience has shown that a translation produced this
way would not work. Advertisements, for example, are compiled in view of
specific source-cultural conditions and cannot be transferred into the target
culture as word-for-word translations. Conflicts of beliefs may also be caused
by factual mistakes in the source text that the translator has detected on
account of his/her knowledge; however, he/she cannot be sure whether
he/she may correct them or not. These conflicts are not necessarily provoked
by cultural differences; frequently, this is a matter of specialist knowledge. On
the borderline between the conflicts of values and conflicts of beliefs, there are
instances when the translator’s beliefs clash with the information contained in
the text.
Seeking a compromise over a conflict of beliefs is harder, since an in-
dividual’s beliefs always rest on his/her personal convictions about the truth of
certain propositions or circumstances and are relatively rigid as regards
changes. Due to diverse enculturation and socially or individually conditioned
truth criteria, people have different experience of the world around them.
Finding ourselves confronted with opposite views, we frequently try to enforce
our own personal belief as the truth, unless it has been disproved by some
arguments or evidence.
Another extract (2) from the novel mentioned above Ma armastasin
venelast (I Loved a Russian) by Maimu Berg might serve as an example of a
possible conflict of beliefs. The main character’s reflections in the original text
are communicated as follows:
(2) Kuskil pole elu nii kole kui Venemaal. Kuskil ei ole inimelu hind nii madal.
Kuskil ei ole uuendused ja muutused, kõik see, mida vaba maailm on
harjunud pidama demokraatiaks, nii võimatud. (Berg 2004: 147)
380 Terje Loogus
[Nowhere is life as awful as in Russia. Nowhere is human life worth so little.

Nowhere are renewals or changes, everything that the free world long regards
as democracy, so impossible.] (My translation – T. L.)
(2a) [....] Nirgendwo sind Erneuerungen und Veränderungen, all das, was die
freie Welt Demokratie nennt, so unmöglich wie in Rußland. (Berg
(Grönholm) 1998: 252)
[Nowhere are renewals and changes, everything that the free world calls
democracy, as impossible as in Russia.] (My translation – T. L.)
In this case, the translator has omitted two first sentences. The decision may
have been conditioned by her moral motives or beliefs. Also, the author’s and
the translator’s different cultural backgrounds may have been behind that: the
two women have been brought up in different countries, and therefore their
views on the events happening in the world are different. What people consider
to be true does not depend only on their knowledge, but also on the socio-
political and cultural situation. We cannot completely ignore the possibility
that the translator omitted these sentences just by mistake, but there are some
other omissions of similar nature in the German translation (e.g., on page 141),
which may suggest that this was the translator’s (or the editor’s) deliberate
decision. In the Finnish and Swedish translations, however, all the sentences
have been translated. The translators probably did not consider it necessary to
leave anything out.
4.4. Conflicts of methodology

In some respect, the above-mentioned decisions relating to purpose, values and
beliefs may also be called purely intellectual decisions (Ladmiral 1999: 164),
because they are concerned with fundamental questions and principles of
translation-related decisions. The decisions discussed provide a basis for the
so-called technical choices, i.e. decisions concerning the methodology of
handling the culture-specific content of different texts. In translation, decision
conflicts are always ultimately solved by making methodological decisions.
Such methodological decision conflicts include conflicts which arise from
translating individual textual elements on the text level. On the one hand, they
comprise decisions on the type of translation – either domesticating or
foreignizing translation. On the other hand, they concern the use of various
translation methods on the micro-level of the text, i.e. on the level of words and
sentences, and imply choosing between alternatives, e.g. “word-for-word” or

“free” translation; “explication” or “implication”, etc. These are the most
common conflicts that the translator needs to resolve – they relate to the
strategies chosen by the translator while solving the problem of foreignness of a
text as a whole or translating particular culture-specific textual elements.
Conclusion
Translation as mediation between cultures inevitably implies comparing diffe-
rent cultures. For the translation process to run smoothly, the translator has to
be aware of differences between his/her own and the other culture, i.e. an ex-
cellent cultural competence on the part of the translator is essential. Un-
awareness may result in internal conflicts, as well as leading to situations where
culture-specific aspects are not recognized or cultural differences become
cultural barriers (Vermeer 1989: 37).
Culture-specific decision-conflicts arise from different cultural embeddings
of the source text and that of the target text and their causes can be summarized
as follows:
‒ the translator’s double role as the recipient of the source text and the
producer of the target text in the area of conflict of two cultural perspec-
tives;
‒ the translator’s double liability to the source-text author (or to the commis-
sioner) and to the target addressees;
‒ disagreement between the purpose and the possibilities of realizing the
purpose;
‒ cultural differences, e.g. different conditions of understanding due to diffe-
rent cultural embeddings, different linguistic restrictions and textual con-
ventions, different norms of behaviour in similar situations, etc.;
‒ incomplete information available to the translator; and
‒ last but not least, the complexity of the translation process.
Similarly to many other classifications, there is no clear borderline between

various types of conflicts. Several decision conflicts may occur simultaneously
and condition one another. The conflicts of purpose relate to the translator’s
overall objectives and the question of what he/she wants to achieve with the
translation. The translator’s moral decisions, which concern the responsibility
382 Terje Loogus
to other participants, are closely connected with that and may in turn result in
value conflicts. The conflicts of beliefs are associated with factual information
about reality. Decisions concerning the purpose, values and beliefs finally
extend to the methodological decisions on translating particular textual
elements and these, in turn, may lead to conflicts between translation methods.
To conclude, conflicts can be resolved if they are recognized in good time.
Only after the translator has become aware of a problem, is he/she able to
handle it and turn the conflict into a constructive force.2
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384 Terje Loogus
Конфликтные решения при межкультурном переводе

Переводчик как член определенной культуры (как правило культуры языка перевода)
принимает переводческие решения исходя из перcпективы своей культуры, причем
сами решения мотивированы чужой (исходной) культурой. Различие культур может
вызвать конфликтные решения, когда переводчик должен идти на компромисс между
разными участниками процесса – автором исходного текста, адресатами перевода и
самим собой. Под конфликтными решениями имеются в виду внутренние сомнения
переводчика в связи с его целями, интересами, ценностями, методами перевода или с
их последствиями, вызванными разными культурными фонами исходного текста и
текста перевода. Конфликтные решения ощущаются, как правило, как субъективные
проблемы перевода. Переводчик должен уметь подходить к тексту с разных точек
зрения. Конфликты возникают, когда перспективы разных культур, которые
переводчик старается согласовать в своем переводе, в принципе несовместимы без
ущерба для одной из этих культур. Действие на перекрестке двух культур и учитыва-
ние интересов всех участников крайне осложняют переводческие решения.
Otsustuskonfliktid kultuuridevahelises tõlkimises

Tõlkija kui teatud kultuuri (reeglina sihtkeelse kultuuri) liige langetab tõlkealaseid otsuseid
oma kultuuri perspektiivist, kusjuures otsused on motiveeritud (võõrast) lähtekultuurist.
Kultuuride erinevus võib põhjustada otsustuskonflikte, mille korral tõlkija peab jõudma
kompromissile erinevate osapooltega – nii lähteteksti autori, sihtadressaatide kui ka
iseendaga. Artiklis analüüsitakse kultuurierinevustest tingitud otsustuskonflikte tõlke-
protsessis. Kultuurist tingitud otsustuskonfliktide all peetakse silmas tõlkija sisemisi kaht-
lusi seoses tema eesmärkide, huvide, väärtuste, veendumuste, tõlkemeetodite või nende
tagajärgedega, mis on tingitud lähteteksti ja sihtteksti erinevast kultuuritaustast. Otsustus-
konflikte tajutakse reeglina subjektiivsete tõlkeprobleemidena. Tõlkija peab olema
suuteline lähenema tekstile erinevatest perspektiividest. Konfliktid tekivad siis, kui kahe
kultuuri perspektiivid, mida tõlkija üritab tõlke abil kokku viia, ei ole ühendatavad, ilma et
mõni protsessi osapooltest kannataks. Tegutsemine kahe kultuuri lõikepunktis, arves-
tamine mitme osapoole huvidega muudab tõlkealased otsused äärmiselt keeruliseks.
The cultural mediational dynamics

of literary intertexts:
An approach to the problem of generative and
transformational dynamics
Katalin Kroó
Department of Russian Language and Literature
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE)
Múzeum krt. 4/D, H–1088 Budapest, Hungary
e-mail: krookatalin@freemail.hu
Abstract. The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of
literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The
intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – (1) in the
context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in
the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; (2) at various
kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole
intertextual system within the work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and
transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define
the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their
functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions
are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying
structures consist (here a terminological clarification and re-evaluation are added) and
their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality (cf. the different
versions of referential and relational semantics). In the first place, however, the paper
aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic
processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this
framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure is
elucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving
semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on
mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by
A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee.
386 Katalin Kroó
Introduction
On reading the title of this paper the question may arise: according to what kind
of logic can the main concepts indicating the components of the theme to be
discussed here – intertext, cultural mediation and dynamics – be brought together?
I attempt to combine a theoretical and methodological framework to interpret
the notion of intertext and the semiotic peculiarities of its emergence and function
in the literary work. This function will be looked at from the point of view of
cultural mediation based on various forms of intersemiotic textual mediation,
which are realized within the literary work in dialogue with the reader. The two
levels of mediation (cultural and intratextual structural-compositional) will be
treated from the point of view of textual and interpretational dynamics.
I try to clarify the application of intertext as a theoretical concept, with its
various aspects and contexts. This clarification is especially required when
conceptualizing the literary intertext, as in this field of research a conspicuous
terminological diversity and an excessive variety of approaches can be dis-
cerned. This is so in spite of the fact that, for today, it is commonly accepted
that the intertextual mode of thinking in cultural texts belongs to their basic
ontology, is part of the prerequisites of their existence in the cultural mode. I am
going to outline some aspects of this semiotic phenomenon and its conceptual
definition on which all of the theoretical and empirical methodological pro-
ceedings to be formulated in this paper will be grounded. On this course it does
not seem superfluous to underline even the simplest aspects in the definition.
The scope of the investigation will be restricted to the literary intertext, i.e.
intertext as formulated in a literary work, though obviously an intertext is an
intersemiotic system (cf. e.g. Torop 2000) very often assuming the properties
of intermediality (cf. e.g. Rajewski 2005).
I will briefly outline the notion of intertext from three different standpoints:
(1) the ontological, (2) the generative and (3) the transformational, out of
which I will give a more detailed reflection on the transformational point of view.
It will lead to the concept of transformational dynamics which I treat as an in-
between notion, permitting the link between the problematics of intertextuality
with that of cultural mediation. In the second part of the paper I attempt to
show, in the literary text, i.e. in the poetic literary practice, some sample
processes which may contribute to the identification of the cultural media-
tional nature of the intertext and its dynamics. These will be examined from the
point of view of the relation of the signifying construct of the intertext to its
semantics, which is again closely connected to the problem of mediation.
The cultural mediational dynamics of literary intertexts 387
1. Intertextual ontology and the generative point of view

1.1. Preliminary theoretical considerations
Introducing the notion of intertextuality by saying that it is one of the pre-
requisites of the existence of the text in the cultural mode means to have voiced one
approach. The consideration of intertextuality as representing a cultural mode
of existence and being a semiotic phenomenon belongs to the ontological
standpoint. This covers the realms of cultural ontology and semiotic ontology,
and if accepting the emphatic sense of the term intertextuality, then also the
realm of intersemiotic ontology. As a second step we can take the generative
standpoint, where it is possible to outline three aspects:
(a) A literary intertext is meant as an intersemiotic system not taken over by,
but generated within the literary work,1 through verbal signs used within that work.
These are brought into relation with other texts of culture. Here besides specific
literary texts a corpus of literary texts forming a particular literary paradigm or
tradition can be examined. Adding to this first point, we can say that this can be
realized in a simple or a poetically complex, sophisticated manner.
(b) Following from the first characteristic, the intertext is meant as a
semantic space2 where meaning is generated. We can emphasize here that the
process of the emergence of this semantic space with its meaning-generating
property is the result of a consequent, well-structured intertextual intersemiotic
dialogue developing as a dynamic process.
(c) Under the third aspect of the generative standpoint, it can be stated
(and this reflects my own emphasis in the present paper) that the signs
generating an intertext (let us call them, for the time being, “intertextual
signs”), nevertheless, do not form a continuous verbal textual sequence within
that work. This relates to the problem of generating the sign system of the
intertexts.
1
Let us remember some early crucial works in the field of the investigation of meaning
generation, e.g. Kristeva’s (1969), Barthes’ (1970), Greimas’ (1970), Lotman’s (1971),
Riffaterre’s (cf. eg. 1980), partly Genette’s (1982) – just to mention some names
representing the “generative” point of view in general, and some as regards the theory of
intertextuality in particular; cf. Igor Smirnov’s book entitled The Generating of the Intertext
(Порождение интертекста), one of the greatest achievements in this field; see Smirnov
1985b; cf. Riffaterre, e.g. 1990.
2
This was the way Peeter Torop also understood intertext in his book on the proble-
matics of total translation: Torop 1995.
388 Katalin Kroó
1.2. Textual examples

As an example for point (c) we can take any literary work in which we can identify
one particular (or several) intertext(s). To take a classic example from Russian
literature, which I will develop further later, we can remember that some traces of
Alexander Pushkin’s epoch-making novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (Евгений Онегин,
1823–1831), can be discerned in quite a few later Russian texts. Juri Lotman even
identifies the Oneginian structure (Tatyana’s and Onegin’s “fields”) in later texts
(Lotman 1988: 91–92). However, when we try to interpret the function of the
novel Eugene Onegin in these primary (i.e. “quoting”) works, we realize that, in fact,
we cannot find an “Oneginian” text that could be read continuously, which means
that the intertextual signs alone, evoking Eugene Onegin, only in themselves do not
constitute a continuous verbal sequence which could be read as a textual whole of
the Pushkinian intertext. This is because the reader cannot rely on a systematic
static, fixed signifying structure. What is meant by Eugene Onegin as an intertext
(e.g. in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Анна Каренина, 1875–1877) – this is again
one of Lotman’s examples showing that later works tried to complete Eugene
Onegin by its transformation), may indeed simply be understood as a semantic
space. On the level of signifiers this space may be outlined partly by the intertextual
signs as signals (here we can rely on quotations, paraphrases etc.). But the intertext
itself as a semantic space is constituted not only by these signs. In most cases we
cannot make out the whole intertext from the intertextual signs as signals.3
We can take another example from an entirely different cultural space. In
the novel entitled Foe (1986) by John Maxwell Coetzee, the Nobel-prize
winner, we can read a story of a shipwrecked woman who arrives on an unin-
habited island where, strangely enough, she meets Cruso and Friday (more
than obvious intertextual signals indicating Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
(1719)). Understanding this, we associate the title of the novel, Foe, with
Defoe’s name (Head 1997: 114; Korang 1998: 196) (Foe is otherwise one of
the characters of the novel and, of course, a writer). Nevertheless, in spite of
these very explicit signals directing the reader towards Defoe’s novel, the
simple sequence of these intertextual signals, or a combination of these, do not
constitute, in themselves, a continuous text which can be identified as the
Robinson Crusoe-intertext. They just point at that text.
3
I will use throughout my paper the term “signal” as it is accepted in intertextual
research; functionally, in certain cases (cf. intextual signs), a signal may partly correspond
to an index.
Now I return to the Russian example. When in Ivan Turgenev’s work, the
novel Rudin (Рудин, 1856), which I will use as an illustrative example in more
detail later, we can also find, at different places, quotations from Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin, these quotations cannot automatically be made readable as a
continuous text. They function just as intertextual signals and this is the
function of the intexts to which Peeter Torop has dedicated much attention
(Torop 1995, e.g. 158–163), differentiating intexts from the intertexts. I inter-
pret intexts, among them quotations, as fulfilling the function of intertextual
signals due to their double signalizing capacity. They refer to external texts
originally alien to the “primary” (citing) text, which are brought into the space
of internal referentiality – if pointed at in the most direct, simple way – by the
intexts. The intextual signs, the word by word quotations given by intexts, their
sign realization in periphrastic modes, or their fragmented use, in the capacity
of intextual sign systems shared by the “primary” (citing) text, however, cannot
be identified with the whole signifier-structure of the intertexts. Intextual signs
simply refer to the original text of which they are part, bringing into the citing
or alluding text the semantics of textual referentiality, without further seman-
tization. The intext, in this sense, can be interpreted just as one type of inter-
textual sign, an intertextual signal, conveying semantics which can be defined in
terms of semantics of textual referentiality.
1.3. Some theoretical conclusions

When we interpret intertexts and not intexts, there are three crucial circles of
questions:
(a) The first – if it is not the signs from the intexts and shared by the em-
bedding text, i.e. not the intextual intertextual signals, nor other types of
intertextual signals, as in the case of Coetzee’s novel (including morphological
signals – e.g. the morpheme ‘Foe’; lexical items – certain words such as e.g. the
name of Friday itself; or thematic signals – e.g. the themes of shipwreck and the
uninhabited island), then what other signs constitute the intertextual system as
a continuously readable textual whole? And in what sense may an intertext be
regarded as a readable text which is interpreted on the plane of semantics?
(b) The second circle of questions goes with an inquiry into just this side of
semantics. If the delimitation of a text, called an intertext, does not equal that of
an intext, nor does it correspond to the textual whole of the primary text
embedding this intext, and is not even identical with the cited text, the pretext
390 Katalin Kroó
(cf. praetext/pre-text; I am soon returning to this notion which first is meant

according to the well-known common usage in literary criticism), since that
pretext is an external text, then what are the processes of semiosis which allow
us to identify an intertext at the semantic level (i.e. in fact as a semantic space
filled in with some semantic construct)?
(c) And finally, the third question runs as follows: “Does a special relation-
ship as a distinctive feature exist between the complex signifier-structure of an
intertext and its semantic content and scope, a relationship which can be
regarded as the distinctive semiotic nature of an intertext?”
All in all we encounter three crucial questions: (1) the question of sign
construction / the complex construct of the signifiers; (2) the question of
semantics; and (3) the semiotic question of the “signifier–signified” relationship.
2. The transformational point of view

2.1. Notional and terminological differentiation
To think about these problems requires a further differentiation of certain
notions and terms which are firstly outlined below and at the same time, in
advance, are summarized according to the following differentiating definitions
shown in Fig. 1:
(a) Intertextual signs

intertextual signals (among them: intextual signs)
referring to a pretext and to the presence of a (developing) intertext
vs.
signs / sign complexes constructing intertexts
(b) Intertextuality in terms of internal and external texts

recalling text vs. recalled text
evoking text vs. evoked text
(c) Pretext vs. intertext

pretext as external text
(praetext: pre-existent in relation to the intertext into which it will be metamorphosed)
intertext generated and developed as a result of a consequent, well-structured
intersemiotic dialogue showing features of dynamic processuality
Figure 1. Notions and terms.

The difference between intertextual signals and intertext-constituting complex

signs (a) is in close connection with the difference between a pretext and an
intertext (c). As the second point (b) in Fig. 1 shows, it is worth keeping to the
terms “recalling text (part)” or “evoking text/text segment” (meant as the
primary citing/quoting text embedding intexts and generating its intertexts),
and the “recalled” or “evoked (cited/quoted) text/text segment”. With this, it
might be easier to avoid the whole confusion arising from the diversity of the
different types of quotations, citings, paraphrases, reminiscences, etc. through
which intexts can be isolated within the recalling text. According to the gene-
rative standpoint, the evoked literary work may not be interpreted any more
outside the context of the evoking text, only in its realized relational semantics.
We have to make a distinction, then, between three types of semantic
constructs. Intextual semantics covers referential semantics (intexts referring to
exterior texts). Intertextual semantics as opposed to intextual semantics can be
identified as relational textual semantics as opposed to just the referential textual
semantics belonging to the intexts, since intertexts are generated by constituting a
semantic relation between the evoking and evoked texts. It is partly this
relational semantics which outlines the semantic space which intertexts repre-
sent and in which they are realized. The evoked external text (according to the
Bakhtinian–Lotmanian concept meant as “alien”/“чужой”) to be remembered
by the evoking text is just a pretext for the intertext (the term pretext in the
strict context of the intertextual problematics covers a specific meaning
excluding that of the previous variants of the same text as seen in the process of
the textual evolution). The pretext in the given framework of theoretical
notions and terms may be regarded as a text, having pre-existence in relation to
the intertext into which it will be transformed. The mediatory phase of this
transformation (in the process of the semiotic generation of the intertext) is
embodied by the intext with its status of signifier. With this status the intext as
intertextual signal refers to an exterior text and revives some meaning aspects of
that alluded text (text part). The semantic revival in the case of intexts,
however, goes without the process of transformation entailed by an evolving
relational context (the intertextual semantic space) whereby semantics is
engendered when bringing the evoked text into semantic relation with the
evoking text. In this sense, the intext really serves as a mediational construct in
the process of transforming a pretext into an intertext. When pretexts are
semantically metamorphosed (gaining their relational semantics), we are in a
space of intersemiotic dialogue realized in dynamic processuality with the
392 Katalin Kroó
participation of the reader, who, according to Thomas Sebeok’s definition

(Sebeok 1985), is an intertext himself (i.e. an interpretative space and medium
of textual dialogues).
The definition of the intertext as an intertextual and evidently intersemiotic
dialogue with intensive transformational dynamics outlines the transformational
point of view, inseparable from the generative standpoint.
2.2. Dynamic processes

At the same time it must be underlined that the transformational nature of the
intertext cannot be conceptualized as being restricted to the notion of the
transformational dynamics manifesting itself by the metamorphosis of a pretext
into an intertext. This would mean that the intertext as a semiosphere is simply
confined to emphasizing relational textual semantics (which would mean the
prevalence of semantics based exclusively on the relationship between intertext
and pretext). However, the intertextual-intersemiotic transformational dyna-
mics (revealing itself within an intra-semiospheric intertextual dialogue in the
evoking text), manifests itself in the framework of the entire context of the
literary work with its global dynamics of semiosis. This complex intratextual
dynamics in its intertextual semantic aspects includes not only the intertext–
pretext relation, but also and primarily the projection of this relation into the entire
semantic system of the evoking work. This defines the structural-compositional
(and signifying) scope as well as the semantic status and extension of the
intertext in relation to the overall semantic world of the evoking text.
On this basis, in terms of textual/interpretational dynamics we can
distinguish the following phases of the generation of an intertext which are
inseparable from a chain of transformations. The textual phases (sequence of
textual modes) of the generation of the intertext are shown with their typical
signifying, semantic constructs in Fig. 2:
PHASES OF THE EMERGENCE/GENERATION OF AN INTERTEXT

IN TERMS OF TEXTUAL MODES AND SEMANTICS INTERPRETED AS A PROCESS OF
GENERATIVE-TRANSFORMATIONAL TEXTUAL DYNAMICS:
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE EVOKING TEXT

Textual mode Textual semantics
Pretext External textual
referential semantics
A concept of textual referentiality in relation to an external text.

(Pretexts can be identified when intexts refer to them
as their textual mode of pre-existence.)
↓ ↓
Intext Internal
textual referential semantics
a) Signalization of the import of the external text into the evoking text.
b) Signalization of the presence of an intertext (to be developed).
↓ ↓
Intertext Relational
textual referential semantics
Figure 2. Generative-transformational textual dynamics in terms of textual modes and

semantics.
The implied processes may be outlined as given in Fig. 3:
THE PROCESSES OF GENERATIVE-TRANSFORMATIONAL TEXTUAL DYNAMICS:
1.
a) from Intext → to Pretext
The setting of external referentiality.
b) from Pretext → to Intext
The transformation from external textual
referentiality to internal textual referentiality.
↓
The signalization of an intertext: the setting of relational textual referentiality.
2.
from Pretext → to Intertext
The dynamic realization of relational textual referentiality in a chain of intertextual
transformations.
Figure 3. Processes of generative-transformational textual dynamics.

394 Katalin Kroó
If we sum up the transformational dynamics of the above indicated

processes we arrive at the following transformational line presented in Fig. 4a:
INTERTEXT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF TRANSFORMATIONAL DYNAMICS:
1.
Pretext → Intertext
The transformational dynamics of the development of internal relational referentiality:
the process of the evolution – in different phases – of the semantic relation
between the evoking text and its pretext(s).
Figure 4a. Intertext from the point of view of transformational dynamics.
This is the change of a pretext into an intertext which covers the transformational
dynamics of the development of the internal relational referentiality when
interpreting the functioning of the pretext in its various relationships with the
evoking text in different processes of semiosis.
At the same time the function of the intertext must be interpreted in the
context of the overall semantic system of the literary work. The inquiry into
this semantic functionality – as stated above – implies taking into consideration
the transformational dynamics of the textual whole, i.e. the transformational
processes belonging to the intratextual world into which the pretext–intertext
relationship is projected, and also the factor that an intertext is always a
component of a global intertextual system into which it is semantically
systematically integrated (see Fig. 4b):
INTERTEXT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF TRANSFORMATIONAL DYNAMICS:
2.
Pretext → Intertext → Evoking Text
Partial and global transformational dynamics within the intratextual world
of the evoking text: the relation of the pretext to the overall integrating
text as a system.
Figure 4b. Intertext from the point of view of transformational dynamics.

2.3. Intertextual mediation

The generative-transformational dynamics of the emergence and development
of intertexts, accordingly, has two crucial ramifications. On the one hand, there
appears the problem of the relationship of the pretext with the intertext, and
hence there is a need for the examination of the transformational dynamics of
relational textual referentiality. On the other hand, there appears the problem of
the dynamic integration of the intertext into the textual whole regarded as an
intertextual system.
Just a short reminder of the first ramification of transformational dynamics.
Speaking of literary intertexts in the context of their relation to preceding texts,
the problem of cultural mediation is involved, belonging to a wide range of
textual communication with the emphatic participation of the reader in a
reception space of multiple dialogues. Literary-cultural mediation is based, on
the one hand, on the reader’s expectation of the continuity of a set of well
established cultural-textual traditions, and on the other, on the reader’s inter-
pretation of the measure to which this continuity is preserved, reinforced,
modified, marginalized or radically broken (to set an umbrella category for this
feature it is useful to remember Jauss’ term concerning the reader’s
expectation4). The reader’s interpretative response to the tradition meant as a
literary-cultural textual continuum develops through semantic processes also
based on relational semantics. This means the permanent interpretation of the
correspondence of the text to certain components of a particular complex of
cultural-textual tradition, or just the opposite, the perception of the deviation
from this kind of tradition. In the literary text it may concern questions of
genre, plot-type, the system of characters, the type of motif coherence,
vocabulary, style in the broadest sense, and also the diverse forms of structural-
semantic or abstract semantic paradigms; or the methods of using metaphors,
tropes; or the practice of metapoetic thinking – just to mention some of the
points.
The problem is made more complex by the fact that this kind of relational
intertextual interpretation may involve even the language of the transforma-
tional dynamics itself when the reader remembers the typical, canonized
modes of the metamorphoses of certain traditional pretexts into intertexts. And
then, the transformation is itself a part of the tradition. (From Russian
literature we remember, as an example, the case of Pushkin’s The Stationmaster
4
Cf. Jauss’ (1967) term “horizon of expectation”, cf. e.g. Jauss 2001: 1559.
396 Katalin Kroó
(Станционный смотритель) from his Belkin’s Tales (Повести Белкина,

1831) as rewritten in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (Бедные люди, 1846),
when Pushkin’s short story in itself represents a creative modification of a
sentimental pattern embodied in Nikolay Karamzin’s Poor Liza (Бедная Лиза,
1792); consequently the intertextual relationship between Poor Folk and The
Stationmaster preserves the memory of the whole process of the intertextual
evolution of the sentimental literary paradigm, see also Bocharov 1985).5 The
semantics of all these correspondences, deviations or digressions – equi-
valences as Wolf Schmid (1994) would put the term – is turned into an
interpretative force within the evoking text, an interpretative tool which is
encoded in the evoking text itself endowed with cultural memory and eliciting
this cultural memory from its reader, too. The complex intertextual semantics
enters the metapoetic construct of the given literary work (see Hutcheon 1977;
1980/84) and in this sense the mediation of cultural texts equals the mediation
of metapoiesis.
Intertextual transformational dynamics from this point of view of cultural
memory may be regarded as a tool for reception. However the readers’
reception then concerns a diachronic, historical relational intertextual semantics.
Cultural texts are mediated by the intertexts and connected to the metapoiesis
of the evoking work. The intertextual construct contributes to the literary
historical self-identification of the evoking text through cultural mediation. In
this function an intertext is a dynamic operator of cultural mediation in a
process of the self-conceptualization of the literary work generating its
intertextual system. This intertextual system is capable of involving an
extensive range of cultural surroundings and contexts, possibly whole cultural
traditions in which the pretexts are rooted. Even connotative cultural
mediation may have very intensive semantic performative power. The reader’s
expectation and semantic “performance” (semantic interpretation) neverthe-
less is structured by complex processes of intratextual semiosis.
This is saying that while the intertexts are cultural mediational operators
transmitting traditions by collective cultural intertextual memory, at the other pole
of the mediational scale we can find the intratextual generating and regulating
system of this intertextual cultural mediation.
Here we have to consider that an intertextual system is an internally
hierarchically organized dynamic semiotic construct. Since different intertexts are
5
On literary memory see, e.g. Smirnov 1985a, Lachmann 1997.
formulated at different textual and semantic levels within one and the same
work, the combination of the various intertexts into one semantically coherent
and unified system presupposes the flexibility of the inter-level dialogical
relationship of the intertextual components belonging to various intertexts and
semantic subsystems. The intertextual system is a multi-level semiotic
construct which elaborates its own forms of interlevel mediation, contributing to
the heightening and the metaconceptualization of the intersemiotic nature of
the literary work. It is also interlevel mediations which lead to the creation of
internal semantic hierarchization and on which the reader can rely when
interpreting the intertexts in their cultural mediatory terms.
2.4. Text examples

I am going to observe a literary textual illustration based on a very simple
example. It is taken from Turgenev’s novel Rudin and makes it possible to
follow the logic of the transformational dynamics of the emergence and
development of an intertextual system, in many of the aspects treated so far,
from a theoretical point of view.
I take that part of the novel where two quotations appear from Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin. To understand the basic situation in the plot in which these
quotations are embedded, it is enough to remember the following: the hero
and the heroine of the novel, Rudin and Natalya are bidding farewell as Rudin
is not ready to devote himself to a life of love with Natalya. Natalya and the
narrator condemn Rudin, referring to the deficiencies in his character, and
Rudin also talks of himself in harsh self-critical terms, judging himself to be a
feeble man not suited to living a useful life, and being afraid of dying without
leaving behind any “beneficial consequences” (Turgenev 1975: 144) or
remarkable traces (“благотворный след”, Turgenev 1963: 337). Instead he
lives a life of shame. All this is put into a letter sent to Natalya. And this letter
includes one piece of advice, addressed to her in a Pushkinian context through
the quotation of one line from stanza 10 of the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin:
“Blessed is he who in youth was young…” (Turgenev 1975: 144). The heroine
reads this letter; the narrator describes how “tears rose” in her eyes and how
later she opened “a copy of Pushkin at random and read the first line that came
to hand. […] This is what she found” – and here again a quotation comes from
Pushkin’s novel in verse, taken from the 46th stanza of the first chapter.
398 Katalin Kroó
Whoe’er has felt will feel alarmed

By phantoms of the days long gone …
There are no fascinations left for him,
Already the serpent of remembering,
The pangs of conscience will be gnawing him … (Turgenev 1975: 146)
Later Rudin in fact leaves Natalya and, travelling out from the mansion,
paraphrases some words of Don Quixote from Cervantes’ novel.
As we stated earlier, the two intexts from Onegin – functioning as inter-
textual signals, simultaneously indicating the presence of a pretext and an
intertext within the novel (the latter, however, not having taken shape at that
given textual moment) – cannot be read as a continuous text. Nevertheless,
they contribute to the development of a larger signifying construct, since
through certain words and themes discernible at that place in the evoking text,
they lead the reader back to the original context of the two quotations, which in
this way is also evoked. So we arrive from the Pushkinian intexts to the original
contexts of the quotations. Since these quotations themselves are organized
into a relationship of equivalence in Turgenev’s novel (are voiced in Rudin’s
parting words and the description of Natalya’s reception of these words – the
parallelism is thus established in the “sender–addressee” situation), and
similarly, the Turgenevian quotational contexts themselves show signs of
explicit parallelism, through common motifs [see: “beneficent”], we begin to
read together the Pushkinian quotations, their original contexts, and the
Turgenevian evoking contexts, paying careful attention to their equivalences. It
is essential to consider that the Pushkinian quotations are taken from the first
and the last chapters of the work, because their larger contexts in Eugene Onegin
and the interrelation of these contexts make the transformations of certain
motifs and themes belonging to the heroes’ and narrator’s story conspicuous,
textually spanning from the first to the final chapter in Pushkin’s novel.
These parallels which will not be shown in their detailed textual forms
here – I will just attempt to throw some light on the logic of the emergence and
development of the intertext6 – make the motif of travelling not only
discernible but also dominant, not simply because it is connected to the plot,
but also because it is given a very intensive poetical elaboration in Pushkin as a
metaphor. (We must remember here that travelling gave the initial plot motif
from where the Pushkinian intexts arose. Rudin writes the letter to Natalya
6
For further details, see Kroó 2008a.
when she leaves to go travelling. In the Pushkinian quotations themselves,

travelling is not mentioned whereas in thеir immediate contexts it is.) This
motif in Eugene Onegin is segmented into semantic layers. From the first
chapter of Onegin – i.e. from the broader surroundings of the stanza quoted by
Turgenev – the hero’s desire to travel to a far-off country together with the
narrator may come to the reader’s mind; but we also remember from the same
source the transformation of the motif conveying the meaning of an external
physical journey into a motif with the sense of an internal spiritual journey and
dream linked to the opportunity of finding internal freedom, i.e. freedom inside
(“Как в лес зеленый из тюрьмы / Перенесен колодник сонный / Так уносились
мы мечтой / к началу жизни молодой”, I. 47, Pushkin 1975: 257). Then, from
the end of Pushkin’s novel which leads us back to the beginning (as Turgenev
does by his quoting the two segments together), we recollect the narrator’s
journey when becoming a writer, and then his journey together with his heroes,
which entails the poetical conceptualization of the text itself as a creative
journey. We could go on endlessly with the Pushkinian formulations of motifs,
showing the accumulation of the numerous variants which acquire various
metaphorical meanings. Nevertheless these 3–4 examples, reduced to the
examination of just a single motif, already clearly evidence the peculiarity of the
process in generating the intertext.
The following happens in Turgenev’s Rudin. The intextual signs (quota-
tions) and the other intertextual signals (e.g. lexical and thematic units in the
evoking text common with those in the evoked text) generate an overall
reading context for the Turgenevian part, projecting the sense of the Pushki-
nian poetic metaphorization to the evoking text. In this reading, Rudin’s
leaving is seen as an act of making a free internal choice, something connected
with creative activity and poetry meant metaphorically. This leads to the
gathering into one semantic point of all of the other information from different
places in Turgenev’s novel which witness Rudin’s poetic nature and quality of
speech, in fact a poet figure’s metaphoric talk.
What we encounter is the constant broadening process of the signifier-
structure. Besides the two short quotations, we find other parts of Onegin when
reading the citing and cited texts with their original contexts, and the intexts
within the broader intertextual framework of the Turgenevian part. It is
7
English translation: “Like convicts sent in dreaming flight / To forest green and
liberation, / So we in fancy then were borne / Back to our springtime’s golden morn”
(Pushkin 2009: 25).
400 Katalin Kroó
possible because the intextual signs in the Turgenevian context with their
signalizing function indicate the semantic scope and the textual limits of the
involvement of Pushkin’s novel in Turgenev’s Rudin at the given moment and
place. They establish the Pushkinian signifying structure for the intertext.
Then, reading the intertext semantically, we arrive at the metaphorization. This
metaphorization shows the interlevel movement of the motif of journey in
Pushkin’s novel (there is the level of plot motif: external journey; the
metaphorical level: internal journey; the metaphorical amplification: the
combination of the idea of freedom with creation; the metapoetic motif: text as
journey). Reading all this into Rudin reveals similar processes of metaphori-
zation in Turgenev’s novel – i.e. on the basis of the semantics interpreted in
Eugene Onegin we find new intertextual signs in the evoking text, Rudin. It is a
special way of forming a complex signifier-structure of the intertext.
Conclusions
From the text analysis made above it follows that the mediational function of
the intertext is manifold. The process of the development of the intertext itself
entails the activity of a kind of mediational function in the movement from a
signifier to a signified and from there to a new signifier. Then, secondly, the
intertext is a mediational operator between the textual-semantic levels. It takes
part in the intralevel semantic movement between the different levels of
semantic interpretation (from the concrete sense to the symbolic plane; from
plot level to the meta-level). The third mediational aspect of the intertext
concerns its being a mediator for the evoking text in its self-decoding, i.e. self-
interpretational processes. The Rudin–Onegin intertext mediates between two
diametrically opposed interpretations: according to these, on the one hand, we
see Rudin as a condemnable feeble man and, on the other, we see him entirely
differently, as a poet exercising his internal freedom. The intertext is a mediator
between the two interpretations, i.e. a tool of the autopoetic thinking of the
text. It is possible because the development of the intertext is realized in a
movement from the signifier to the semantic plane; then semantics leads to the
creation of new signifiers in the text, entailing a transformation of the semantic
formulation.
With the permanent augmentation and enlargement of the signifying
structure a constant semantic reevaluation takes place. Intertextual text
dynamics goes from intext to evoking text and to evoked text, then back to
evoking text, then to evoked text, and so on. In the meanwhile the intertext
affects the intratextual interlevel semantic processes within the evoking text.
The intertextual construct makes its dominant semantic trait conspicuous and
emphatic, and that leads to the inclusion of other intertexts organizing them-
selves into a system. In our case it is the Don Quixote-intertext, where the
themes of travelling and freedom are explicitly stated. The dialogue of the
intertexts is based on the creation of relational referentiality in an analogous
way with that of the transformation of the pretext into the intertext. The
intertexts begin to refer to one another, and, depending on at which textual and
semantic level they are primarily shaped, different intertextual constructs come
into being. The processes of their development, in a similar fashion to the
relationship between the evoking text and the individual evoked texts, mark the
scope of their connectedness – and also the relevant textual and semantic levels
– in which they are mediators in the emergence and evolution of the entire
intertextual system of the overall text.
In this way, for example, the linking up of the Onegin- and the Don Quixote-
intertext will mark all of the other intertexts with the explicit or implicit
semantization of travelling put into a cultural context of chivalry. Then, at
different textual levels this literary context of chivalry has different meanings
(Kroó 2008b). Ultimately it leads to the problems of the genre poetics of
Turgenev’s novel at the metapoetic level and in this sense the intertext again
proves to be a cultural mediator, with the function of first segmenting both the
signifiers and the signified, and then synthesizing the composition and the
semantics of the overall intertextual system.
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К проблеме генеративной и трансформационной динамики
Статья посвящена теоретическому вопросу посреднической, медиаторской натуры
литературного интертекста, которая изучается с точки зрения генеративной и
трансформационной динамики. Интертекстуальный комплекс как медиатор расс-
матривается на двух уровнях: 1) в контексте диахронии культуры (уделяется внимание
тому, каким образом произведение создает и определяет свое место в истории
литературы в формах, связанных с его метапоэтическим праксисом); 2) в свете разных
интратекстуальных межуровневых процессов, управляющих формированием целой
интертекстуальной системы. Различая онтологическую, генеративную и трансфор-
мационную концептуализацию интертекстуальной поэтики литературного текста, мы
задаемся целью определить претекст, интекст и интертекст как базовые текстуальные
модусы путем описания их функциональности в плане построения интерсемио-
тической системы. Релевантные функции улавливаются и характеризуются в работе
освещением типа знаков, составляющих означающие структуры (в этом аспекте
проводятся наши терминологические выяснения и переосмысления), и определением
текстовой семантики с установкой на референциальные и реляционные аспекты
смысла (cр. разные варианты референциальной и реляционной семантики). На
первом месте, все же, стоит задача очертить структуру и содержание генеративно-
трансформационных семиотических процессов, в которых раскрывается динамика
интертекстуального семиозиса. В этих рамках выявляется процессуальность развития
интертекстуальной означающей структуры, которая толкуется как проявление
активности взаимосоотнесенных знаков. Такая взаимно проецированная друг на
друга активность приводит к постоянным семантическим переменам (обновлениям),
наблюдаемым в процессах интра- и интертекстуального семиозиса. Все эти семанти-
ческие перевоплощения опираются на реализации в тексте функций посредничества.
Художественные примеры взяты из произведений А. С. Пушкина, И. С. Тургенева,
Ф. М. Достоевского и Джона Максвелла Кутзее.
404 Katalin Kroó
Kirjanduslike intertekstide kultuuriline vahendav dünaamika:

generatiivse ja transformatiivse dünaamika probleemist
Artikkel püstitab teoreetilise küsimuse kirjanduslikest intertekstidest kui kultuurilistest
vahendajatest generatiivse ja transformatsioonilise dünaamika vaatepunktist. Intertekstilist
kooslust kui vahendajat vaadeldakse kahel tasandil – 1) kultuurilise diakroonia kontekstis,
jälgides, kuidas kirjandusteos sätestab oma koha kirjandusajaloos, tihedas seoses teksti
metapoiesisega; 2) erinevat tüüpi intratekstiliste tasandite vahelistel liikumistel, mis
juhivad kogu tekstisisese intertekstilise süsteemi arengut. Eristades intertekstilise poeetika
ontoloogilist, generatiivset ja transformatsioonilist kontseptualiseerimisviisi, tehakse katse
määratleda pretekst, intekst ja intertekst kui põhilised tekstilised olemisviisid, kirjeldades
nende funktsionaalsust intersemiootilise kirjandussüsteemi ülesehituses. Vastavaid
funktsioone kirjeldatakse, heites valgust märgitüüpidele, millest antud tähenduslik struk-
tuur koosneb (siinkohal on lisatud terminoloogiline täpsustus ja ümberhindamine), ja
nende tekstilisele semantikale, keskendudes tähenduse referentsiaalsele ja relatsioonilisele
aspektile (vrd referentsiaalse ja relatsioonilise semantika erinevad versioonid). Esmajoones
aga taotleb artikkel visandada nende generatiiv-transformatiivsete semiootiliste protsesside
struktuuri ja sisu, milles avalduvad intertekstilise semioosi dünaamilised aspektid. Selles
raamistikus selgitatakse intertekstilise tähendusliku struktuuri arengu protsessuaalsust,
mida nähakse kui märkide vastastikust aktiivsust, mille tulemuseks on pidevad semantilised
nihked intra- ja intertekstilistes semioosiprotsessides, mis kõik toetuvad vahendavatele
toimingutele. Tekstinäiteid tuuakse A. S. Puškini, I. S. Turgenevi, F. M. Dostojevski ja J. M.
Coetzee teostest.
The history of humanities as reflected

in the evolution of K. Vaginov’s novels
Ekaterina Velmezova
Faculté des lettres, Bâtiment Anthropole (bureau 5096),
Université de Lausanne,
Quartier UNIL-Dorigny, CH-1015 Lausanne, Suisse / Switzerland
e-mail: Ekaterina.Velmezova@unil.ch
Abstract. In the late 1920s – early 1930s, the Russian poet and novelist Konstantin
Vaginov (1899–1934) wrote four novels which reproduce various discourses per-
taining to the Russian humanities (philosophy, psychology, linguistics, study of
literature) of that time. Trying to go back to the source of the corresponding theories
and “hidden” quotations by identifying their authors allows us to include Vaginov’s
prose in the general intellectual context of his epoch. Analysing Vaginov’s prose in the
light of the history of ideas enables us to understand how a number of philological and
philosophical trends were interpreted by particular groups of Soviet intellectuals (for
instance, writers and poets who were Vaginov’s contemporaries). Besides, it allows us
to propose a new interpretation of Vaginov’s novels and their evolution which
corresponds to his perception of humanities around him: their many tendencies and
peculiarities become unacceptable for the writer in the 1930s.
1. From the search of prototypes to the search of ideas

Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Russian poet and novelist Kons-
tantin Vaginov (1899–1934) wrote four novels: Kozlinaya pesn’ (The Goat
Song, published in its entirety in 1928), Trudy i dni Svistonova (The Works and
Days of Svistonov, published in 1929), Bambochada (Bambocciada, published in
1931) and Garpagoniana (Harpagoniana, written in 1933, but published only
in 1983). All these novels are considered to be among the so-called “literary
works with keys” (cf. Ivanov 2000), i.e. works with easily recognizable proto-
types. Much has already been written about the prototypes of Vaginov’s
characters: for instance, philologists have considered Vaginov’s characters as
406 Ekaterina Velmezova
being “copied from life” [spisany s natury] (Gerasimova 2008: 12). Neverthe-
less, one should now admit the absence of any one-to-one correspondence
between the characters of Vaginov’s novels and real people. If, for instance, it is
often said that Teptyolkin’s prototype was L. Pumpyanskij1 (sometimes
P. Medvedev is also mentioned2), Misha Kotikov can be “identified” not only
with Medvedev, but also with V. Voloshinov and P. Luknickij. In the Philo-
sopher, there are traits of M. Bakhtin, A. Mejer, S. Alekseev-Askol’dov, while
certain particular features of Vaginov himself have been “incarnated” either in
the Unknown Poet, or in Svistonov and Evgenij Felinflein (the latter character
seems to have embodied also some traits of O. Tizengauzen and S. Muhin).
Therefore, one can propose a somewhat different approach to Vaginov’s
novels, which will presuppose an analysis of various discourses pertaining to
the Russian humanities of the 1920s–30s. Vaginov’s novels are riddled with
quotations and theories of thinkers of his time and trying to go back to their
source by identifying their authors will allow us to include Vaginov’s prose in
the general intellectual context of his epoch. It is only in this sense that we shall
discuss the prototypes of Vaginov’s characters, without focusing much on their
biographical details. In this way, the notion of prototype will be considerably
restricted (otherwise, one could infinitely extend the potential number of
persons whose features could have been reflected in one or another literary
character).
Vaginov’s novels are difficult to study from this point of view already due to
the fact that small fragments of quotations and theories are spread out through
the texts, rather than “concentrated” in more or less extensive extracts as in
1
The idea of the surname Teptyolkin itself, as a designation of something negative, came
to Vaginov from Pumpyanskij (Nikolaev 2000a: 23), cf. the following quotation: “[…]
perhaps, Teptyolkin himself made up his unbearable surname […]” (Vaginov 2008: 28).
Later on, referring to Vaginov’s novels, we shall indicate only the numbers of pages in the
edition Vaginov 2008. The English translation of The Goat Song (Satyr Chorus) is, in case
of the majority of quotations, by Chris Lovett, available at http://www.nnnonline.org/
vaginov/index.htm.
2
Among other more or less established correspondences of this kind, let us mention the
following: Kostya Rotikov – I. Lihachev, the poet September – V. Mart, Mar’ya Petrovna
Dalmatova – M. Yudina, Svechin – S. Kolbas’ev, Asfodeliev – P. Medvedev, Troitsyn –
Vs. Rozhdestvenskij, Psihachev – B. Zubakin, Lokonov – А. Egunov, Toropulo – L. Savi-
nov, Zaevfratskij – N. Gumilev, Varen’ka Ermilova – Lidiya Ivanova, etc.
The history of humanities reflected in the evolotion of K. Vaginov’s novels 407
some other literary works.3 In this article (which does not claim to be an
exhaustive treatment because of its limited volume – therefore we shall only set
up some landmarks for a future study of a larger scope in which these problems
will be analysed), we shall concentrate, first of all, on various researches and
theories pertaining to Russian humanities in the 1920s–30s, as they were
reflected in Vaginov’s novels – or, more precisely, in the evolution of these four
novels.4 This way, we shall study the “real […] dialogue” of Vaginov’s novels
with their “time” (Bakhtin 1997–…[1959–1960], V: 324). This direction of
analysis has recently been chosen by some Vaginov specialists. For example,
O. Shindina (2010) has found some parallels between Vaginov’s novels and
certain ideas and theories of those who are counted among the members of the
so-called “Bakhtin Circle”5 (Bakhtin,6 Pumpyanskij, etc.). Shindina insisted
particularly on the fact that not only was Vaginov as a writer and poet under the
influence of their discussions, but that he could himself have influenced the
process of formation of their theories, too.
3
For instance, in V. Kaverin’s novel Skandalist, ili Vechera na Vasil’evskom ostrove (The
Troublemaker, or Evenings on the Vasil’evskij Island [1928]).
4
Evolution of Vaginov’s prose as such has already been studied (cf. for instance
Nikol’skaya 1991; Tichomirova 2000; Gerasimova 2008, etc.); in this article, we shall
include it in a larger context of the history of ideas.
5
The (in)adequacy of this expression to the real historical situation is now discussed (cf.
for example Sériot 2010), which explains the fact that we shall use inverted commas
mentioning this Circle in our work. Among members of this Circle there were M. Bakhtin,
P. Medvedev, V. Voloshinov, L. Pumpyanskij, I. Sollertinskij, M. Kagan, B. Zubakin,
M. Yudina, A. Mejer, etc.
6
Bakhtin and Vaginov got acquainted in 1924. At that time, Bakhtin was working on the
problems of Menippean satire, considering a “carnival perception” of the world as one of
the peculiarities of this genre. It explains partly Bakhtin’s interest in Vaginov’s literary
works: Bakhtin appreciated Vaginov’s novels highly and considered him as a “true carnival
writer” (Nikol’skaya 1991: 8). Sometimes the theme of the carnival appears manifestly in
Vaginov’s novels – for instance, when, in The Goat Song, Mar’ya Petrovna finds herself
outside after a night service in the St. Isaac’s Cathedral, “it seemed that she was taking part
in a carnival procession” (p. 166). Cf. also Shindina 1989 about the influence of the
Bakhtinian conception of carnival on Vaginov, and Shindina 2007 about other “carni-
valesque” aspects of Vaginov’s prose (in a more general sense, in all Vaginov’s novels the
theme of the carnival correlates with a mixing of high and low, tragic and comic aspects of
life). With time, Vaginov became a friend not only of Bakhtin, but also of some other
members of the “Bakhtin Circle”. (However, after the publication of The Goat Song,
Vaginov quarrelled with some of his acquaintances, including Pumpyanskij, who had
recognized themselves in the personages of this novel and did not like it.)
This trend of analysis seems important, first of all, for the fact that during a
long time, in spite of the growing interest in the works of the “Bakhtin Circle”,
Bakhtin was often drawn from the intellectual context of his epoch and studied
as a “lone star on a scientific firmament” (Koval’ski 2001: 77) – which not only
was methodologically wrong, but also led to a misinterpretation of Bakhtin’s
works. That is why today it is necessary to “return” Bakhtin – with Vaginov – to
the large “philological” (and philosophical) context of their time. Nevertheless,
we shall only touch upon this large theme in our article, focusing on the
evolution of Vaginov’s novel prose analyzed in the light of Russian humanities
in the 1920s–30s.
2. Vaginov’s novels reflecting

the social sciences of his time
2.1. Towards a concept of “interrelatedness”
Studying all Vaginov’s novels as a single metatext7 (by this we mean that, taken
and analysed together, the four novels form a new text and therefore they
become “texts in a text”8) –, the first thing which attracts attention, at least in
Vaginov’s first three novels (The Goat Song, The Works and Days of Svistonov
and Bambocciada) is his characters’ surprising versatility, wide reading in
various fields. Teptyolkin – like his main prototype Pumpyanskij whose
erudition was “exceptional” (Nikolaev 2000a: 9) – seems to be interested in
everything at once: “If you had the money, you’d probably buy my whole
library”, a street vendor tells him (p. 37).9 That is why Teptyolkin can deliver
lectures on diverse subjects (p. 77–78):10 “Now he was reading with someone
7
It can be justified already by their common themes – such as “the tragedy of a
generation which found itself in a breach between “old” and “new” worlds”, “the tragedy of
people who found themselves in a breach between exterior and interior worlds” (Gerasi-
mova 2008: 12; cf. also Shindina 2010), as well as by the fact that some characters, objects
and phenomena (even some characters’ dreams) reappear from one novel to another.
8
Cf. Torop 1981.
9
Vaginov was also a passionate bibliophile who devoured books from various centuries.
10
Teptyolkin’s main prototype Pumpyanskij gave more than a thousand public lectures
on very different subjects (Nikolaev 2000a: 27). The first lecture in Teptyolkin’s series was
on Novalis, and from time to time, Novalis is mentioned by Bakhtin (cf. Bakhtin 1997–
…[1923–1924], I: 80; 1997–…[1922–1927c], II: 327; 1997–…[1965], IV/2: 133, etc.);
Pumpyanskij spoke about the influence of Novalis upon Tyutchev (Pumpyanskij
about love and interpreting a pregnant turn of phrase. Now, at the same time,
analyzing Dante11 and, coming up to the middle of the fifth canto, to Paolo and
Francesca, he was pacing the room, bowled over. Now he was doing com-
mentary on Hector’s parting from Andromache, now giving a lecture on
Vyacheslav Ivanov”.12 Also Evgenij, the central character of Bambocciada who
can outshine any professor by his erudition (р. 352) is “extremely” well-read.
These and many other of Vaginov’s characters – like the members of the
“Bakhtin Circle” – are interested in history (р. 47, 120), archaeology (р. 98),
American civilization (р. 27, 98), physics (р. 75), mathematics (in particular, in
the relativity theory [р. 87]), music (ibid.) etc.
In addition, many spheres of knowledge are interrelated, for them. Even in
Harpagoniana, Vaginov’s novel with the most ignorant characters (cf. below),
one can discern some pitiful attempts to link – at least via comparisons and
metaphors – architecture and music (р. 464) as well as music and cookery
(р. 457) (this idea arises already in Bambocciada, [р. 285, 296]). Such implicit
relatedness of everything with everything becomes apparent even in the need
2000[1928]: 252), etc. (Since it is impossible to find references to all the discourses that
Vaginov could know and “transpose” to his prose, we shall confine ourselves to mentioning
only some of them in the present article. Besides, although – here and below – some
relevant works appeared after the publication of Vaginov’s novels, the ideas contained in
them could have been formulated as early as the 1920s: this concerns especially the
members of the “Bakhtin Circle”.)
11
Cf. in this regard Pumpyanskij (2000[1924]: 532; 2000[1925b]: 538; 2000[1929–
1930]: 501; Bakhtin 1997–…[1923–1924], I: 79–80, 134, 184, 221; 1997–…[1929], II:
34–35, 39–40, 42; 1997–…[1940a], IV/1: 115–117, etc.) – E. V.
12
Once again, to a greater or lesser extent, all this was interesting to many humanists in
the 1920s. For instance, as to Vyach. Ivanov, Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1997–…[1922–1927c];
1997–…[1929]), Pumpyanskij (2000[1925b]), Medvedev (1928: Part II, Chapter 2; Part
III, Chapter 1) and other members of the “Bakhtin Circle” wrote and gave talks about him
(Nikolaev 2000b: 768). Showing their vivid interest in Ivanov (Ivanov was probably
Bakhtin’s favourite author in general [Bocharov, Melihova, Pul 2000: 562]), at the same
time they insisted on the “absence of literary future” of Ivanov’s poetic system (Nikolaev
2000b: 769). In connection with the concept of interrelatedness which we discuss in this
part of our work, is worth mentioning the “general question” which, according to Pum-
pyanskij, should be asked about Ivanov who linked scientific culture with poetry in his
writings: Why has so much knowledge merged with poetry? (Pumpyanskij 2000[1925b]:
538). (Of course, in the 1920s–30s, interest in Ivanov’s works – and in the works of other
thinkers, poets and writers admired by Vaginov’s characters – went beyond the “Bakhtin
Circle”; also Vaginov himself was interested in Vyach. Ivanov; cf. Kozyura 2005; Shindina
2010.)
to find analogies between various aspects of the outer world – for instance,
between nature and cookery (Toropulo draws analogies in forms, colours etc.,
p. 307). In The Works and Days of Svistonov, Svistonov “unites” physics, geo-
graphy, history and philosophy “in historical perspective”, considering them as
“one enormous memoir of humanity” (p. 247).
In The Goat Song, the idea about interrelatedness of various sides of human
spiritual activity, as we shall see later, is even more evident. As Teptyolkin
records in “his life’s basic work” (p. 48), aesthetics is “a harmonization of
nature and history” (р. 49), which supposes there is a harmony between
natural sciences and humanities.13 That is why, probably, Teptyolkin’s lectures
are attended by specialists in very different domains of knowledge: “an expert
in Sumero-Acadian letters”, “a little old man with a passion for antiquity” and
even “a biologist” (р. 77);14 in general, Vaginov’s personages often “merge into
nature” (р. 152, cf. also p. 164) – Kostya Rotikov proposes to “go listen to
fatherland’s aspens changing their language” (р. 72), Teptyolkin mentions
“tree-trunks” as “prototype[s] of columns” (р. 88) etc.
According to Vaginov’s characters, “everything in the world is connected”
(р. 305), “everything in the world is surprisingly interrelated” (р. 435) – and
these opinions seem to echo the reasoning about the “vanity of one-sided-
nesses” [tscheta odnostoronnostej] and the aspiration for a “Great Synthesis” in
A. Losev’s novel Zhenschina-Myslitel’ (Woman-Thinker) (1933–1934).15 In
13
As to the boundaries between natural sciences and humanities, many intellectuals
considered them as very relative in the 1920s–30s (cf. Velmezova 2010). In his later works,
Bakhtin also shared this view (Bakhtin 1997–…[1966–1967?], VI: 407). However in
Vaginov’s earlier short prose Monastyr’ Gospoda nashego Apollona (The Monastery of Our
Lord Apollo [1922]) culture and art are opposed to “chemistry, mechanics and physics”
(Vaginov 1991[1922]: 481). Therefore it is perhaps no coincidence that some of Vaginov’s
characters in the last two novels (where high culture is more and more forgotten, cf. below)
also have technical occupations – Toropulo is an engineer (p. 293) (and Ermilov, probably,
too [p. 284]), Punshevich is a professor of physics (p. 323), etc.
14
Probably, in this way biologist I. Kanaev – a member of the “Bakhtin Circle” – found
himself in the The Goat Song (according to literary critics, in this novel he appears as “the
pharmacist” walking with “the philosopher” [p. 74], cf. Nikol’skaya, Erl’ 1999: 524).
15
It was the notorious pianist M. Yudina (who was a member of the “Bakhtin Circle”,
too) who served as a prototype for Radina in the Woman-Thinker. Losev reflected upon
problems of interpenetration of various fields of human spiritual activity also in his other
literary works – as, for instance, in the narrative Trio Chajkovskogo (Tchaikovsky’s Trio
[1933], where the character of Tomilina once again incarnates some traits of Yudina), etc.
Cf. Taho-Godi 2004 about the correlation of Losev’s philosophy and literary works.
some respect, all these statements can be considered as a quintessence of one

of the models of semiotic (or philosophical) knowledge in Russia in the 1920s–
1930s: semiotics could be interpreted not only as a science which deals with
signs,16 but also as a synthesis or a dialogue of various branches of knowledge
and of human (spiritual) activity in general. And this aspiration “to create a
science of everything”, typical of many Russian intellectuals in the 1920s–30s,
was reflected in Vaginov’s novels.
On the other hand, in this interrelatedness of everything we may discern an
echo of the later Bakhtinian conception of dialogue – in this case, a dialogue
between various domains of science, culture and art. In Bakhtin’s works, the
word dialogue referred to several phenomena, and if its broader meaning
(supposing the sense in general and its transmission – for instance, a dialogue
between different fields of knowledge) appears only in the 1950s, Bakhtin’s
writings from the 1920s already contained some germs of his future theory of
dialogue (cf. Velmezova 2012c). In accordance with Bakhtin’s “dialogical
conception”, all words and ideas of the past are (or will be) always necessarily
reflected in later works and theories in one way or another – exactly as the
books of Svistonov, the central character of Vaginov’s second novel, “are born
from everything”, arising from “hideous marginal notes”, “stolen comparisons”,
“skilfully copied pages”, “intercepted conversations”, “twisted gossips”
(р. 176). The same thing was sometimes said about Vaginov himself: “Vaginov
has no words of his own. All his words are repeated”, “aired by literature”; these
are “borrowed words, borrowed images, borrowed phrases” (Buhshtab
1990[1926]: 275, 277).
2.2. Life and culture: opposition or interpenetration?

If Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue arose, to a considerable degree, from his
thoughts about the interrelated nature of everything (concerned with
meaning), in all Vaginov’s novels, on the contrary, art and culture on the one
16
In the context of interrelatedness of everything and of semiotics interpreted as a science
of signs, cf. Medvedev’s definition of the study of literature as a field belonging to a larger
domain dealing with ideologies: the notion of ideology was connected with that of
superstructure and had evident semiotic orientation, supposing sense, meaning, and
“inner value” (Medvedev 1928); in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
(1930[1929]), Voloshinov also insisted on a “semiotic” definition of ideology, based on
signs.
hand – and reality on the other, hand – are opposed: “Art is rapture, it is an
objective phase of being. In the esthetic [sic. – E. V.] there is neither nature, nor
history, it is a sphere of its own” (р. 49), according to Teptyolkin. Svistonov
also thinks about this distinction between art and life when he considers art as
more real than life itself and “transposes” real people into his prose (р. 194).17
The well-educated characters of The Goat Song lock themselves away from life
in a tower – both in a figurative (they are in an ivory tower) and literal sense
(they meet in a tower in Peterhof):18 ““The tower – that’s culture,” he
[Teptyolkin – E. V.] reflected. “On the summit of culture – that’s where I
stand”” (р. 27; cf. also р. 66–67, 76, 95). As the narrator points out, “strictly
speaking, the idea of the tower was inherent in all my heroes. It wasn’t a specific
trait of Teptyolkin. They would all gladly cloister themselves in a Petersburg
[sic. – E. V.] tower” (р. 118). Other metaphors are used in parallel to the tower
for Vaginov’s characters: a temple (р. 34), a castle (р. 69), an “island” in the
“sea” (р. 13, 47), an (intellectual) “garden” with “fruits” (of culture) (р. 76).
Finally the tower – once again, both in the figurative and literal sense of this
word – is destroyed (р. 158) and high culture in Vaginov’s novels, as we shall
see, turns into ignorance and lack of any education, into senseless classifi-
cations, into the loss of essence of classified objects and a pathetic triumph of
nothing more than their obscure differential features.
The question of the relations between art, culture and life is also reflected in
Vaginov’s earlier works, where he manifestly opposed culture to life. The
former can literally “gorge” living people – that was the main subject of Vagi-
nov’s small prosaic work The Monastery of our Lord Apollo. Wounded by
modern civilization and sheltered by a fraternity, the ancient deity (= Culture)
17
The theme of the relationship between the author and his characters was touched upon
already in The Goat Song. Besides, in the 1920s it was discussed by M. Bakhtin,
L. Pumpyanskij, I. Lapshin, A. Lappo-Danilevskij, T. Rajnov and many other Russian
writers, philologists and philosophers. The problem of the interpenetration of literature
and reality also interested many philologists-formalists. Both in the behaviour of Svistonov
who “transfers” real people to literature and in his above-mentioned technique of collage as
a particular method of creation of literary works (“from hideous marginal notes, stolen
comparisons”, etc.: one should simply write, and “coherence and sense will appear
afterwards” [p. 176]) one may discern an allusion to the ideas of early OPOYAZ
(Obschestvo po izucheniyu poeticheskogo yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language)
which considered art as a simple set of hooks (cf., in particular, V. Shklovskij’s “Art as a
technique” [Shklovskij 1990 (1917)]).
18
Cf. also Vyach. Ivanov’s famous literary salon known as “The Tower”.
recuperates by devouring, one after another, all those who worship it. In
general, the problem of opposition versus interpenetration of life and art was
discussed in the 1920s–30s both in philosophical treatises and in literary works.
For example, this question was in the centre of Bakhtin’s first published
article, Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost’ (Art and Responsibility) (Bakhtin 1997–…
[1919]). There, Bakhtin stands up for a “unification” of these two realms (art
and life) in individual responsibility. Otherwise, a tragedy – like the one of
Vaginov’s characters – is inevitable. That is why it is no coincidence if some
quotations from Bakhtin’s article seem to have been directly transposed to
Vaginov’s novels. Here is an example of this parallelism: “When a man is in the
art, he is not in the life, and vice versa” (Bakhtin, ibid.: 5) – “Art is an extraction
of people from one world and drawing them into another sphere” (Vaginov
2008: 194).
In the 1920s–30s, other philosophers (even those who had rather opposite
theoretical opinions to Bakhtin’s views, in general) dealt with the subject of art
and culture and their relationship with life – for instance, Losev. Taking the
topic of humanities as they were reproduced in literature, the enigma of the
relationship between art and life was central in Losev’s novel Woman-Thinker.
Its several characters (Telegin, Vorobyov and the narrator himself, Nikolaj
Vershinin) hold different opinions on this question and in their reasoning (art
is a “retirement” from life versus life and art are one and the same), once again,
they sometimes seem to repeat whole lines of Bakhtin’s Art and Responsibility:
“[…] a man leaves, for a time, for creation as for another world, away from
“everyday agitation”” (Bakhtin 1997–…[1919], I: 5) – “[…] already due to
the fact that art is art, it is a resignation from life” (Losev 1993[1933–1934], 5:
82).19 And the following is a contrary point of view: “Art and life […] must
become […] one thing” (Bakhtin, ibid.: 6) – “[art is] human life in its concrete
manifestation” (Losev, ibid.: 94).20
On the whole, at the beginning of the 20th century, isolation of art from life
was considered as one of the most vital and pressing problems both by West
European and Russian thinkers – not only by M. Bakhtin and A. Losev, but also
by P. Medvedev, G. Shpet, E. Zamyatin, as well as H. Rickert, E. Husserl, etc.
19
Cf. Medvedev 1928 on a “semiotically” closed essence of art (Medvedev 1928).
20
All these questions were also discussed in other of Losev’s literary works –
Tchaikovsky’s Trio, Theatregoer (Teatral [1932]) – and in his own philosophical papers (cf.
Taho-Godi 2004).
2.3. Philosophy, psychology, philology…

Some fields of humanities are particularly well “presented” in Vaginov’s novels.
Like many thinkers of the early 20th century, Vaginov’s characters did not draw
boundaries between various domains of humanities in which they were
interested. Here, once again, we can remember Bakhtin’s words, this time
about his own researches which were characterized as “philosophical” only for
lack of a better definition, while de facto they were neither linguistic nor
philological, nor literary, nor any other, but were at the intersection of all
corresponding disciplines (Bakhtin 1997–…[1959–1960], V: 306).
As to the spheres of knowledge “exposed” in Vaginov’s prose in detail, his
characters were particularly interested in philosophy, psychology, study of
literature, languages and linguistics.
2.3.1. Philosophy
To begin with, the Unknown Poet and Troitsyn – like S. Frank, F. Stepun,
N. Berdyaev, Ya. Bukshpan, M. Bakhtin and many of their contemporaries –
speak about O. Spengler and K. Leont’ev (р. 58)21 (in the general context of
Spenglerianism, such discussions could probably have been focused on the
latter’s Slavophile ideas). “In the year of Spenglerianism” (p. 59)22 everybody
was discussing Spengler – even “some Ivan Ivanovich” and “some Anatoly
Leonidovich” (р. 58).
Teptyolkin reads various books on philosophy and its history (р. 37–38),
meditates – like the Unknown Poet (р. 81) – about the appearance of new
religions (р. 38), and philistines call him “philosopher” (р. 66). Meanwhile, in
The Goat Song there is a hero bearing “officially” the nickname of “Philo-
sopher” – this is Andrei Ivanovich Andrievsky (р. 67). He recalls Marburg and
21
Bakhtin, for instance, considered cultures as being open (and not closed) to each other
and therefore he used to object to Spengler (cf. Bakhtin 1997–…[1918–1924], I: 51 and
especially Bakhtin 1997–…[1970], VI: 455).
22
The first volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes
[1918]) was translated into Russian in 1923; the corresponding chapter in The Goat Song
is entitled “Some of my heroes [in] 1921–1922”. (Vaginov began to compose this novel,
most probably, in the second half of 1926.) Represented in Vaginov’s prose, the decline of
the “last generation of Saint-Petersburg pre-revolutionary intelligentsia” (Sergievskij 1928:
284) seems to echo Spengler’s “decline of the West”.
“the great Cohen” (р. 68), gives lessons on the methodology of artistic theory
(р. 73)23 and believes that “the world is set, the world is not given; reality is set,
reality is not given” [mir zadan, a ne dan; real’nost’ zadana, a ne dana] (р. 70).
As it has already been pointed out, even if Bakhtin “recognized himself” in this
extract (Nikol’skaya, Erl’ 1999: 524),24 the Philosopher’s thoughts most likely
reproduced a criticism of the notion of given [dannost’], undertaken by
H. Cohen, head of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism: according to
Cohen, the object of cognition is not “given” (as a “thing”), but is only “set”
(“conceived”), because cognition is possible only as a series of approximations
going into infinity, and it never results in any final, definite answer
(Korovashko [quoting V. Asmus] 2003: 31).
2.3.2. Psychology
Vaginov’s characters discuss the “bifurcation of consciousness” (р. 27), speak
about consciousness and subconsciousness (р. 114) – in particular, displaying
interest in Freudianism (р. 75, 190). Their liking of Freud’s theories can also be
seen in their collecting, buying and selling of dreams, in Harpagoniana. One of
23
Cf. Bakhtin’s K voprosam metodologii estetiki slovesnogo tvorchestva (English translation:
On the Question of the Methodology of Aesthetics in Written Works) (Bakhtin 1997–…
[1924]).
24
Analyzing Bakhtin’s biography, A. Korovashko (2003) comes to the conclusion that
Bakhtin could not be the prototype of Vaginov’s “Philosopher”. Once again, it brings us to
the necessity of narrowing the notion of prototype speaking about the history of ideas as it
was reflected in literature (cf. Part 1 of this article).
Many members of the “Bakhtin Circle” were interested in Cohen’s philosophy:
Pumpyanskij wrote about him (cf. for instance Pumpyanskij 2000[1931]), Medvedev
discussed his notion of aesthetics (Medvedev 1928: Part I, Chapter 2); Kagan was his
disciple, etc. In general, many Russian philosophers of the early 20th century considered
Cohen to be one of the few thinkers who were able to comprehend the “Self – Other”
relation as being an asymmetrical and irreversible one. Bakhtin’s deep interest in Cohen’s
works can be explained partly by his confidence in the philosophy of the Marburg School.
Bakhtin considered this trend if not able to solve the whole problem of the “Self and
Other”, then at least to be oriented towards solving of this problem (cf. Velmezova 2012c).
On the whole, at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia, the problem of the “Self –
Other” relationship interested not only philosophers and historians of philosophy
(B. Vysheslavcev, I. Lapshin, A. Vvedenskij, N. Losskij, etc.), but also psychologists
(V. Behterev, L. Vygotskij), etc.
its characters, Anfert’ev, even intends to sell the dreams to the Institute of the
Brain (р. 402 etc.).25 In The Works and Days of Svistonov Ivan Kuku speaks
about dreams (р. 206); in his time, he was “inspired” by Freudianism (р. 190).
However, Vaginov’s prose contains an implicit criticism of Freudian doctrine.
Teptyolkin, for instance, thinks “that even a finger could have a Freudian
interpretation, that lo and behold, a disgusting concept had sprung up so
recently. If he was reading a philosophical poem, a phrase would suddenly rivet
his attention, and even a favourite poem by Solovyov: No replies long silence
since, no need of speeches, // I strive toward you, just like a stream toward the sea, –
took on for him a disgusting meaning” (р. 121). At the beginning of the 20th
century, Freudianism was very popular among many Russian intellectuals26
and, in particular, among the members of the “Bakhtin Circle”: for example,
Sollertinskij (cf. “a young man with a passion for Freudianism” [p. 75] [Ni-
kol’skaya, Erl’ 1999: 524]) and Pumpyanskij were very interested in S. Freud’s
and O. Rank’s discoveries (Miheeva 1988: 49, 51–55; Vasil’ev 1995: 11; Tu-
taeva 2007; Tylkowski 2010). The members of the Circle (including Bakhtin
himself) gave various lectures on Freud’s theories and discussed them during
their own meetings in 1924–1925. Nevertheless, this interest in Freudianism
did not prevent the members of the “Bakhtin Circle” from criticizing Freud.
Without disputing the importance of successes of Freudianism in psychiatry, to
Freudianism as spread out to social sciences Voloshinov opposed the idea that
there existed no abstract “biological individuals” outside particular societies,
but believed that people were always determined by concrete socio-economical
conditions (cf. The Goat Song: “[…] every age has its one characteristic form
or consciousness of surroundings” [p. 85]). Voloshinov (1925; 1930[1929];
1995[1927]) saw in Freud’s theories an extreme manifestation of biologism
(biological determinism) that was “fashionable” in the 1920s, and he refused to
interpret phenomena of culture “à la Freud”. The indignation of Teptyolkin
who did not want to read Freudian theories in poetry (cf. above) can be
compared with that of Voloshinov who – on the example of I. Ermakov’s
interpretation of The Nose, a short story by N. Gogol – criticized the attempts
to apply psychoanalytical methods to the study of literary works (cf.
25
In Petrograd, the Institute of the Human Brain was founded in 1918, on V. Behterev’s
initiative.
26
This situation lasted till the late 1920s, when Freud’s theories were severely criticized,
for political reasons (Stalin’s struggle with Trotskij, one of Freud’s fervent admirers in the
Soviet Union), among others, cf. Lejbin 1999[1991: 253, 258].
Voloshinov 1995[1927]). On the other hand, according to Voloshinov, there is

no reason to follow Freud in dividing the psyche into two parts:
“consciousness” and the “subconscious” (Voloshinov 1925: 203); in its
extreme formulation, this thesis means that there exists no subconscious, as it
was defined by Freud.27 In The Goat Song, the Unknown Poet tries to
implement this point, “abolishing” the “boundary between consciousness and
the subconscious” (p. 114) – even if he acts in an opposite way, compared with
the one outlined by Voloshinov, destroying his consciousness (and not his
subconscious: “I must abolish the boundary between consciousness and the
subconscious. To let in the subconscious, give it a chance to swamp a glowing
consciousness” [p. 114]), which leads to his degradation.
Other members of the “Bakhtin Circle” also criticized Freud, and psycho-
analysis in general. If in his article written in 1924 Pumpyanskij mentioned
Freud in a relatively neutral context while analysing V. Bryusov’s poetry
(Pumpyanskij 2000[1924]: 533–534), in 1925 Pumpyanskij wrote a work
entitled K kritike Ranka i psihoanaliza (Towards a criticism of Rank and
psychoanalysis) in which he belittles the importance of psychoanalysis even for
medicine (Pumpyanskij 2000[1925a]). Later, in Literatura sovremennogo
Zapada i Ameriki (Literature of modern West and America [1929–1930]), Pum-
pyanskij – like Voloshinov – criticizes Freud for his anti-historical approach
and for taking people out of their particular social contexts (cf. the comments
of M. Tutaeva [2007: 490–491]). Medvedev’s attitude towards psychoanalysis
was also negative (Medvedev 1996[1925]). Finally, several decades later, in his
conversations with V. Duvakin, Bakhtin (to whom Voloshinov’s Freudianism
and other above-mentioned works dealing with Freud had been attributed for a
long time) acknowledged that Freud was a “great, brilliant discoverer”, but at
the same time he pointed out that Freud’s views were alien to him and that
there did not exist “any considerable successors of Freudianism” “on Russian
soil”, in general (Besedy 1996[1973]: 204).28
27
According to Voloshinov, the phenomenon of consciousness was closely connected
with the notion of social background (cf. Tylkowski 2010).
28
Even if Bakhtin almost never mentions Freud in his works (cf. however Bakhtin
1997–…[1940a], IV/1: 441; 1997–…[1959–1960], V: 307), his PhD work on Rabelais
was severely criticized as being “methodologically pseudoscientific [and] Freudian”
(Popova 2008: 916). As in the case of other theories and discourses reflected in Vaginov’s
prose, not only the members of “Bakhtin Circle” commented on Freudianism: at that time,
for different reasons (lack of any sociological component, simplistic approach, “biologism”
2.3.3. Study of literature

Kostya Rotikov’s toast “To literary scholarship!” (p. 98) could have been
proposed by many other Vaginov’s heroes. The characters of The Goat Song
enjoy studying literature, which is nevertheless qualified as the “most meaning-
less and most useless occupation” (р. 26): Teptyolkin writes “a treatise about
some unknown poet” (ibid., cf. also p. 38, 46, 47) and probably, devotes
lectures to him (“I’m doing a paper on a remarkable poet” [p 27]).29 The
Unknown Poet also meditates about poetry (р. 89, 93): his imaginary allusions
to Gogol’s and Juvenal’s laughter (p. 84) remind us of the works by Bakhtin
(1997–…[1940b]; 1997–…[early 1940s?]; 1997–…[1940; 1970]) who also
spoke about Juvenal’s and Gogol’s laughter and satire. Besides, along with
Kostya Rotikov they “pore” for hours “over Spanish, English, Italian poets […]
and exchange ideas” (р. 90). Even Misha Kotikov is interested not only in
factual accounts when he tries to restore every minute of Zaevfratskij’s life
(р. 147–148), sometimes he asks what his idol’s opinion was “about asso-
nances” (р. 63). Like Bakhtin or Pumpyanskij, whose “indispensable” dis-
tinguishing feature of research style and methods consisted in “historical and
literary confrontation” (Nikolaev 2000a: 10),30 the heroes of Vaginov’s first
novel are keen on comparative study of literature – especially when they ana-
lyse Pushkin’s works. Teptyolkin “compares [him] against” Chénier (р. 105)31
etc.) Freudianism was criticized by other Russian researchers – such as V. Yurinets,

N. Karev, A. Deborin, etc. (Etkind 1993).
29
It is a clear reference to Pumpyanskij’s talk about the poetry of Vaginov, delivered in
1926 (Nikol’skaya, Erl’ 1999: 516). Several unfinished drafts of writings (1922–1923)
about Vaginov’s poems have been preserved in Pumpyanskij’s archives (ibid., cf. also
Nikolaev 2000а: 23). Vs. Rozhdestvenskij (prototype of Troitsyn in The Goat Song)
analysed Vaginov’s poetry too.
30
It is in classical philology in particular that Pumpyanskij saw an example and model for
European “national” philologies (Nikolaev 2000а: 16), insisting on the unity of the
European culture going back to the antiquity (ibid.: 17), and, therefore, on the continuity
of the European philological and cultural “traditions” (in The Goat Song, the image of
Philostratus [a generalized image of a fine court writer of the epoch of late Hellenism]
seems to embody this continuity – also, there is a likely connection to Lucius Flavius
Philostratus [c. 170 – c. 247], Greek scholar and author of philosophical and historical
books).
31
Pumpyanskij was also interested in these comparisons, cf. Nikolaev 2000a: 23;
Pumpyanskij 2000[1923–1924]: 37, 109–110, 114.
and Parny (р. 27), Kostya Rotikov “finds a huge similarity” between “Pushkin’s
work” and “a sonnet by Camões” (р. 70).32
More generally, in his “life’s basic work” Teptyolkin intends to “give new
definitions to the concept of the romantic and the concept of the classic”
(p. 49). These categories (including in their relationship) were among funda-
mental ones, in particular, for Bakhtin and Pumpyanskij (cf. for instance
Bakhtin 1997–…[1923–1924], I: 235 etc.; 1997–…[1922–1927b], II: 289;
1997–…[1929], II: 97–98; 1997–…[1940a]; 1997–…[1965]; etc.; Pum-
pyanskij 1935; 1947; 2000[1923–1924]; 2000[1939] etc.).
2.3.4. Languages and linguistics in their various aspects

Firstly, some of Vaginov’s characters have a good knowledge of many foreign
languages – like Vaginov himself. Evgenij in Bambocciada is a polyglot (р. 276),
Zhulonbin in Harpagoniana is several times referred to as “teacher of Dutch”33
(р. 383, 392, 399), in The Goat Song Kostya Rotikov, “the Irish poet”,
Agathonov and “the German student” speak “no longer […] in one language,
but in every language all at once” – in Greek, Latin, Italian, French… (р. 141);
Kostya Rotikov used to teach English (p. 140). However the principal expert
on foreign languages in Vaginov’s fiction is Teptyolkin. Not only does he give
private lessons of German (р. 75), but also delivers “free lessons in Egyptian,
Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese”, trying to “uphold a culture
in decline” (р. 86). At his own university lecture he starts “reading the originals
and, there and then, translating them and doing commentary, drawing on God
knows how many poets and in how many languages” (р. 77).34 Teptyolkin
studies new foreign languages with considerable interest – for instance, he
learns Sanskrit (in order to “penetrate into eastern wisdom” [p. 81]), perfects
himself in “the Egyptian language of the classical period” (р. 88), reading “an
32
Cf. Pumpyanskij 2000[1923]: 208.
33
Cf. Wright 2010: 34–35 about this occupation as related to Zhulonbin’s passion for
collecting (cf. the next part of this article).
34
This way, the “culture in decline” was upheld, indeed: “Some students took up studying
Italian, to read about the love of Petrarch and Laura in the original, others going over Latin
to read the letters of Abélard and Héloise. Others started devouring Greek grammar to
read Plato’s Symposium” (p. 78).
Egyptian grammar in German” (р. 87)35 and deploring that “in the whole wide
world, there isn’t a complete dictionary of the Egyptian language” (р. 88).
Sometimes Teptyolkin also tries to make theories about languages – for
example, about the inner form of certain words, including the “phonetic
semantics” of proper names, in particular of his own surname: ““What would
have happened,” he thought, “if my last name hadn’t been Teptyolkin, but
totally different. The two syllables ‘tep-tyol’ are without a doubt onomatopœia.
The word ‘kin’ might have been ominous, a bit like ‘king’, but the consonant ‘l’
prevents this. And if the ‘l’ here combined for another syllable, you would have
gotten ‘Tepteyolkin’. It would have been terribly lugubrious” (р. 169). Here we
can draw a parallel with numerous works created in the 1920s–30s – in
particular, those by Marrists and by adherents of the doctrine of imyaslavie,
glorification of the name – which were based on the anti-Saussurean idea of the
(implicit) influence of words’ forms on their semantics (cf. Velmezova 2007:
263–286): in this context, P. Florenskij’s study of the “phonetico-ontological
structure” [zvukovo-ontologicheskoe stroenie] (Florenskij 1993[1926]: 18) of
proper nouns is particularly relevant.
Besides, Teptyolkin correctly states that the Egyptian language belongs to
the “Semitic-Hamitic” “group” of languages (р. 88).36 Passing by “rather unruly
corpulent gals who were mouthing off with some choice words” (р. 106), Tep-
tyolkin is pondering over the phenomenon of argot: ““The dialect of robbers’
dens,” he decided. “It’s interesting to analyze from where and how this dialect
appeared.” He went back in his mind to XIII century France, when argot was
created” (ibid.). It is also worth mentioning that in the first third of the 20th
century interest in argot as a particular “social dialect” in Russia was manifested
mainly by linguists who (had) worked in Saint-Petersburg (Petrograd, Lenin-
grad…), where Teptyolkin “lived”: I. Baudouin de Courtenay (Boduen de
Kurtene 1963[1908]), B. Larin (1977[1928a; 1928b]), E. Polivanov (1928;
1931a; 1931b),37 L. Yakubinskij (1930; Ivanov, Yakubinskij 1932), V. Zhir-
munskij (1978[1936]). Sometimes these researchers understood argot diffe-
rently; nevertheless from time to time they discussed the origins and evolution
of the corresponding phenomena (including in France [cf. Larin 1928b]).
35
It could be W. Spiegelberg’s Demotische Grammatik (1925).
36
Today this designation is out of date; linguists speak rather about Afro-Asiatic family of
languages than about a “Hamito-Semitic group”.
37
Polivanov’s interest in argot was also reflected in Kaverin’s The Troublemaker, or
Evenings on the Vasil’evskij Island, cf. Velmezova 2012b.
V. Zhirmunskij, for instance, would have shared Teptyolkin’s opinion con-

cerning the time of appearance of argot as a “dialect of robbers”: according to
him, in France, “the word “argot” in the sense of “dialect of criminals” [yazyk
prestupnikov] goes back to the XIII–XIV centuries” (Zhirmunskij 1978[1936]:
121).
Also, Teptyolkin’s thoughts about the single common language of “the
Roman Empire once again taking wing” (р. 27) betray some sociolinguistic
interests; besides, if “at the word “imperial” something poetic would awake in
Teptyolkin” (ibid.), it can be an allusion to Pumpyanskij’s idea about the
connection between Russian versification and the very idea of empire or
classical monarchy (Pumpyanskij 2000[1922]; cf. for instance his assumption
about the “[c]onnection of Pushkin’s poetry”, “classical monarchy” and
“[o]rigins of the state” [ibid.: 590, cf. also Pumpyanskij 2000[1923], etc.). A
number of allusions to Soviet linguistic politics in the 1920s–30s can also be
detected in Bambocciada: commenting on an inscription on a sweet wrapper
which Evgenij sends to Toropulo, he mentions in passing the replacement of
the Arabic alphabet by the Latin script in Tatar (р. 376), which indeed took
place in 1927.38
Finally, Teptyolkin’s “life’s basic work” is entitled The Hierarchy of Meanings
(р. 48).39
2.4. The Hierarchy of Meanings and other classifications:

from high culture… towards distinctive features?
In Part 2.1 we have already seen that many fields of knowledge interrelate for
Vaginov’s characters. It is at this intersection of linguistics, study of literature
and, perhaps, philosophy that Teptyolkin creates his life’s basic work, The
Hierarchy of Meanings. An Introduction to the Study of Poetic Works (р. 48–49,
81).40 The issue here is, in particular, that “words are a nest for meanings”
38
In 1939, a Cyrillic alphabet was adapted for Tatar.
39
In connection with this, cf. the title of one of Pumpyanskij’s articles: Smysl poezii
Pushkina (The sense of Pushkin’s poetry) which begins with the following words: “Thus, the
hierarchy of symbols could be stable only as a classical (monumental) one…”
(Pumpyanskij 2000[1919]: 564).
40
Cf. in this regard the words of the Unknown Poet: “Poetry is a special occupation […]
It’s a horrible and dangerous spectacle. You’ll take some words, juxtapose them in an
unusual way and you’ll start to brood over them one night, a second, a third, you keep
(p. 49) – this metaphor of nest(s), used already by V. Dal’, was widespread in
the 1920s; it was used, among others, by N. Marr (cf. Velmezova 2007) and by
Bakhtin (1997–…[1922–1927a], II: 356) referring to V. Vinogradov’s work
about A. Ahmatova.
The work which consisted not only in the description of the meanings of
words (р. 70, 89, 93), but also in their sorting and ordering (cf. the word
hierarchy in The Hierarchy of Meanings), reminds us once again of the early
stages in the evolution of semiotic ideas in the Soviet Union: at least for a part
of linguists, semiotic researches began with semantic ones in the 1920s–30s (cf.
Velmezova 2010).
Any hierarchy presupposes a classification, an ordering or a sorting. At the
foundation of The Hierarchy of Meanings is Teptyolkin’s above-mentioned
versatility. This erudition and the (even implicit) search for “integral know-
ledge” distinguish the heroes of Vaginov’s first novel. Later on, his characters’
interests become more and more utilitarian and down-to-earth – even if the
word culture is still considered as a “great” one (р. 202). For instance, in The
Works and Days of Svistonov, Svistonov also reads a lot and buys various books
(р. 178, 246 etc.), he attends lectures of the Geographical society (p. 217), has
a conversation about some phenomena which recall an (“artificial”) con-
vergence of various biological species (they inoculate apple trees with birches,
oaks, lime trees [р. 250] – which also reminds us of I. Michurin’s horticultural
experiments),41 etc. However Svistonov behaves this way no longer for an
abstract love for the beautiful, but only in search of plots for his prose
(р. 178) – as Vaginov himself used to do. More or less well-read Kuku has
interests that echo those of others (cf. for instance р. 190), or puts up his
knowledge for show, trying to impress the public (р. 206). Even his seeming
yearning for versatility is all put on (р. 190). As to pseudo-esotericist Psi-
hachev, according to Svistonov he knows about everything that he speaks
about (Isis and her priests, the school of Pythagoras, etc.) less than he would be
thinking about the juxtaposed words. And you notice: the hand of a meaning reaches out
from under one word and links with the hand that has appeared from under another word,
and a third word will put out a hand and you’re engulfed by a completely new world
opening up beyond words” (p. 93–94). Teptyolkin’s book remained unfinished, just like
the conception of evolution of Russian literature worked out by Pumpyanskij (which was
never made into a monograph).
41
Discussions about convergence in biology were very frequent in Russia in the 1920s,
mainly due to L. Berg’s Nomogenez (Nomogenesis) (Berg 1922); about the phenomenon of
convergence in humanities of that time cf. Velmezova 2007.
capable of (p. 233). The characters of Vaginov’s third novel (Bambocciada),

starting with Evgenij Felinflein, manifest interest not only in reading as such
(cf. for instance р. 276–277), in music and its history (р. 278–279, 281 etc.), in
painting (р. 291) – like Teptyolkin and other characters of The Goat Song, and,
like members of the “Bakhtin Circle”, they often behave as Kulturträgers
(р. 278, 290–291, 346, 349 etc.), – but (to a much wider extent than characters
of the first two novels) in the material aspects of culture (in particular cookery
and its history). It is the case of Toropulo who has studied history, geography
and foreign languages (p. 292) and who reads a lot (p. 314, 315, etc.) only
because of his interest in gastronomy (the lectures he delivers in his private
circle are also about cookery and its history [p. 298]). He discovers cookery in
the works of Goethe (р. 319), is interested in Pushkin as a heavy eater of cutlets
Pozharsky (р. 334) and in China as a “cultural” (in the art of cookery, of
course) nation (p. 334). Under the influence of Toropulo, Evgenij also deve-
lops an interest in gastronomy (р. 275–276). Besides, the characters of Bam-
bocciada are keen collectors of objects from everyday life – for instance,
tableware (p. 338), sweet wrappers and cigarette boxes (р. 305), soap wrappers
(р. 326) etc. For them, these objects reflect a particular “domain of the human
spirit” (р. 305) and they change with every passing epoch. This is how they
decide to create a Society for collecting small things (р. 326).
Even if already in The Goat Song the educated and well-read Kostya Rotikov
collects vulgar and tasteless objects (р. 126–127, 140 etc.), in Vaginov’s last
novel any high culture seems to be absent: heroes are interested only in col-
lecting small things (the corresponding Society is “transposed” from Bamboc-
ciada to Harpagoniana, with some of its characters – Toropulo, Punshevich…).
In this novel, heroes read much less – even if here again they undertake some
attempts to see great things in small ones, to get access to culture via little
objects (р. 458–459, 461). Besides, in the collections – real or potential – of
Vaginov’s characters, there are not only material objects, but also dreams and
“verbal innovations”, at least a part of which is referred to as “postfolklore”,
today. Vaginov’s heroes collect anecdotes, beautiful phrases from books, slips
of the tongue, language mistakes (р. 383), swearwords (р. 383, 386, 391),
“holidays of new life” (р. 459), street songs (р. 400, 423), thieves’ cant
(р. 423), etc. Although collecting words is a novelty typical of the last novel,
the interest in words and expressions appears in Vaginov’s earlier works: in
Bambocciada, Evgenij reads with much interest epitaphs at a horse cemetery
(p. 369) and inscriptions in a pavilion (p. 364–366),42 and in The Goat Song
Kostya Rotikov records vulgar epitaphs (р. 157) and words written on the walls
of toilets (р. 122–123).
Comparing Vaginov’s first and last novels, we notice that they contrast not
only in the degree of their characters’ versatility and education, but also in their
intensity of reading (these two phenomena are interconnected, of course). For
instance, at the beginning of the first novel, Teptyolkin visits book shops and
book stalls (р. 79); like many members of the “Bakhtin Circle”, he is interested
in Boethius (р. 38),43 Chateaubriand (p. 74), Petrarch and Boccaccio (р. 79)
etc.; even once he has become philistine, he reads Ronsard, Petrarch, Poliziano
(р. 119), Cicero (р. 161), Guarini (р. 162), a brief history of world literature
(р. 132), muses upon Dante and Beatrice (р. 168), “hurries to the bookstore,
as if to the water of life” (р. 160). The narrator, also a frequenter of bookshops
(р. 97), looks for Dante, Philostratus and Bayle’s encyclopedia44 (ibid.). As the
Unknown Poet observes, “[w]e all love books […] Philological education and
interests – it’s that which distinguishes us from the new people” (р. 98), those
“distinguished by the impossible form of exposition, the complete absence of
the spirit of criticism, utter ignorance and out and out brashness” (р. 80) – as,
for instance, characters of Vaginov’s last novel, Harpagoniana, including
classifiers.
The theme of ordering, sorting and classifying appears more or less expli-
citly already in Vaginov’s first three novels: as we have seen, even Teptyolkin’s
Hierarchy of Meanings in The Goat Song is a kind of classification. In The Works
and Days of Svistonov, Svistonov tries to sort his books classifying them in
accordance with several different parameters (p. 247–248): it is hard work for
him, because “every division is conventional” and therefore relative. In Bamboc-
42
Like Vaginov himself who was keen on urban folklore (Vaginov 1999[1933–1934]:
500–511). In general, there was much interest in postfolklore in the 1920s: they collected
new proverbs, humorous rhymes, etc.
43
According to Bakhtin, Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy (the book which
Teptyolkin looks for) crowned the evolution of Menippean satire in antiquity. Also, the
influence of Bakhtin’s theories on Vaginov can be noticed here: as we have already stressed,
Vaginov met Bakhtin when the latter was working on the problems of Menippean satire as
a particular genre of classical literature – but this idea about On the Consolation of
Philosophy was explicitly expressed only in the second, revised version of Bakhtin’s study of
Dostoevsky’s works (Bakhtin 1997–…[1963]). On parallels between The Goat Song and
the genre of Menippean satire cf. Orlova 2009.
44
P. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695–1697).
ciada, Toropulo outlines some principles of classifying of texts on signboards

(р. 326). But it is in Harpagoniana that the passion of personages for classifying
reaches its apogee and becomes a central idea of certain collectors. It is already
all the same for them what they collect and classify – scraps of nails, cigarette
ends, dry leaves, old medicines, empty bottles, clysters, pencil stumps etc.
(р. 379–381): Vaginov’s last novel took its title from the name of Molière’s
personage, stingy Harpagon; it could also be entitled “Plushkiniana”, after a
character in Gogol’s Dead Souls, the miser Plushkin.
The issue here is the importance of classifications as such: classification is
considered as “the greatest art”, assuring the memory itself and the adequate
comprehension of reality. Therefore, the classifier is “the best of people”
(р. 435). As Vaginov himself commented on this, “it is possible to collect and
to systematize everything, and everything is interesting” (cf. Nappel’baum
1988[1981]: 92).
Not only is it all the same for the characters what they collect, but the
essence of the objects is left aside and forgotten: the only important thing now
is their distinctive features which permit to classify these things and which are
sought for and established by the classifiers. For instance, when systematizing
various notes Zhulonbin does not even pay attention to their contents, but only
counts the number of vowels, consonants, nouns and adjectives (р. 437).
Expressing his credo, he says the following: “We must classify objects, study the
objects immanently, so to say. What do we care about all these pictures? We are
not children attracted by the diversity of colours and images” (р. 468); “for me,
objects have no content; I am concerned only with systematisation” (p. 460).
Therefore, simultaneously with disappearance of high culture as opposed to
life, Vaginov’s characters develop an interest in various classifications, in
establishing relationships between objects, while the essence of these objects is
pushed into the background. In addition, the attention of the lecturer shifts
from collectors and classifiers to their objects. Once again, speaking about the
evolution of humanities, representatives of structuralism (appearing or already
blossoming – depending on the country – at that time) were often reproached
for this. By definition, structuralists were (and are) interested not in objects or
phenomena as such, but in their relationships within the framework of a system
/ structure, and in their distinctive features which permit(ted) to establish such
relations. This neglect of elements as such and particular attention to their
relationships were typical especially of the early period in the evolution of
structuralism, before the 1950s (Vinogradov 1990: 497). Metaphorically, this
tendency is reflected in Vaginov’s last novel as switching the attention from

objects to their classifying.45
The author’s attitude towards this seems evident: for him, such a world is
unacceptable, and it is seemingly not without reason that in Vaginov’s last
novel, no character incarnates the author’s traits – in contrast to his first three
novels where the Unknown Poet, Svistonov and Felinflein do. However this
trend of evolution of Vaginov’s prose can be foreseen already taking into
account the unfolding of the first novel: Philostratus – the living picture of the
antique culture and its continuity – was always at Teptyolkin’s side at the
beginning (p. 27), but he disappears in the end (p. 128).
As we can see, all of Vaginov’s novels reproduce not only some theories and
works of particular researchers of his time, but also general discourses which
were specific to the Russian humanities in the 1920s–30s. The evolution of
Vaginov’s artistic world evidently corresponds to his perception of the huma-
nities around him: their certain tendencies and peculiarities (for instance, a
transition from “high culture” to “distinctive features”) become unacceptable
for the writer in the 1930s.
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Об отражении истории гуманитарных наук в романах К. Вагинова

В конце двадцатых – начале тридцатых годов прошлого века русский поэт и писатель
Константин Вагинов (1899–1934) пишет четыре романа, в которых воспроизводятся
различные дискурсы, свойственные гуманитарным наукам (философии, психологии,
лингвистике, литературоведению) в России в то время. Работа по реконструкции
источников соответствующих теорий и “скрытых” цитат позволяет вписать прозу
Вагинова в общий интеллектуальный контекст его эпохи. Анализ прозы Вагинова в
свете истории идей дает возможность понять, как некоторые направления филологии
и философии того времени интерпретировались в определенных кругах советской
интеллигенции (например, среди писателей и поэтов – современников Вагинова).
Кроме того, такое направление работы позволяет предложить новую интерпретацию
эволюции прозы Вагинова, соответствующую восприятию писателем гуманитарных
наук его эпохи: некоторые особенности советского гуманитарного дискурса со
временем становятся для Вагинова неприемлемыми.
Humanitaarteaduste ajaloo peegeldumine K. Vaginovi romaanides

1920ndate lõpus, 1930ndate alguses kirjutas vene poeet ja kirjanik Konstantin Vaginov
(1899–1934) neli romaani, milles peegelduvad tolle aja vene humanitaarteadustes (filo-
soofias, psühholoogias, keele- ja kirjandusteaduses) levinud erinevad diskursused. Vasta-
vate teooriate ja “varjatud” viidete allikaid uurides ning nende autoreid kindlaks määrates
saame paigutada Vaginovi proosa selle ajastu üldisesse intellektuaalsesse konteksti.
Vaginovi proosateoste analüüsimine ideede ajaloo seisukohalt aitab mõista, kuidas
tõlgendasid filoloogilisi ja filosoofilisi suundi Nõukogude intellektuaalide teatud rühmad
(nt Vaginovi kaasaegsed kirjanikud ja luuletajad). Lisaks saame sellele tuginedes esitada
Vaginovi romaanide ja nende arengu uue tõlgenduse, mis kajastab Vaginovi vaateid
tolleaegsetele humanitaarteadustele: paljud arengusuunad ja iseärasused muutusid kirjani-
kule 1930ndatel aastatel vastuvõtmatuks.
The image of neighbours:

Latvian and Lithuanian literature in Estonia
Anneli Mihkelev
Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences,

Roosikrantsi 6, 10119 Tallinn, Estonia
e-mail: milenna@utkk.ee
Tallinn University,
Narva mnt 25, Tallinn, Estonia
e-mail: anneli.mihkelev@tlu.ee
Abstract. The translated text has a specific value in the new culture: it can be a translation
of a literary text, and it can be a translation of culture, i.e. a synchronic text of a cultural
system. There are two principal concepts which are used in the present article: ‘translation’
and ‘reception’. Reception begins with the selection of the author, literary or historical
epoch, literary style, or ideology. So, every translation and reception begins with reading,
and every reading creates meanings. At the same time, reception is also translation: it is a
moment when two distinct cultures mix, and this situation needs understanding of the
other. The translated texts create the image of the translated culture and/or nation. The
article examines texts from Latvian and Lithuanian literatures from the second half of the
18th century to the early 20th century which have been translated into Estonian: what kind
of texts are translated in different periods and by different translators (the selection of the
authors and the texts); what the purpose of the translations is; how these translations
translate Latvian or Lithuanian culture into Estonian; and how Estonians understand and
accept these translated texts. And, finally, how these translated texts create the image of the
translated culture and/or nation.
The story of Latvian and Lithuanian literature in Estonia is the story of re-
ception: the reception of another culture through literature, which begins with
the reading and translation process and includes interpretations of the text in
new contexts. Thus, there are two principal concepts, which are used in the
present article: ‘translation’ and ‘reception’. It is possible to discern two kinds
of relationships between translation and reception: according to Peeter Torop
The image of neighbours 433
(1999: 20–21), the first is translation as reception and the second is translation
and reception. However, both relationships are not totally divergent, as will
also become obvious in the present article. The first step in analysing them is
when a translated text emerges in a new context, and a new cultural situation
begins at the point in which we see translation as reception.
There are several interpretations of the term ‘reception’; one of them has
been suggested by Erkki Vainikkala: “[…] the term “reception” refers to the
juncture where text and reading meet and meaning is produced […]” (Vainik-
kala 1993: 5). This formulation includes both types of the relationship between
translation and reception, as every translation derives from reading, and every
reading creates meanings. At the same time, the distinguishing component in
the translation process is the reader: to regard the translator as a reader is to
regard translation as reception, and to speak of readers who read the translation
is to speak of the reception of the translation or, in other words, translation and
reception.
Reception begins at the moment of selecting the author: it may be the
reception of a literary or historical epoch or literary style, or the reception of
different ideologies. At the same time, reception is also translation: it is the
moment when two distinct cultures mix, and that situation requires mutual
understanding. Both kinds of relationships between translation and reception
depend on each other, and the translated text has a specific value in the new
culture: it can be a translation of a literary text and it can also be a translation of
culture. The translation can be a diachronic text of literary history and it can be
a synchronic text of a cultural system (Torop 1999: 20). An example of the
latter type of translation would be Eduard Vilde’s translations of Rūdolfs
Blaumanis’ stories which are analysed in this article.
The above-mentioned relationships and processes are connected with Juri
Lotman’s concepts of culture and boundaries. According to Juri Lotman,
“[e]very culture begins by dividing the world into ‘its own’ internal space and
‘their’ external space. How this binary division is interpreted depends on the
typology of the culture. But the actual division is one of the human cultural
universals” (Lotman 2000: 131). It is the old question of the self and the other.
And it is also a question of boundaries – one of the primary mechanisms of
semiotic individuation (ibid.). The internal or “own” space and the external or
“their” space are separated by boundaries and on these boundaries translation
of each message takes place, because “[t]he boundary is bilingual and
polylingual”, and “it both separates and unites” (Lotman 2000: 136). Lotman
434 Anneli Mihkelev
has written: “On the level of the semiosphere it implies a separation of ‘one’s
own’ from ‘someone else’s’, the filtering of what comes from outside and is
treated as a text in another language, and the translation of this text into one’s
own language. In this way external space becomes structured” (Lotman 2000:
140).
Culture is not a static phenomenon; on the contrary:
The dynamics of culture can be represented as neither an isolated immanent

process nor the passive sphere of external influences. Both these tendencies are
realised in conditions of mutual tension from which they cannot be abstracted
without the distortion of their very essence.
Intersection with other cultural structures may be achieved in a variety of ways.
Thus, an “external” culture in order to enter into our world must cease to be
“external” to it. It must find for itself a name and a place in the language of the
culture into which it seeks to insert itself. But in order to change from “alien”
(chuzhoi) to “own” (svoi) this external culture must, as we can see, submit to a new
name in the language of the “internal” culture. The process of renaming does not
take place without leaving a trace of that content which has received the new name.
(Lotman 2009: 133)
Translation is the space of reception of literature and culture, and translation is

arranged by the translator; even the selection of the method of translating is
reception, according to Peeter Torop (1999: 20–21).
All the above-mentioned processes and relationships have been taking place
in the interactions between Estonian and Latvian literatures, as well as between
Estonian and Lithuanian literatures.
Latvian literature in Estonia

The literatures of Latvia and Estonia are quite young, but before the national
literatures came into being, the early contacts between the two nations were
described in the old chronicles. Heinrici Chronicon Livoniae is one of the oldest
documents about the ethnic groups living by the Baltic Sea. Heinrici Chronicon
Livoniae tells the story of Germans warring against the Estonian pagans, and
about the role of Latvians in this war. The chronicle, written in Latin by
Henricus de Lettis, covers the period from 1180–1227.
Initially, information about contacts between the two nations was stored in
oral folklore. In the 18th century, such information began to appear in literary
texts and translations by Baltic Germans. These texts and translations

represented Enlightenment ideas and culture. August Wilhelm Hupel (1737–
1819) and Peter Ernst Wilde (1732–1785) published the magazine Lühhike
Öppetus (Brief Instruction, 1766–1767) in Põltsamaa. The Latvian translation,
Latviešu Ārste (Latvian Doctor), was published in 1768–1769 and served as the
foundation for Latvian journalism.
Probably the first text which was translated from Latvian into Estonian was
Gotthard Friedrich Stender’s (1714–1796) Jaukas pasakas in stāsti (Pleasant
Tales and Stories, 1766). Friedrich Wilhelm von Willmann (1746–1819)
translated and complemented Stender’s stories, and published them in the
book Juttud ja Teggud (Tales and Deeds, 1782). Stender’s stories were
influenced by Aesop, Luther and even Arabic fairy tales (Arabian Nights)
(Vinkel 1975: 247; Annus et al. 2001: 44).
The next important cultural contact that deserves mentioning is Johann
Gottfried von Herder’s (1744–1803) book Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (The
Voice of the People in Songs, 1807) where Latvian and Estonian folk songs,
collected by August Wilhelm Hupel (1737–1819), were first published. The
first collection of Latvian folk songs (dainas) in Estonian translation appeared
in 1985.
The first translation of a literary text from Latvian into Estonian, Õnne tee,
ehk kuidas võib rikkaks saada (The Way to Happiness, or How to Get Rich, 1866),
was done by Mats Grant (1836–1884), an Estonian peasant who studied in
Salacgrīva, Latvia; the author of the text is unknown. Most probably, Grant also
translated the love story Turaidas jumprava (The Virgin of Turaida, 1856) into
Estonian.
The contacts between Estonian and Latvian intellectuals were quite
frequent during the 19th century. Both Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–
1882) and Friedrich Robert Faehlmann (1798–1850) enjoyed good co-
operation with their Latvian colleagues, and they both were influenced by
Garlieb Helwig Merkel’s (1769–1850) works. Even so, the texts written in both
Estonian and Latvian during the 19th century do not often mention their
neighbours. Perhaps the Latvian texts, for instance Lāčplēsis (Bear Slayer), are
more concerned with the Latvian-Estonian relationship than the Estonian
texts: in the Latvian epic, the Estonian hero Kalevipoeg is mentioned, but the
Latvian hero is not mentioned in the Estonian epic at all.
436 Anneli Mihkelev
Rūdolfs Blaumanis (1863–1908) in Estonia

The friendship between Eduard Vilde (1865–1933) and Rūdolfs Blaumanis
(1863–1908) established a new level of quality in Estonian and Latvian
translations. Blaumanis established the genre of the short story in Latvian
literature and he was in contact with the Estonian writer Eduard Vilde, the
initiator of the Estonian realist novel, when (in 1889 and 1890) they both
worked for the German newspaper Zeitung für Stadt und Land. Blaumanis and
Vilde were colleagues who were interested in each other’s work. Vilde wrote
that Blaumanis intended to translate his short story Punane mulk (The Red
Mulk) into Latvian, but the idea was never realised (Kuningas 1963: 138). At
the same time, Vilde translated three of Blaumanis’ short stories into Estonian,
although he did it through German translations which had been done by
Blaumanis himself, and in 1892 Blaumanis’ first collection of prose Õlest katuse
all (Under a Thatched Roof) was published in Estonian in Tallinn. It seems that
Vilde was the first serious translator to introduce Latvian literature to Estonian
readers. A little later, he also translated some fragments from Blaumanis’
satirical short story Jutt seast, kes rääkis (A Story about the Pig Who Talked),
published in 1891 in the collection Naer on terviseks (Laughter is Healthy)
(Kuningas 1963: 138). Speaking of translation as reception, we must ask how
Vilde perceived Blaumanis’ works, why these works were interesting to Vilde,
and how he as a translator presented Blaumanis’ works to Estonian readers.
The three stories published in Blaumanis’ first collection in Estonian were
Raudupi perenaine (The Mistress of Raudupi; Raudupiete), Raha sukkades
(Money in the Stockings; Nauda zeķēs), and Pikne (Thunder; Pērkoņa negaiss)
(Vilde 1892). All three are realistic and important works, and were reprinted in
1960. It is significant that the first collection also contains a preface by Vilde in
which he noted that it was a pity that two neighbours, Estonians and Latvians,
did not co-operate in cultural or literary societies and organizations, and he
hoped that Estonians would become more acquainted with a famous writer
from our neighbouring nation through these three stories. He stated that the
young Blaumanis was the best and the most famous Latvian storyteller (Vilde
1892: 3–4).
Vilde used a German translation which had been done by Blaumanis
himself and, judging by his preface, we can understand that Vilde’s primary
purpose was to translate culture, the synchronic text from a cultural system, not
the particular text. He believed that through these three texts Estonians would
get to know something new and interesting about their neighbours.
Another very significant aspect that Vilde emphasized in his preface was
Blaumanis’ realism. Adherence to realism drew the two writers together.
Though Vilde noted that Blaumanis represented nature very poetically in his
stories, it was still meaningful that his presentation of life seemed natural,
making it possible to learn from his writing how Latvians actually lived.
Blaumanis’ realism was very inspiring to Vilde when he decided to translate his
stories.
The next translator of Blaumanis’ texts, Aleksis Rebane (1868–1926), knew
the Latvian language very well and translated directly from Latvian. He
continued Vilde’s tradition of stressing realism through the short stories he
selected: Puhas hing (Pure Soul; Baltais), Tants kolmekesi (Dance of the Three;
Dancis pa trim), Soosse vajuja (Subsidence to Mire; Purva bridējs) etc., and
Blaumanis’ first translated play into Estonian, Ärakadunud poeg (The Prodigal
Son; Pazudušais dēls, 1902), which was staged by Karl Menning at the
Vanemuine Theatre in Tartu in 1907 (Kuningas 1963: 139).
The translations by Vilde and Rebane were also translations of literary style.
A more complex question is whether both men also translated ideologies. It
seems that ideology was not very important to Vilde as regards his translations,
although he himself wrote quite revolutionary stories at the time he made the
translations. Blaumanis was his soul mate and, when translating his stories, the
main thing was to introduce Latvian literature and culture to Estonians.
However, at the same time ideologies emerged through the realist text: through
the translator’s selection and through the presentation of Latvian villages and
peasants. The opposition between the rich and the poor, the life of poor
peasants, the power of money – all of these topics also carry ideological
meanings stemming mainly from leftist ideology which was prevalent in
Europe at that time and which interested and shaped the young Vilde when he
was in Berlin during 1890–1892. In those years, Vilde’s ideological world-view
solidified after completing his translations of Blaumanis.
Generally, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, ideologies were
transmitted through literary texts, including translations. And that reception
depended directly on the translator’s world-view and selections. The
relationship between translation and reception, or translation and the reader,
was not presented in the official criticism or the secondary literature in as
scholarly a manner as it was in the 1920s–30s, although polemics on realism
438 Anneli Mihkelev
existed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as well. Vilde was one of the
innovators in the Estonian literary criticism at that time: so, we can see how a
translator influenced readers through his translated texts, literary criticism and
secondary literature (his preface for Blaumanis’ first collection also indicates
this). Consequently, we may say that Vilde had two roles in the literary
process: he represented translation as reception, and he also represented the
relationship between translation and reception.
The third important translator of Blaumanis’ texts was Mart Pukits (1874–
1961), and his preferences were quite different from those of Vilde and
Rebane. He translated directly from the Latvian language in a very refined style.
This also marked a change in the translation of Blaumanis’ texts: Pukits
preferred Blaumanis’ comedies. He translated the plays Vargad (The Thieves;
Zagļi), Magusast pudelist (From the Sweet Bottle; No saldenās pudeles), the
drama Paha vaim (The Evil Spirit, Ļaunais gars), and Blaumanis’ most popular
play, Rätsepad Sillamatsil (Tailor-Days in Silmači; Skroderdienas Silmačos), etc.
The last one was produced at the Vanemuine Theatre in 1912 and was very
popular in Estonia, along with The Thieves which was performed in the
countryside about five hundred times (Kuningas 1963: 139). It seems that
Pukits translated mainly the text, not the culture. The situations in Blaumanis’
comedies were not totally strange to Estonian readers; these situations did not
need translation, but the text had to be translated well because of the verbal
humour intrinsic to the genre of comedy. At the same time, the translation of
comedies creates the feeling that two different nations, cultures and languages
are not alien, and this is the mystery of comedy: it connects different nations
through laughter. The translator’s duty is to retrieve laughter from the original
text and to translate it into his own language or culture.
The last collection of Blaumanis’ short stories in Estonian, Kevadised hallad
(The Spring Frosts; Salna pavasarī), was translated by Oskar Kuningas and
published in 1960 (Blaumanis 1960). The collection includes 17 stories (some
of them are reprints), and a rather good afterword by the translator which
includes an exhaustive overview on the life and literary works of Blaumanis. It is
remarkable that Oskar Kuningas avoided the ideological assessments and
extremes of the 1960s. This book presents the best selection of Blaumanis’
works and some remarks on their context, but it does not teach or dictate
directly how to read these stories. Thus, the translator and his preferences were
transmitted into the text, his reception being expressed in the selection of the
text and in the style of the translation. It is noticeable that Blaumanis’ texts
were published in a new context in 1960. This demonstrated the timeless value
of his works and Blaumanis was received as a Latvian classic by Estonian
culture. The last translation of a text by Blaumanis to apper in Estonian was
Oskar Kuningas’ translation of the play Tules (In the Fire; Ungunī), published in
1986 (Blaumanis 1986).
Rainis (1865–1929) in Estonia

Rainis (real name Jānis Pliekšāns) is another very famous Latvian writer from
the same period as Blaumanis whose works are connected with Estonian
culture through different motifs. Rainis’ texts, translated into Estonian, contain
indications of double cultural translation, and are thus a very interesting case
not only for Latvian but also for Estonian literature.
Estonian translators began to translate Rainis’ works quite late – in the
1920s when the author was already about 60 years old. When Mart Pukits
began his translation work, he stressed Rainis’ Marxist worldview, and the
connection with leftist ideology to a great extent determined Rainis’ reception
by official critics in the Soviet times. Two volumes of Rainis’ selected works
were published in 1965 including his poems and plays. The afterword written
by the talented translator Karl Aben was still strongly influenced by ideology,
but this was typical of that time. However, Rainis’ texts provide a good material
for ideology, and sometimes it is possible to use his texts in the service of
different ideologies. We must agree with the Latvian researcher Andre Šedriks,
who has written: “Whatever ideological interpretation one wants to give Rainis’
work, his life was totally committed to the emancipation of his people” (Šedriks
1979: 40).
In terms of Estonian influences on Rainis’ works, Šedriks maintains con-
cerning Rainis play The Golden Steed (Zelta zirgs; Kuldratsu, 1909):
Although the Latvians appear to have a definite claim on this tale by virtue of
numerous variants, Rainis used an Estonian folk tale on the same theme as a
source of raw material for his play The Golden Steed. Rainis, of course, was
acquainted with the Latvian tale, but the Estonian version which he had on his
shelf in a German translation may have struck him as perhaps more dramatic and
easier to adapt. […]
In constructing The Golden Steed, Rainis utilized some of the motifs of the
Estonian folk tale but also invented his own to suit his personal vision. (Šedriks
1979: 43–44)
440 Anneli Mihkelev
Voldemārs Kalpiņš has written that the ideas of Rainis’ play The Golden Steed
were drawn from Kreutzwald’s fairy tale Kuidas kuningatütar seitse aastat oli
maganud (How the Princess Had Slept Seven Years; Kuningas 1979b: 5). At the
same time, a story about a princess who slept on a glass mountain is well known
in northern Europe. That fact not only connects Estonian and Latvian folklore,
but also places them in a wider European context and indicates the relation-
ships between European nations.
However, we can find other motifs from Estonian folklore in Rainis’ works.
It is an important fact that all these motifs are quite tragic or dramatic. Kalpiņš
and Kuningas have observed and described the motifs originating in the
Estonian epic Kalevipoeg and the mythological story Koit ja Hämarik (Dawn
and Dusk; Kuningas 1979a: 3). It is known that Rainis had read the Kalevipoeg
in German, and he also translated some songs from the German language. The
motif, which he used in his drama Blow, Wind! (Pūt, vējiņi!, 1914) is the orphan
motif from Kalevipoeg. Both the slave girl from the Kalevipoeg and Baiba from
Rainis’ drama were orphans and had to work hard for their stepfamily. The
orphan motif certainly points to several variants of the Cinderella story that
have been transmitted all over the world. But it is interesting that Rainis also
uses another motif from the Kalevipoeg: the motif of Saarepiiga, the maiden
who lived on an island. After she had met Kalevipoeg a tragic love story ensued,
and Saarepiiga jumped into the sea and drowned.
Johannes Semper (1997: 100–104) has analysed the folk motifs in the
Kalevipoeg and he sees a parallel between Kalevipoeg and the Finnish epic
Kalevala in this regard: the motif of the maiden who commits suicide by
drowning is repeated several times in the Kalevala. This reminds of the story of
Kullervo who met a nice maiden on his travels and raped her. Next day it
turned out that the girl was Kullervo’s sister, and then the maiden drowned
herself. According to Semper, incest was implicated also between Kalevipoeg
and Saarepiiga. The second tragic story from the Kalevala that influenced
Kreutzwald is the story of Väinamöinen and Aino. The sad love story ended
with Aino getting drowned in the sea. The fact that the Kalevala influenced
Kreutzwald has been mentioned in his letters to a friend. All these motifs are
well-known in Europe and have existed in national literatures for a very long
time (cf. Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet).
Another tragic and at the same time exalted motif whose traces we can find
in Rainis’ works is the myth of Dawn and Dusk – a legend about sunrise and
sunset in the summer solstice when day and night touch each other and fuse
together in their kisses. It is a story by Friedrich Robert Faehlmann (1798–

1850) which inspired the sculptor Weizenberg in the creation of his figures of
the characters, and also Rainis. According to Oskar Kuningas, the
personification of the motifs of sunrise and sunset are repeated several times in
Rainis’ play Blow, Wind! Although the motifs of sunrise have been well known
since the antiquity (these are female deities Eos and Selene in Greek, and
Aurora in Roman mythology), the love stories differ from the legend written by
Faehlmann. Blow, Wind! contains a situation involving Baiba and Uldis in
which their passion becomes stronger and stronger, while it all ends with a
farewell kiss from Baiba and her jumping into the water (Kuningas 1979a: 5).
Rainis used these tragic motifs to create tension in his texts: the tragic is
exalted, and through tragedy spiritual catharsis takes place. At the same time,
Rainis connects different motifs from different cultures, and he uses cultural
translation to create the great texts of his own.
Lithuanian literature in Estonia

Lithuania has a different and great history, but the Soviet period created a
common destiny for all three countries. Most of the translations of texts from
Lithuanian literature into Estonian were made in the Soviet period, although
Lithuanian literature is older than Estonian and Latvian ones. The older period
of Lithuanian literature is quite long, reaching from the 14th to the 18th
centuries, and it includes Lithuanian, Byelorussian and Polish traditions, as well
as texts which were written in different languages (Latin, East-Slavic, Polish
and German). These texts also represented different genres: historical texts,
chronicles, philological texts, religious texts etc. The contacts between Lithua-
nian and Estonian cultures have not been as active as the contacts between
Latvian and Estonian literatures.
Lithuanians consider the Lutheran priest Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–
1780) to be the father of Lithuanian poetry. His main work is the narrative
poem Metai (The Seasons), written in 1770–1774. The Seasons is a significant
poem in the tradition of European literature, and it presents the life of
Lithuanian peasants during one year of the 18th century:
The Seasons depicts the everyday life of the serfs in Lithuania Minor, the subject
matter, and the poem’s ideological stance as well focusing on the peasants.
Donelaitis appears to be a spokesman for peasant interests, their ideologue in a way.
442 Anneli Mihkelev
He creates pictures of country life as if he were observing that life up close or were a
participant who was interested and moved by everything that a peasant experiences.
The Seasons is a work of antifeudalist spirit, strongly condemning serfdom.
(Kubilius 1997: 43)
Latvian researcher Māra Grudule has written about the role of nature in Baltic
literatures during the second half of the 18th century, stressing the idea that
nature and the peasant culture are the elements which connect Lithuanian,
Latvian and Estonian culture. The Lithuanian poet Donelaitis and his poem
The Seasons would belong to the best examples of the beginnings of Baltic
secular literatures: Donelaitis and his contemporaries resonated “with the
literary tradition of European literature and philosophy as we can see through
ties with Rousseau. […] On the one hand they are fertilized by European
streams of culture, on the other they are deeply rooted in national culture”
(Grudule 2007: 96–97).
Donelaitis’ narrative poem The Seasons has been translated into many
languages, but unfortunately, not completely into Estonian. Some fragments
from the fourth part of the poem, Winter Cares (Talvised mured), translated by
Mihkel Loodus, were published in the journal Looming in 1964. There is also a
brief comment about the content of the poem by the translator, and a longer
article about Donelaitis by the Lithuanian researcher Teofilis Tilvytis. Actually,
the fragment of Donelaitis’s poem and the article by Tilvytis celebrate the
250th anniversary of the birth of Donelaitis. Tilvytis stressed the realist aspect
of Donelaitis’ poem and the article was influenced by Soviet ideology (Tilvytis
1964: 120–121).
We can also find some texts about Donelaitis in the Estonian newspapers
Edasi and Sirp ja Vasar by Mihkel Loodus (Loodus 1963) and Johannes
Semper (Semper 1964), respectively; there is also an article in the journal Keel
ja Kirjandus by the Lithuanian researcher Leonas Gineitis (Gineitis 1973), and
that is all. It is significant that it is quite common for Lithuanian and Latvian
researchers and writers to write about their own literature in Estonian
magazines, but it is very uncommon to find an article about Latvian or
Lithuanian literature written by Estonian critics.
At the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century,
realism was dominant in Lithuanian literature, but at that time some writers
were also neo-Romantics. One of them was Vaižgantas (real name Juozas
Tumas, 1869–1933). The name Vaižgantas is the name of one of the
Lithuanian pagan gods, and the writer who wrote under this name was a patriot
and idealist who belonged to the generation which created the model of
national culture at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th
centuries. Vaižgantas’ works involve a search for the spirit of the nation, and he
presents the main features of the national character and life, the agrarian
culture, and the love of work and nature. These features are similar to Estonian
national features, but our writers present these national features in a totally
different manner. Vaižgantas’ book of long short stories Onud ja tädid (Uncles
and Aunts; Dėdės ir dėdienės) was published in 1920–1921, but the Estonian
translation by Ilmar Vananurm was only published in 1985. The book contains
an afterword by the Lithuanian researcher Vincas Kuzmickas which is a good
overview of the life and literary works of Vaižgantas. There are also some
remarks about the contacts between Vaižgantas and Estonian writers or, more
exactly, about some casual and single-sided or even failed contacts in 1921
(Kuzmickas 1985: 255). It seems that the cultural contacts between Estonians
and Lithuanians have been more complicated and rarer than contacts between
Estonians and Latvians already for a very long time.
The protagonist of the book is a poor man Mykoliukas, who represents the
national character. Mykoliukas is not a farmer but a servant in his family
because he is not married. He is the uncle of his brother’s children:
Vaižgantas firmly believed that “gentleness of manner and goodness of the heart”
compose the essence of Lithuanian ethnic character. […] Peasants, who were
released from serfdom and wanted to achieve economic security, were forced to
take part in rather immoral actions, namely, to use their unmarried brothers and
sisters as cheap labour, as servants in a way, so that they would not have to divide
the land and pay them their fair share. These selfsacrificing family members were
called “uncles” and “aunts” in the family, because the children addressed them this
way. The spiritual drama of these people gave the author an opportunity to reflect
on the essence of Lithuanian national character. (Kubilius 1997: 134–135)
Mykoliukas works very hard but he still finds time to play the violin. The song
that Mykoliukas plays is very expressive and significant:
Kui ma tahan – tööd teen tõsist, kui ei taha – laisklen ka. (Vaižgantas 1985: 9)
If I want to, I work so hard; if I do not want – I’m idle, too. (My translation – A. M.)
There are several characteristics which represent Mykoliukas and also the spirit
of the nation: he “has a sensitive soul” and “he subtly experiences the beauty of
444 Anneli Mihkelev
nature” (Kubilius 1997: 135). The role of nature is very important in Vaiž-
gantas’ story as it was in Donelaitis’ poem.
The book presents a more optimistic and lighter view of life than Estonian
literature generally, for example in the works of Anton Hansen Tammsaare
(1878–1940). In his text Vaižgantas stresses that Lithuanians are always joyful,
love to laugh and are naive. Both Latvian and Lithuanian literatures are similar
in this respect: these literatures are more lyrical and softer than Estonian litera-
ture, as well as the national characters represented by our writers like Vilde,
Tammsaare etc. It seems that such an image of our neighbours still exists, at
least to some extent.
Conclusion
The analysis of Latvian and Lithuanian writers demonstrates different ways in
which the translation process takes place in literary texts, as well as in culture as
a whole.
The cultural contacts between Estonian and Latvian nations are older than
the contacts between Estonian and Lithuanian nations. The literary contacts
between Estonian and Latvian began to appear in the 18th century in literary
texts and translations by Baltic Germans. These texts and translations as
synchronic texts of a cultural system represented Enlightenment ideas and
culture. Eduard Vilde’s translations of Rūdolfs Blaumanis’ stories are also
synchronic texts of a cultural system, also representing ideology, while Vilde
himself had two roles in the literary process: he presented translation as
reception, and he also presented the relationship between translation and
reception. The later translations of Blaumanis’ works, especially the collection
The Spring Frosts (1960) are diachronic texts of literary history, as are the
translations of Rainis’ literary works in 1965. At the same time, the literary
works of Rainis are more complicated, because he connects different motifs
from different cultures, and he uses cultural translation to create the great texts
of his own.
The translations of older Lithuanian literature (Donelaitis) and also
literature of the 1920s (Vaižgantas) are diachronic texts of literary history.
Unfortunately, most of the translations of texts from Lithuanian literature into
Estonian were made in the Soviet period, and the reception was influenced by
the Soviet ideology, yet these translations still introduced Lithuanian literature
to the Estonian readers.
Translation is connected with interpretation, and at the same time

translation and reception are mixed. It is also important that these translated
texts create the image of translated culture and/or nation, including our neigh-
bours.
References
Annus, Epp; Epner, Luule; Järv, Ants; Olesk, Sirje; Süvalep, Ele; Velsker, Mart 2001. Eesti
kirjanduslugu. Tallinn: Koolibri.
Blaumanis, Rūdolfs 1960. Kevadised hallad. Jutustusi ja novelle. Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik
Kirjastus.
– 1986. Tules. Näidend viies vaatuses. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat.
Gineitis, Leonas 1973. Leedu kirjanduse klassiku tee maailma. Keel ja Kirjandus 2: 101–
102.
Grudule, Māra 2007. The role of nature in Baltic literature during the second half of the
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Something in Common: The Baltic Memory. Collegium litterarum 21. Tallinn: The Under
and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences; Institute of
Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, 87–98.
Kubilius, Vytautas 1997. Lithuanian Literature. Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature
and Folklore.
Kuningas, Oskar 1963. Rudolf Blaumani loomingut eesti lugeja laual. Looming 1: 138–140.
– 1979a. Eesti motiive näidendis “Puhu, tuul!” Edasi, 28.09.
– 1979b. Rainis ja Eesti. Edasi, 29.09.
Kuzmickas, Vincas 1985. Juozas Tumas – Vaižgantas. In: Vaižgantas, Onud ja tädid.
Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 253–256.
Loodus, Mihkel 1963. Leedu kirjanduse rajaja. Edasi, 29.12.
Lotman, Juri 2000. Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture. (Shukman, Ann,
trans.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
– 2009. Culture and Explosion. (Clark, Wilma, trans.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Semper, Johannes 1964. Donelaitis ja ta “Aastaajad”. Sirp ja Vasar, 01.01.
– 1997. Kalevipoja rahvaluulemotiivide analüüs. Tallinn: Olion.
Šedriks, Andre 1979. Introduction to the Golden Steed. In: Straumanis, Alfreds (ed.), The
Golden Steed. Seven Baltic Plays. Illinois: Waveland Press, 39–49.
Tilvytis, Teofilis 1964. XVIII sajandi suur realist. Looming 1: 120–121.
Torop, Peeter 1999. Kultuurimärgid. Tartu: Ilmamaa.
Vainikkala, Erkki 1993. Cultural? Reception? Introductory reflection. In: Vainikkala, Erkki
(ed.), The Cultural Study of Reception. Nykykulttuurin tutkimusyksikön julkaisuja.
Publications of the Research Unit for Contemporary Culture. Julkaisu 38. Jyväskylä:
Jyväskylän Yliopisto, 5–9.
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446 Anneli Mihkelev
Vinkel, Arne 1975. Fr. W. Willmann ning tema “Juttud ja teggud”. In: Willmann, Friedrich
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253.
Образ соседей: латышская и литовская литература в Эстонии

Переведенный текст получает в новой культуре особенное значение. Прежде всего
это перевод литературного текста, но это может быть и перевод культуры. “Перевод”
и “рецепция” являются основными понятиями, которые используются в данной
статье. Рецепция начинается уже с выбора переводимого автора, литературного или
исторического периода, литературного стиля или разных идеологий. Можно сказать,
что каждый перевод и рецепция начинаются с чтения и каждое чтение привносит
значения. В то же время рецепция является и переводом – это момент, когда две
культуры встречаются и эта ситуация нуждается в понимании “другого”. Переве-
денные тексты создают представление о переводимой культуре и/или народе. В
настоящей статье рассматриваются переводы на эстонский язык текстов латышской и
литовской литературы с конца 18-го до начала 20 века. В статье показывается, какие
тексты переводились в разные периоды, какие авторы были выбраны, что было целью
перевода и как эти переводы транслировали латышскую и литовскую культуру
эстонскому читателю. Анализируется и то, как эстонские читатели воспринимали и
понимали эти тексты.
Kujutluspilt naabritest: läti ja leedu kirjandus Eestis

Tõlgitud tekstil on uues kultuuris eriline tähtsus. Kõigepealt on see kirjandusliku teksti
tõlge, kuid see võib olla ka kultuuri tõlge, s.t teisest kultuurisüsteemist pärineva sünkroo-
nilise teksti tõlge. “Tõlge” ja “retseptsioon” ongi kesksed mõisted, mis käesolevas artiklis on
kasutamist leidnud. Retseptsioon saab alguse juba tõlgitava autori, kirjandusliku või
ajaloolise perioodi, kirjandusliku stiili või erinevate ideoloogiate valikust. Võib öelda, et iga
tõlge ja retseptsioon algab lugemisest ning iga lugemine loob tähendusi. Samal ajal on
retseptsioon ka tõlge – see on moment, mil kaks erinevat kultuuri kohtuvad, ja see
situatsioon vajab “teise” mõistmist. Tõlgitud tekstid loovad kujutluspildi tõlgitud kultuurist
ja/või rahvast. Käesolevas artiklis on vaatluse all eesti keelde tõlgitud tekstid, mis pärinevad
18. sajandi lõpu kuni 20. sajandi alguses läti ja leedu kirjandusest. Artiklis tuuakse välja,
milliseid tekste on erinevatel perioodidel tõlgitud, milliseid autoreid ja tekste on tõlkijad
valinud, milline oli tõlkimise eesmärk ning kuidas need tõlked on läti ja leedu kultuuri eesti
lugejale edasi andnud. Analüüsitud on sedagi, kuidas eestlasest lugejad neid tõlgitud tekste
on mõistnud ja omaks võtnud. Lõpuks üritatakse jõuda selgusele, kuidas vaatluse alused
tekstid loovad kujutluspilti tõlgitud kultuurist ja / või rahvast.
Equiprosodic translation method

in Estonian poetry
Maria-Kristiina Lotman
Institute of Germanic, Romance and Slavonic Languages and Literatures
University of Tartu
Ülikooli 17, 51014 Tartu, Estonia
e-mail: maria.lotman@mail.ee
Abstract. Equimetrical translation of verse, which conveys the metre of the source text,
should be distinguished from equiprosodic translation of verse, which conveys the
versification system of the source text. Equiprosodic translation of verse can rely on the
possibilities of natural language (for instance, when presumably Publius Baebius Italicus
created the Ilias Latina, he made use of the quantitative structure in Latin), but it can also
employ an artificial system (cf., for example, the quantitative verse in Church Slavonic or
English). The Estonian language makes it possible to convey the syllabic (based on the
number of syllables), accentual (based on the number and configuration of accents) and
quantitative (based on the configuration of durations) versification systems. In practice,
combined types are most frequent, for instance, the ones in which both the syllable count
and the configuration of accents is relevant; in Estonian, versification systems with the
participation of all three principles are possible as well. Despite the contrast of quantity in
Estonian, the transmission of the quantitative structure of ancient metrics still involves a
number of difficulties which result from differences in the prosodic structures. The
transmission of purely syllabic versification system has also been problematic: it is hard to
perceive such structure as verse in Estonian and therefore it has often been conveyed with
the help of different syllabic-accentual or accentual-syllabic verse metres. Although
equiprosodic translation is not necessarily equimetrical, in actual translation practice it
usually is so.
0. Introduction
In translating poetry there are numerous formal constraints to be considered,
especially when we are dealing with the macro-stylistic type of translation, in
which case the dominant is the expression plane of the source text (see Torop
1999: 147). For instance, in order to transmit the metrical structure one has to
not only regulate the syllabic count and the placement of prominent and
448 Maria-Kristiina Lotman
nonprominent syllables, etc., but to keep in mind the arrangement of word-

ends to convey the caesurae and zeugmata, the syntactic structure, for instance,
enjambments, phonemic structure (rhymes, alliterations), etc. This paper is
devoted to one particular aspect in translating poetry, that is, the transmission
of systems of versification. First, to regard this feature in its context, let us
examine the main methods of interlinguistic verse translation1 in Estonian
poetic culture.
1. Methods of translating poetry

A list of methods of verse translation has been proposed by André Lefevere
(1975), but in this paper a number of additions have been offered as adjust-
ments in order to best describe the methods of Estonian verse translation.
The list will start from the freest and proceed to the stricter methods. The
freest forms are inspired by the source text, but do not convey its structure or
semantics, that is, these are free adaptations. In poetry, there are several
versions of such forms.
1.1. Nachdichtung
In the case of Nachdichtung (sometimes used as a synonym to imitation;2 see,
for instance, Frank 1998: 20), a new poem is created which is inspired by the
source text. In Estonian poetry, Nachdichtung is quite widespread: when the
principles of verse translation started to form in the mid-19th century, it was
one of the most common methods of translation (see also Liivaku, Meriste
1975: 13). A typical example is Mihkel Veske’s well-known and often
paraphrazed poem Minge üles mägedele (see Veske 1931) which is usually
treated as his original text, while it is actually a Nachdichtung of Berthold
Sigismund’s almost forgotten work Auf die Höhen laßt uns steigen.
1
See Jakobson 1959: 233. Estonian poetic translation also includes various examples of
intralinguistic translation, in which case verbal texts are translated by means of other signs
of the same language, resulting in new texts; in the case of poetic works, these are most
often synopses, Nachdichtungs or parodies.
2
For Lefevere’s distinction between imitation and version, see Lefevere 1975: 326.
Equiprosodic translation method in Estonian poetry 449
1.2. Synopsis
With synopsis, source text structure is not followed; instead it is a concentrate
of the subject that is the focus. Epic texts have often been translated into
Estonian this way; for example, in the first decades of the 20th century the
ancient epics, the Eddic texts, the Finnish epic Kalevala, and some others were
thus conveyed.
1.3. Verse-to-prose translation

The main difference between verse-to-prose translation and interlinear
translation lies in the preservation of the typographical structure of the source
text in the latter, or at least marking the boundaries of verses with slashes, etc.,
while in verse-to-prose translation verse boundaries are not marked at all. The
main weakness of this method is that, together with verse form, a considerable
part of the structure of the poem becomes lost, since verse form also creates
meaning: for instance, the metre can have a specific semantic halo (see, e.g.,
Gasparov 1999), rhythm can create certain semantic associations (see, e.g.,
Tarlinskaja 1987: 287–329), for example, slowing of rhythm can be related to
the theme of the dragging of time, heaviness, hardness, toil, but also
premonition, etc., while quickening of rhythm can mark the beginning of fast
activity, etc. All these associations are simply lost in translating verse into prose.
For examples of such a translation method in Estonian poetry, see Lotman
2011a: 137.
1.4. Interlinear translation

This method is distinct from equilinear translation which aims to strictly
preserve the content of a source text line within one line also in the target text.
It is a freer way of translation which, above all, aims to convey the content of
an utterance and in doing so not to violate the syntactic structure of the target
language. Although the metrical structure is not conveyed, the division into
verse lines is still preserved as a sign of the versified source text. This method is
often used in scholarly publications; for example, interlinear translations have
been used in commented editions of ancient or neo-classical poetry, such as the
collection of academic occasional poetry from 17th-century Tartu, O Dorpat,
Urbs Addictissima Musis (Viiding, Orion, Päll 2007).
1.5. Free verse

Translations into free verse are common as well, even when the source text is in
a regular verse metre. For instance, quite frequently Homer’s or Pindar’s texts
have been translated into free verse; a recent Estonian translation of Gilgamesh
(2010) is in free verse,3 etc.
It is, of course, a convenient way to convey the meaning of the source text,
but since the metre and other structural elements are ignored, a certain
semantic layer is lost, just like in the case of prose translation.
1.6. Phonemic translation

The next method is what Lefevere calls phonemic translation. The main
purpose is to remain faithful to the sound of the text. At the same time,
Lefevere states that it is almost impossible to achieve any satisfactory results
with this method, especially since the prosodic structures of different languages
are too unlike to achieve even an acceptable rendering of the source-language
sound in the target text (see also Raffel 1988: 23–37), not to mention
producing an acceptable paraphrase of its sense. Lefevere points out that this is,
to a certain extent, only effective within three possibilities: in the case of the
translation of words by target language words etymologically related to them,
in the case of proper names, and in translation of onomatopoea. Of course,
when we are working with poems in related languages, this task is easier to
accomplish (on the other hand, see Raffel 1988: 36–37). See Matthias Johann
Eisen’s translation of the Finnish epic Kalevala (Lönnrot 1891) in which some
sections are conveyed more or less in accordance with this method:4
Riisti ristin rinnaltansa, Riisus risti rinnaltasa,

sormukset on sormestansa, sõrmused need sõrmestasa,
helmet kaulasta karisti, helmed heitis kaelastasa,
punalangat päänsä päältä. punalõngad peasa pealta.
(Kalevala 4.16–20) (Kalevala 4.16–20, trans. M. J. Eisen)
3
The metre of the source text is different, however; on the metrical structure of
Gilgamesh see Buccellati 1990.
4
English translation: Then she threw the gold cross from her, / Tore the jewels from her
fingers, / Quickly loosed her shining necklace, / Quick untied her silken ribbons (Lönnrot
1889; translated by John Martin Crawford).
The translator has preferred words with similar stems and, thus, the sound of
the target text at least resembles the sound of the source text.
1.7. Non-equivalent metrical translation

The next method is non-equivalent metrical translation. This can be a
translation into an arbitrary structure, which is motivated neither by the
structure of the source text nor by its cultural context, audience, etc. Such
translation is often just an experiment, such as, for instance, a translation of
Horace’s Ode 1.34 into haiku form by Ivo Volt (see section 1.10 below).
Moreover, this form also contains a possibility of antithetical translation, in
which case the metre of the target text is intentionally contrasting the structure
of the source text (free verse vs. strict metre, popular verse form vs. some
sophisticated stanza, foreign metre vs. national metre, and so on).
1.8. Functional equivalent

This form of translation has also been called analogical translation (see
Weissbort, Eysteinsson 2006: 461). Here, another verse form is chosen for the
translation, for instance, a form closer to the audience or more appropriate
functionally and/or historically. This method is derived from an understanding
that different metres have dissimilar semantic halos in different traditions: for
instance, the alexandrine is a completely different metre in French poetry than
in Estonian poetry, and to English readers the iambic pentameter means
something else than to Germans. Here, in selecting a verse form for translation,
one must find an equivalent to the halo of this metre from the tradition of the
target text. To give an example, during the period of early literature the
hexametrical Greek epic poems were translated into Latin not in hexameters,
but in the Latin national form – Saturnian verse; the English translations used
iambic pentameters (see also Weissbort, Eysteinsson 2006: 460), the French
ones alexandrines, and so on. An example of functional equivalent in Estonian
translation culture is the translation of Prometheus Bound (Kinnineeditud
Prometheus, translated by Jaan Jõgever; see Aeschylus 1908), in which iambic
trimeters are mostly replaced with trochaic hexameters as a more suitable form
for spoken verse.
1.9. Equimetrical translation

A method aiming to convey the metrical structure of the source text is
equimetrical translation. Such a way of translation has also been called
mimetical translation. Its first aim is the fidelity to the verse form of the source
text, especially its metre and rhyme, but sometimes also to the finer nuances:
rhythmical effects, alliteration, etc. Such method of translation has been the
most common one in the tradition of Estonian verse translation; it has been
rooted already since the 19th century, and is prevalent today. For more on the
equimetrical verse tradition in Estonian poetic culture see Lotman 2011a.
1.10. Equiprosodic translation

The purpose of equiprosodic5 verse translation is to reflect the system of
versification of the original. Equiprosodic translation is not necessarily
equimetrical, for instance, quantitative hexameter can be translated into
quantitative regisong, the Estonian folk metre, or, in another example, Horace’s
ode is translated into haikus (Horace 1.34; translated by Ivo Volt6). Here is the
third stanza:7
 
kaarik laskumas
   
rappumas tömp maa veetulv
  
Styx ja õõvpaigad
The original poem was written in Alcaic stanzas; therefore this is not an
equimetrical translation. With each stanza the translator had to condense the
content of 41 syllables into 17 syllables. There is an unusual number of heavy
syllables here, as well as in the rest of the poem; in fact, almost all the accented
5
Ain Kaalep has used the term ʻhomorhytmic translation’ in a similar meaning (Kaalep
1972).
6
Unpublished translation that was suggested by its author in an e-mail to the mailing list
of the University of Tartu’s Department of Classical Philology (23.1.2004).
7
The Latin original is as follows: quo bruta tellus et uaga flumina, / quo Styx et inuisi horrida
Taenari / sedes Atlanteusque finis /concutitur. Valet ima summis; English translation: E’en now
dull earth and wandering floods, / And Atlas’ limitary range, / And Styx, and Taenarus’ dark
abodes / Are reeling. He can lowliest change (Horace 1882; translated by John Conington).
syllables in this poem are heavy. That is, although such verse is not in
accordance with the moraic principle of the haiku form, the prosodic structure
of this translation is an implication of the quantitative structure of its source
text, the quantitative Alcaic stanza.
For the most part, equiprosodic translations in Estonian verse translation
are equimetrical. In the case of the dactylic hexameter, for example, it means
that the translated verse consists of six feet which are also quantitatively
regulated, as in this example of the translation of Lucretius (1971) by Uku
Masing:8
          
hüljatud kõrbtühi ruum, pimeväikesed asjade algmed.
Here the strong positions are filled with heavy syllables and the weak positions
are filled with one heavy or two light syllables.
Equiprosodic translation of verse can rely on the possibilities of natural
language (for instance, Publius Baebius Italicus, a likely author of the Ilias
Latina, made use of the quantitative structure in Latin), but it can also employ
an artificial system. Thus, the quantitative structure of the natural language is
not an inevitable precondition for creating quantitative verse: there are many
examples of cases in which the natural language has no grounds for quantitative
verse, but the latter is still created in different artificial quantitative systems
(compare, for instance, quantitative verse in Church Slavonic or English).
2. Equiprosodic verse translation

in Estonian translation culture
The Estonian language allows to convey the syllabic (based on the number of
syllables), accentual (based on the number and configuration of accents) and
quantitative (based on the configuration of durations) systems of versification.
In practice, combined types are most frequent, for instance, those in which
both the syllable count and configuration of accents are relevant; in Estonian,
systems of versification with the participation of all three principles are possible
8
On the Nature of Things 1.1110. The Latin original is as follows: desertum praeter
spatium et primordia caeca; English translation: the desolate space, and germs invisible
(Lucretius 1921; translated by William Ellery Leonard).
as well. Despite the fact that the contrast of quantity exists in the Estonian
language, the transmission of the quantitative structure of ancient metrics still
involves a number of difficulties which result from differences in the prosodic
structure. Also the transmission of purely syllabic system of versification has
encountered certain difficulties: it has often been conveyed with different
syllabic-accentual or accentual-syllabic verse metres. The problems with
accentual verse arise from a specific feature of the Estonian prosodic system:
the accent is fixed on the first syllable of a word.
2.1. Syllabic versification

Although Estonian is a syllable-counting language in which the unstressed
syllables are not reduced and a syllable is prosodically independent, the
transmission of purely syllabic versification has not become widespread,
especially in the case of longer metres in which it can be difficult to perceive
such a form as verse. Therefore, in addition to constraining the syllabic count,
the placement of stresses is regulated as well. On the one hand, the reason lies
in the fact that the Estonian stress is a too significant and distinct prosodic
feature to be disregarded. However, perhaps even more important than the
prosodic causes are the influences of the German and Russian traditions in
which the syllabic metres are traditionally translated as syllabic-accentual
forms; compare the first occasional poem in Estonian, Reiner Brockmann’s
Carmen Alexandrinum Esthonicum ad leges Opitij poeticas compositum, which is
written in syllabic-accentual iambic hexameter and has explicit German
influences.
In the 20th century, despite some difficulties, translations of the French
alexandrines in Molière’s works were made that convey the source structure
rather successfully. Let us compare the alexandrines in two different
translations of The Misanthrope. The literary critic and translator Ants Oras’s
translation is earlier (Molière 1936),9 while the translation by August Sang was
published in the Soviet times (Molière 1961). Both translations have the
following characteristics: the number of syllables is set, 12 syllables (in verses
9
Ants Oras has formulated his principles as a translator of verse in a paper on translating
French syllabic metres (1931: 373–379). Among other things he maintains that the main
principles of conveying the original structure should be isosyllabism and the predominance
of verses with caesura. The rhythmical variability of the source text should be pursued in
order to achieve more flexibility and freedom.
Equiprosodicc translation m
method in Esto
onian poetry 455
with feminiine endings 13 syllables)), yet the syyllable countt is not the only
principle to regulate thee versification
n: the placem
ment of accen nts is not ranndom
either. Alreeady the first syllable gives the readder the rhytthmical signaal to
interpret thiis structure. The followinng figure dispplays the statistics of the first
syllable in thhe Estonian alexandrine in comparisoon to the firsst syllables of the
other Estoniian metres.
Figure 1. Thee accentuality of

o the first syllaable in differennt verse formss.
Due to the nnature of Estoonian stress, a verse line hhas to begin with
w at least some
s
kind of stresss signal; the only way to overcome
o thiis constraint is to use a forreign
word, whichh is, howeverr, exceptionaal. On the othher hand, Esstonian has also a
gradation off stresses: thee weakest strresses are seccondary stresses, the stron ngest
stresses are phrase acceents. The data showed in Figure 1 reveal how w the
proportionss of differentt accentual types
t can bee quite dissim milar in diffeerent
metres. For instance, in iamb and tro ochee the pe rcentages of main accents are
completely different. In iambic metrres, the inciddence of syllaables carryingg the
main accentts is less thann 15%, in trochees over 80%, and when w we add to it
even strongger phrase accents,
a the incidence off strong streesses in the first
syllable is ovver 90%. As for
f the first syllable
s of aleexandrines off both translaators,
here the datta resemble those
t of iambbic verse, thaat is, at the beginning of verse
v
the stresses carrying a weak syllable prevail. This does not mean that the
Estonian alexandrine is iambic; in actuality, analysis shows how the alexand-
rines of both translators are divided into iambic and anapestic units:
100%
80%
60%
"iamb"
40% "anapest"
20%
0%
Oras Sang
Figure 2. Rhythmical units in the Estonian alexandrines.
In Ants Oras’s text iambic units prevail, but the incidence of anapestic units is
still over 40%. In August Sang’s alexandrines the rhythmical structure becomes
even more regular, and the incidence of anapestic units decreases below 20%. If
this was a purely syllabic metre, we could also see, for instance, dactylic and
trochaic units, but such structures are not to be found.
Every verse contains 4–6 rhythmical units, which are always di- or trisyllabic
and with an iambic or anapestic rhythm, the alternation of which is irregular.
According to this description, the result should be an irregular heterometrical
stress-metre. At the same time, it cannot be forgotten that there is more to this
structure: the number of syllables is fixed. Thus, the most regulated level in this
structure is the syllabic count and the number of accentual units is directly
subjected to it; consequently, it is still the syllabic system of versification, only
with strong elements of the accentual system on the rhythmical level.
Let us now turn to the principles of the French alexandrine. Although in the
most general descriptions it is characterized as a purely syllabic verse, it is not
quite that simple. French accentual laws (stress on the final syllable) already
determine that, inevitably, some kinds of patterns are formed; in addition to

that, there is also a rule against accentual clash. The outcome of these two
factors is that the French alexandrine is based upon four combinations of two
hemistichs, one of three iambs and one of two anapests; these combinations
may be: (1) six iambs (hemistichs Ia/Ia), (2) four anapests (hemistichs
An/An), (3) three iambs and two anapests (hemistichs Ia/An), (4) two
anapests and three iambs (hemistichs An/Ia) (Porohovshikov 1932).
In the Estonian alexandrine a general metrical principle is adopted. The
model of the alexandrines of the target texts is as follows:
One line consists of two hemistichs:

L  HS1, HS2
1. Syllabic rules
1.1. 6 syllables correspond to the first hemistich, 6 (masculine verse-end)
or 7 (feminine verse-end) correspond to the second hemistich:
HS1  6 syllables
HS2  6 or 7 syllables
2. Syllabic-accentual rules
2.1. A hemistich is made up of units A or B:
HS  A or B
2.2. A is iambic (that is, consists of three disyllabic rhythmical units with an
accent – primary or secondary – on the second syllable):
A  aaa
a  xx́ or xx̀
2.3. B is anapestic (that is, consists of two trisyllabic rhythmical units with
an accent on the third syllable):
B  bb
b  xxx́ or xxx̀
2.4. The possible combinations of a verse line are as follows:
L  bb/aaa
L  bb/bb
L  aaa/aaa
L  aaa/bb
August Sang follows this model wholly, with the clear preference for the most
regular combination aaa/aaa; Oras, however, allows some deviations (for
instance, a half-verse with the structure aa, thus violating the syllabic structure
of the line). The two are compared in Figure 3.
60%
40%
Oras
Sang
20%
0%
Ia/Ia Ia/An An/Ia An/An other
Figure 3. Rhythmical structure of the Estonian alexandrines.
It is remarkable that while the rhythm of the French alexandrine is completely

derived from the characteristics of the French prosodic structure, in the case of
the Estonian alexandrine an author has to overcome difficulties connected with
the prosody of the natural language: iambs and anapests are a challenge to
languages with the accent fixed on the first syllable.
An example of non-equiprosodic translation tradition is the translation
of Italian endecasillabo of Petrarcan poetry. Endecasillabo is a verse in Italian
metrics with only one accentual constant: on the tenth syllable. There are also
other positions where stresses tend to accumulate, one common pattern for the
Italian hendecasyllable being with stresses on the sixth and the tenth syllables,
and another one with stresses on the fourth, seventh and tenth syllables (see
also Beltrami 1996: 61–62), but these regularities have a rhythmical, not
metrical nature. In Petrarch’s endecasillabo, with only few exceptions, the
number of syllables is constantly 11.
The first translator of Petrarch into Estonian poetry was Villem Ridala, poet
and philologist, who in 1923 published a translation of sonnet CCX (Petrarca
1923: 2). Compare the first two stanzas:10
Zephiro torna, e’l bel tempo rimena, Zephyros ilmub ja toob ilma hele
e i fiori et l’erbe, sua dolce famiglia, ja lilled, rohud, hõrna sugu ka:
et garrir Progne et pianger Philomena, to hüüdja Prokne, nutja Philomele,
et primavera candida et vermiglia. ja kevade nii valge, punaka.
Ridono i prati, e’l ciel si rasserena; Eks väljad naera siis, ilm sätendele,
Giove s’allegra di mirar sua figlia; Jupiter rõõmsat tütart jäljenda;
l’aria et l’acqua et la terra è d’amor piena; õhk, vesi, maad on altid armudele,
ogni animal d’amar si riconsiglia. ja iga elaja siis võtab armasta.
(Petrarch, Sonnet CCX) (Petrarch, Sonnet CCX, trans. V. Ridala)
In the source text each of the 14 lines has a feminine ending, accent is not
regulated anywhere except on the tenth syllable, which carries a constant stress.
The verse of the translation does not correspond to the structure of the source
text. The translation is almost consistently written in iambic pentameter, with
the alternation of feminine and masculine endings: that is, the syllabic count of
the source text is not followed. In the first line (Zephyros x́xx) and in the second
line of the second stanza (Jupiter x́xx), deviations from the iambic structure
occur in proper names, which are just like implications of the syllabic nature of
the source text.
Ridala’s text formed a tradition, and in subsequent translations of Petrarch
we can see similar versification. More than sixty years later, Ain Kaalep, a poet,
translator and critic, translated Sonnet XVI (Petrarca 1984: 34). In this
translation, the number of syllables is consistent: each line has 11 syllables,
each line has a feminine ending. But, just like Ridala’s text, it is an iambic
pentameter, and just like in Ridala’s text there is one hint at the syllabic
10
English translation: Zephyr returns and brings fair weather, / and the flowers and
herbs, his sweet family, / and Procne singing and Philomela weeping, / and the white
springtime, and the vermilion. // The meadows smile, and the skies grow clear: / Jupiter is
joyful, gazing at his daughter: / the air and earth and water are filled with love: / every
animal is reconciled to loving (Petrarch 2002; translated by A. S. Kline).
versification of the original: the dactylic beginning of the third line of the first
triplet (kellega x́xx); compare:11
et viene a Roma, seguendo ’l desio, ja jõuab Rooma, seirates üht sihti,

per mirar la sembianza di colui et näha saaks kord kujutustki sellest,
ch’ancor lassú nel ciel vedere spera: kellega kohtumist on taevas loota,
(Petrarch, Sonnet XVI) (Petrarch, Sonnet XVI, trans. A. Kaalep)
The same device can be seen in several other translations as well; it is a sign
that the translator is aware of both the syllabic structure of the source text and
the prior tradition of translating endecasillabo.
There are also purely syllabic translations of the Italian hendecasyllable.
Märt Väljataga’s translations provide an example. Compare the beginning of
Giacomo Leopardi’s poem La sera del dì di festa (Sweet and bright is the night;
Leopardi 2001):12
Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento,

E queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti
Posa la luna, e di lontan rivela
Serena ogni montagna. O donna mia,
Già tace og ni sentiero, e pei balconi
Rara traluce la notturna lampa:
(Giacomo Leopardi, La sera del dì di festa)
Õrn ja selge on õhtu, tuul ei puhu, x́x̀x́xx̀x́xx́x̀x́x

tasa katuste kohal, keset aedu x́xx́xxx̀xx̀xx́x
seisatab kuu ja toob esile taamal x́xxx́x̀x́x̀xxx́x
selgelt iga mäe. Oo, mu armastatu, x́xx́xx́x́x̀x́xx̀x
nüüd vaikivad kõik teed ja palkonile x̀x́xxx̀x́x̀x́xx̀x
paistavad siin-seal üksikud öölambid. x́xxx̀x̀x́xxx́x̀x
(Giacomo Leopardi, Pidupäeva õhtu, trans. M. Väljataga)
11
English translation: He reaches Rome, following his desire, / to gaze on the image of
Him / whom he hopes to see again in heaven (translated by A. S. Kline, available at
http://poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Petrarchhome.htm).
12
English translation: The night is sweet and clear, without a breeze, / and the moon
rests in the gardens, / calm on the roofs, and reveals, clear, / far off, every mountain. O my
lady, / the paths are still, and the night lights / shine here and there from the balconies
(translated by A. S. Kline, available at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/
Italian/Leopardi.htm).
Each line in the target text consists of 11 syllables. Although the translator
admits that, most probably, Estonian readers do not perceive the actual
number of syllables of a line, at least not without counting them, he has
preferred the purely syllabic form so that the verse would be more agile and less
staccato than the traditional iambic translation (Väljataga 2001: 17). The
placement of accents has no role in this translated verse except in the
penultimate and ultimate syllables: all verses have feminine endings; still, an
Estonian reader is likely to perceive this rather as dol’nik than as syllabic verse.
Purely syllabic forms of this kind are rather marginal in Estonian poetry and
also in translations of poetry. Shorter syllabic structures like haiku and tanka
are still common and are translated into Estonian with the help of 17-syllabic
and 31-syllabic forms respectively, although recently an antithetic form has
evolved: some authors prefer the so-called trochaic version, that is, our own
native metre, in which the first line has, for instance, four syllables, being a
trochaic dimeter, the second has six syllables (a trochaic trimeter) and the third
again four syllables.
2.2. Syllabic-accentual and accentual-syllabic versification

In Estonian translated verse syllabic, accentual and quantitative principles are
represented, but more usual are the combined types, for instance, those based
on both the number of syllables and the placement of accent. There are also
systems in which all three principles are involved. The accentual system of
versification and its different combinations are best adjusted to the Estonian
language and the main part of versified translations follows these principles. A
large corpus of German, Russian, English, etc. poetry has been translated into
Estonian in syllabic-accentual and accentual-syllabic systems of versification.
Although the dynamic nature of Estonian stress allows constructing such
verses, the translator still has to solve certain problems due to the prosodic
system of the Estonian language. For instance, in comparison with the Russian
language, the following features of Estonian are relevant from the standpoint of
verse prosody:
1. the presence of secondary stress;
2. the fixity of stress on the first syllable of a word;
3. the lack of the reduction of unstressed syllables.13
13
The accentual principles of Russian verse were formulated by Viktor Zhirmunskij
(1925) and detailed by Mikhail Gasparov (1974).
The consequence of the first feature reveals itself most clearly in the rhythmics
of the syllabic-accentual verse: the effect of the so-called missed stresses is
considerably less obvious, since, on the whole, in the case of polysyllabic words,
the stress positions are filled with syllables carrying a secondary stress. The
second characteristic inflicts difficulties, first of all, at the beginning and at the
end of verse, but also in the positions of caesurae. For instance, in the case of
iamb and amphibrachiac the monosyllabic beginning can be avoided only with
names, foreign words or compound words.14 Let us see the second stanza from
the translation (by Kalju Kangur; see Mandelstam 1990: 105) of Osip
Mandelstam’s poem Как кони медленно ступают (How slow the horses go) in
iambic tetrameter (x́ signifies syllables with main stress and x̀ syllables with
secondary stress; in Russian, the secondary stress is present only in the case of
certain clitics):15
А я вверяюсь их заботе, xx́xx́xx́xx́x

Мне холодно, я спать хочу; x̀x́xxx̀x́xx́
Подбросило на повороте xx́xxxxxx́x
Навстречу звездному лучу. xx́xx́xxxx́x
(Osip Mandelstam, Как кони медленно ступают)
Ma usaldan end nende hoolde. x̀x́xx̀x̀x̀xx́x.

Külm vaevab, silmad täis on und. x́x́xx́xx̀x̀x́
Retk suundub tähekiire poole, x́x́xx́xx̀xx̀x
teekäänakul mis heiastund. x́x̀xx̀x̀x́xx̀
(Osip Mandelstam, Kui laisalt ratsud samme seavad, trans. K. Kangur)
While in the source text there are only four lines where all the stress positions are
filled with stressed syllables, in the target text there is at least some kind of
rhythmical signal in every odd position, even if it is the weakest secondary stress,
as in the second foot of the first line in the given example. In the third line of the
example there are only two stresses in the source text and as many as five stresses
14
Such a feature has even evoked opinions that it is not possible, in principle, to create
iambic verse in Estonian, compare Lehiste 1994.
15
For the poem in Russian, see http://www.rvb.ru/mandelstam/dvuhtomnik/
01text/vol_1/01versus/0018.htm. English translation: I’m confident in their care, / I’m
cold: sleep, my desire: / Catapulted at the corner / Towards the starry fire (translated
by A. S. Kline, available at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Russian/
MoreMandelstam.htm).
in the target text – four in accordance with the scheme and one extra-metrical
stress at the beginning of verse. The most common position for extra-metrical
stresses in the Estonian iamb is at the beginning of verse: it is usual that a column
of monosyllabic words tends to align at the beginning of verses; in this example,
only in the last verse this pattern is avoided with the help of a compound word.
As for the cadence, in the source text all masculine verses (with one exception)
end with polysyllabic words, while in the target text all masculine verses (also
with one exception) have a monosyllable in the verse-end.
The third prosodic feature is independence of unstressed syllables which
causes problems in the transmission of accentual-syllabic verses. While in
Russian accentual-syllabic verses it is sometimes hard to determine the exact
length of intervals between stresses (see, for instance, Jakobson 1969: 102), in
the Estonian dol’nik and taktovik16 the syllabic count of an interval is for the
most part clearly determinable.17 Let us compare, for example, a passage from
Mayakovskij’s poem Нашему юношеству (To our youth) and its Estonian
version (translated by Felix Kotta; see Mayakovskij 1947):18
Когда ж переходят On tegemist

к научной теме, teaduse alalt teemaga,
им piirab vene keel
рамки русского mõtteviisi,
у́зки; ning prantsuse keeles
с Тифлисской Kaasani akadeemia
Казанская академия akadeemiale
переписывается по-французки. kirjutab
Tiflisi.
(Mayakovskij, Нашему юношеству 52–55) (Mayakovskij, Meie noorsoole, trans. F. Kotta)
16
For more details on the Estonian dol’nik and taktovik see Põldmäe 1978: 124–139;
Lotman, M. 1998: 2063.
17
An exception is the prosodic licence in the poetry of the 19th century and the early
20th century, according to which the diphthongs could become disyllabic. Therefore, for
instance, in the earlier accentual-syllabic dactylic hexameter it is sometimes difficult to
establish in the case of diphthongs whether the feet are dactylic or spondaic (trochaic).
18
For the poem in Russian, see http://feb-web.ru/feb/mayakovsky/texts/ms0/ms8/
ms8-014-.htm. English translation: If they go over to a scholarly subject, / the frames of
Russian are too narrow for them / with the Academy of Tbilisi the Academy of Kazan /
exchanges letters in French (my translation – M.-K. L.).
The prosodic problems are of a different kind. In Russian the number of non-
initial syllables is ambivalent (for instance, переписывается can be read both as
a heptasyllabic and a hexasyllabic word). In Estonian, the syllabic count is
unambiguous, but the problems are related to the footing of words, especially
in the case of polysyllabic and compound words. See, for instance, a fragment
in the translation of the same poem:
kehkenpüksluse näol pariisitsev,19
which can be, metrically, rendered as xxXxxXxXxx, XxXxxXxXxx, XxxxxXxXxx

or XxxxxxxXxx, that is, there are different ways of footing. The original of this
line is here:
французистыми пижонами.
It is a two-footed phrase, the syllabic structure of which can only be determined

in the context of verse (in this case: xXxxx xXxx / ABAABABAA).
2.3. Quantitative versification

The fact that there exists the contrast of quantity in Estonian is the very reason
why it has become mainstream in the Estonian poetic culture to translate
quantitative poetry into quantitative verse. Also, the Estonian folklore metre
was originally quantitative and since the beginning of the 20th century, when
writers had become aware of the contrast of quantity in the Estonian language,
there have been constant experiments with it in translations, especially in
translating verse of classical antiquity, but also, for instance, the Finnish
national epic Kalevala. Nevertheless, there is no uniform, standard system of
Estonian quantitative versification. The quantity of syllables carrying the main
stress does not pose a problem: as a rule, the syllables of the second and the
third duration occur in heavy positions, while syllables of the first duration are
in light positions. However, since there is no contrast of quantity in the non-
initial unstressed syllables in the Estonian natural language (see also Lotman
2011b: 316–318), there are rather big differences in the variety of systems. Let
us compare three different models of translated hexameter.
19
English translation: As wannabe French snobs (my translation – M.-K. L.).
2.3.1. Artificial quantitative system

Jaan Lõo, a poet and lawyer, translated Homer’s Iliad in its entirety. Differently
from the earlier translations of Homer (for more details, see Lotman 2005),
which follow the accentual-syllabic principles without paying attention to the
quantitative structure, Lõo pursues quantitative verse. The metrical model of
his hexameter is as follows:
&&AB&AB&AB&AB&AB&A6B&&
The model is realized with the syllabic, quantitative-syllabic and accentual

rules.
1. Syllabic rules
1.1. To every position A corresponds one syllable.
Ax
1.2. To every position B correspond one or two syllables.
Bx
B  xx
2. Quantitative-syllabic rules
2.1. To every position A corresponds one heavy syllable.
A–
2.2. To every position B correspond one heavy or two light syllables.
B–
B  
3. Accentual rules
3.1. To position A6 corresponds one accentual syllable.
A6  x́
A6  x̀
This model calls for some comments. First, syllabic weight, especially the
weight of non-initial syllables, often is not in accordance with the prosody of
natural language, but is attributed to these syllables with the help of artificial
rules.20 For instance, according to the prosody of the natural language, there is
20
Lõo’s system is not the only attempt to develop an artificial system of Estonian
quantitative hexameter, see also Roos 1938. Victor Terras was the first to distinguish
between these two types of quantitative hexameter; in his terms, Oras’s verse is
quantitative-tonic, Roos’s secondary quantitative (Terras 1970).
no contrast of quantity in the final open syllable, yet Lõo sometimes treats such
syllables as heavy. Second, although Lõo tries to construct a hexameter where
accent has no role, the strong position of the last foot still acquires an accentual
constant. It is a consequence of the avoidance of monosyllabic words in verse-
ends; thus, the penultimate position is usually filled with the main stress of a
disyllabic word or the secondary stress of a polysyllabic word. The main
purpose of Lõo’s translation is to convey the versification of the original, to
perfect the Estonian quantitative-syllabic system of versification, while the
expression plane clearly dominates the content plane. The accentual constant
in the verse-ends relates to classical Latin verse, in which the stress supports the
quantitative structure in verse-ends differently from the middle part of the
verse, where the concurrence of quantitative and accentual structure is avoided.
2.3.2. System based on the prosody of natural language

A bulk of Latin hexametrical poetry is translated by Ants Oras who drew on the
principles of versification developed by Villem Ridala. Ridala experimented
with ancient verse forms also in his original poetry where he developed the
rules of Estonian literary quantitative verse – however, in his version of the
Estonian Iliad he adhered to accentual-syllabic rules (for more details, see
Lotman 2005). In such hexameter the syllabic rules are the same as in Lõo’s
model, but the quantitative rules are different in some respects. For example,
while in position A the syllabic weight is sustained, in positions B the rules are
less rigid than in Lõo’s verse. In Oras’s hexameter the following quantitative
rules are applied:
1. To every position A corresponds one heavy syllable.

A–
2. To every position B corresponds one heavy syllable or a sequence
consisting of two syllables of an optional quantity.
B–
B  xx
3. To position B6 corresponds one syllable with an irrelevant quantity.
B6  x
Hence, in the case of such versification, attention is focused mainly on filling

the strong positions with heavy syllables. As a rule, such a syllable is an initial
one and carries the main stress. At the same time, there is less regard for the
quantitative structure of non-initial syllables filling the weak positions in the
line. Accordingly, in weak positions Oras does not pay as much attention to
quantity as he does in the case of strong positions. Of course, the incidence of
heavy syllables is much lower in weak positions than in strong positions, but
this is the result of the fact that weak positions are mainly filled with non-initial
syllables which are mostly light.
As compared to Lõo’s model, a set of accentual rules also applies in the
given hexameter:
1. To position A corresponds one syllable with a primary stress or one

syllable with a secondary stress.
A6  x́
A6  x̀
2. To position B corresponds one unstressed syllable or a sequence of two
unstressed syllables.
Bx
B  xx
2.1. Mono- and disyllabic non-lexicals are accentual ancipitia and can fill
both strong and weak positions.
2.2. As an exception, also a monosyllabic or disyllabic lexical item can
occur in the position B.
Of course, the versification and rhythmical structure of such hexameter are

quite distinct from that of the classical hexameter and, differently from Lõo’s
aim, the purpose is not to imitate the versification of the source text, but rather
to develop a hexameter specific to Estonian, which would accommodate the
prosodic reality of the Estonian language. Such versification which mainly pays
attention to filling the strong positions, is indeed closer to the prosody of the
natural language, where the contrast of quantity reveals itself in stressed
syllables.
2.3.3. Synthetical system

Neither Lõo’s artificial model nor Ridala’s looser system sufficed to meet the
demands of several other hexametrists who pursued stricter quantitative
structures. The most elaborate form of hexameter has been developed by Ain
Kaalep, who in his discussions of verse translation has emphasized the
importance of conveying the inseparable unity of content and form (compare,
for instance, Kaalep 1961). In his hexameter the weak positions are also
regulated, while, more than with Lõo’s verse, the prosodic structure of the
natural language is considered. The quantitative-syllabic rules of his verse are
the following:
1. To position A corresponds one heavy syllable.

A–
2. To position B corresponds one heavy syllable or a sequence consisting
of two light syllables.
B–
B  
2.1. To position B6 corresponds one syllable with an irrelevant quantity.
B6  x
Stresses occur mostly in strong positions, but in order to construct implications

to the structure of the source text, where verse is based not on accentual, but
quantitative contrasts, Kaalep uses deliberate rhythmical effects (accentual
shifts); such shifts (first used by the pioneers of Estonian quantitative
hexameter Jaan Lõo and Gustav Suits) also help to avoid the concurrence of
word-ends and foot boundaries.
In this aspect, Kaalep’s versification is a step back towards the structure of
the ancient hexameter, as compared to Ridala’s and Oras’s verse. Here the
primary aim is to follow quantitative rules, to which the syllabic structure is
subjected, while the use of accents is in places irrelevant. Yet, since the prosodic
systems are dissimilar, the result is an entirely different rhythmical structure.
3. Conclusion
Although in the history of Estonian poetic translation there are examples of
nonequimetrical nonequiprosodic, nonequimetrical equiprosodic and
nonequiprosodic equimetrical translation of verse, the prevailing method has
been simultaneously equimetrical and equiprosodic. Even in the case of
nonequiprosodic translations, it is common that implications of the prosodic
structure of the source text occur on the rhythmical level.
Even more interesting are the cases where the prosodic system of the source
language is rather different from that of the target language, so that it is difficult
to convey the system of versification with the means of natural language. An
example is the translation of ancient metres into Estonian. Although the
Estonian language has a contrast of quantity, its nature is quite different from
the quantitative structure of, for instance, ancient Greek. There are various
approaches in creating quantitative verse in Estonian – some are derived, first
of all, from the prosody of the natural language, some create an artificial system,
while some are a compromise between the two, mostly complying with the
quantitative structure of the natural language, but for special effects, especially
in accentual shifts, applying also the artificial renditions of quantity.21
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varjus. Luulet. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 105.
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град: Академиа.
Эквипросодический стихотворный перевод

Эквипросодический перевод, передающий систему стихосложения оригинала, следует
отличать от эквиметрического. Эквипросодический перевод может опираться на
естественные возможности языка (например, Энний в переводе «Одиссеи»
воспользовался квантитативной структурой латыни), но может основываться и на
искусственно созданной системе (ср. квантитативное стихосложение на английском
или церковнословянском языке). В эстонском языке есть возможности для передачи
как силлабического стихосложения (основанного на счете слогов), так и тонического
(основанного на счете и расположении ударений) и квантитативного (основанного
на расположении долгот). Наиболее часто встречаются комбинированные типы:
например, сочетающие силлабику с тоникой, но возможны и системы стихосложения,
сочетающие все три просодических фактора. Хотя в эстонском языке есть контраст
долгот, передача квантитативной структуры античного стиха связана с рядом
трудностей, проистекающих из различий просодической структуры. Также затруд-
нена и передача чисто-силлабического стиха: его структура с трудом воспринимается
в качестве стихотворной, поэтому, по примеру русских переводчиков, силлабический
стих передается различными видами силлабо-акцентного или акцентно-силлаби-
ческого стиха. Хотя эквипросодический стихотворный перевод не обязательно
является одновременно и эквиметрическим, в основном русле переводческой прак-
тики наблюдается совпадение этих принципов.
Ekviprosoodiline luuletõlge
Ekvimeetrilisest värsitõlkest tuleks eristada ekviprosoodilist värsitõlget, mis annab edasi
originaali värsisüsteemi. Ekviprosoodiline luuletõlge võib tugineda loomuliku keele
võimalustele (nt Enniuse tõlgitud “Odüsseia” kasutab ära ladina keele kvantiteerivat
struktuuri), kuid võib põhineda ka kunstlikult loodud süsteemil (vrd nt kvantiteerivat värssi
inglise või vene keeles). Eesti keeles on võimalik edasi anda nii süllaabilist (silbiarvul
põhinevat), rõhulist (rõhkude arvul ja paigutusel põhinevat) kui ka kvantiteerivat (väldete
paigutusel põhinevat) värsisüsteemi. Praktikas on sagedamini kasutusel kombineeritud
tüübid: nt sellised, milles on oluline nii silbiarv kui rõhkude paigutus; eesti keeles on
võimalikud ka kõigi kolme põhimõtte osalusel tekkivad värsisüsteemid. Kuigi eesti keeles
on olemas vältekontrast, on antiikmeetrika kvantiteeriva struktuuri edasiandmisel siiski rida
raskusi, mis tulenevad teistsugusest prosoodilisest struktuurist. Samuti on probleemne
puhtsüllaabilise värsisüsteemi edasiandmine: seda struktuuri on raske tajuda värsilisena
ning seetõttu on seda vene tõlkijate eeskujul sageli asendatud ka erinevate rõhulis-silbiliste
või silbilis-rõhuliste värsimõõtudega. Ekviprosoodiline värsstõlge ei pruugi tingimata olla
ekvimeetriline, kuid peavoolutõlgetes on see üldjuhul siiski nõnda.
On the semiotic description of autogenesis in culture
Tomi Huttunen
Department of Modern Languages
P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40B)
00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
e-mail: tomi.huttunen@helsinki.fi
Abstract. The article is devoted to the notion of autogenesis and mechanism of

unpredictable emergence in culture. The notion is treated in the context of the semiotics of
culture and the theory of semiosphere. The examples are drawn mainly from Russian
avant-garde culture.
Тhe idea that everything in culture exists in a historical continuum of tradition

and intellectual communication is one of the essential features of semiosphere.
In analyzing the dynamic cultural space of constant dialogue, intellectual
interaction and communication, Juri Lotman turned to Vladimir Vernadskij
and concluded that nothing in culture is created out of nothing. On the
contrary, everything is related to other formations and to the whole culture
(see Lotman 1997: 629–630). Semiosphere as a continuum of texts means
constant interactivity and intertextuality, and this space surrounding all
intellectual activity presupposes the dialogic situation. Intersemiotic and
intertextual features are thus taken as part of culture’s essential being.
Because of the semiosphere, studying innovation in culture, i.e. sponta-
neous phenomena of self-creation, means studying declarations of autogenesis
rather than autogenetic phenomena in themselves. Such a declaration is often
emphasized within abrupt and unexpected phenomena in culture. More
generally, the question of autogenesis in culture could be translated as a
dialogue between creation and evolution and their often paradoxical inter-
action in cultural history.
In discussing autogenesis in culture one must turn to Lotman’s last works,
which were dedicated to unpredictability. However, before these works the
474 Tomi Huttunen
notion of dialogue had become extremely important to him: “Consciousness is

impossible without communication. In this sense it can be said that dialogue
precedes language and generates the language.” (Lotman 2005[1984]: 218).
The “dialogocentric” theory of the semiosphere emphasizes the idea that in
culture there are no pre-existing components, except for dialogue (Lotman,
Kull, Torop 2004; see also Kull 2005: 179 and Torop 2009: xxxii). Eventually,
this dialogo-centrism was taken to another level and developed further in
Universe of the Mind, where Lotman (1990: 143–144) underlined that “the
need for dialogue, the dialogic situation, precedes both real dialogue and even
the existence of a language in which to conduct it: the semiotic situation
precedes the instruments of semiosis”.
In his final books Lotman tried to synthesize his earlier findings by
concentrating on two features of historical cultural progress: gradual (pre-
dictable) and explosive (unpredictable) processes. As Peeter Torop (2009:
xxvii) has shown, the distinction between static and dynamic aspects of culture
was also already present in the earlier Lotman and was very significant in
discussing the theory of unpredictability. In Torop’s interview Lotman talks
about combining artistic signification with unpredictability: “Art has always
been oriented towards unpredictability” (Torop 2005: 160).
In discussing unpredictability, Lotman turned to Ilya Prigogine and his
studies on stability and instability. The gradual processes of motivated
predictability in culture came to mean something that is understood with
certainty and inescapably received by its consumers – it meant processuality,
continuity and the logical evolution of consistency (Lotman 1992: 17–18).
Against the background of cultural semiotics, these gradual processes should
be understood as a neutral dialogue from the point of view of cultural history,
since Lotman was mainly interested in cultural formations that would revolt
against norms, even against our understanding.
Lotman was approaching the question of autogenesis in Russian culture
from the same perspective, and Prigogine explicitly discussed self-organization
as an argument that would develop Vernadskij’s ideas in a new direction: “The
early appearance of life is certainly an argument in favour of the idea that life is
the result of spontaneous self-organization that occurs whenever conditions for
it permit” (Prigogine, Stengers 1984: 176).
Studying unpredictability by analysing autogenetic phenomena in culture
means an attempt to describe the indescribable, that is, to predict ultimate
unpredictability in culture. In order to make some statements about auto-
On the semiotic description of autogenesis in culture 475
genesis in relation to the theory of predictability/unpredictability, I shall turn

to the following diagram which describes the semiotic process of gradual
understanding in the case of a phenomenon, a process which declares its own
unpredictability and its own autogenetic origin. An unexpected, spontaneously
formed, theoretically incomprehensible phenomenon – a genuinely innovative
artistic text in culture, for example – is transformed into a gradual, predictable
process and appears in dialogue with more predictable processes in the
following way:
HISTORICAL META-TEXTUAL
13.
2. criticism
12.
3. analysis
11.
4. adaptation
10.
5. imitation
9. 6. translation
8. 7. language / grammar
1.
Figure 1. Diagram describing the semiotics of an autogenetic phenomenon in culture.
An artistic text, for example, which is not understood by contemporary

readers/recipients, is described here as a spontaneous appearance at a certain
moment in time. Its autogenetic nature relies on the fact that it has – or it
seems to have – no language. Here it is shown as the vertical arrow in the
middle of the diagram (1). For example, in the Bible the idea of linguistic
autogenesis in the Book of Genesis was further emphasized in the Gospel
according to John, especially in the prologue called the “Hymn to Logos”,
which introduces the conception that Jesus Christ is the Logos: “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”
476 Tomi Huttunen
(John 1:1). According to John, the Word, which had participated in the
creation, in fact gave birth to itself. It was not created nor was it given birth; it
existed before the world was created, and it was realized by being “made flesh”
(John 1:14). However, the Word was not understood by people. Christ as
Logos remained misunderstood. The autogenetic word was born out of itself
and was received with confusion. The hymn to Logos is obviously an
autogenetic motif, but at the same time we can speak of a word being difficult
to understand as an expression of an unknown language, which people in their
“darkness” (Gr. σκοτία) do not “comprehend” (Gr. κατέλαβεν). Theologically,
the idea of people not comprehending Logos was soon considered highly
problematic, especially as the idea is further emphasized in the Gospel itself.
Returning to the diagram, such unexpected phenomena can easily be found
in the historical avant-garde, declaring its innovativeness and its non-belonging
to the existing cultural context of its arrival. In Igor Smirnov’s (1986)
terminology, such a spontaneously formed artistic text represents catachresis,
which ignores the inevitable contact with existing tradition, other con-
temporary texts, or the culture as a whole. Its reception in the culture could be
described as a gradual emergence of a sign system for a previously unknown
phenomenon, because it is followed in time by semiospherical activity, by
different metatextual processes or practices of culture (circles 2–6 on the
diagram; see Fig. 1). The language of the text emerges after the text itself, from
the dialogic space of metatextual, semiospherical activity.
Metatexts are attempts to understand unknown phenomena: immediate
criticism (circle 2 on the diagram), for example, generating new paraphrases,
concepts or fragments of a language. Or analyses (3), typical attempts to apply
a specific metalanguage to describe the text in question. Adaptations (4) and
imitations (5) are fascinating phenomena, being obviously more predictable
than the text reflected upon. Thus, adaptations and imitations are much better
understood by representatives of the culture. This could be one of the reasons
why imitations usually become bestsellers in literature or blockbusters in the
cinema. In this context Lotman (2009: 8–9) often refers to the language of
fashion and especially to the question of dandyism in culture: an authentic
dandy is not understood by the viewers of his entrée, since he is a creator of a
new fashion and strives not to be understood at all. To be misunderstood is not
a problem for him. However, to be left unnoticed – that is the real tragedy for a
dandy. But before a real dandy becomes something that is understood (before
an original is transformed into an imitation or before the clothes created by an
innovative fashion maker appear in clothing stores), we can discern a category

of something unnoticed that is noticeable. It is a paradoxical formation
between an authentic dandy and his imitator. It is a category of oxymoron and
catachresis.
For the Russian Futurists, the idea of self-emergence was essential.
Paradoxically, in declaring their independent appearance in the history of
culture they would turn, for example, to the Novgorod iconographic tradition,
which flourished especially during the 13th century. One of the major motifs
developed from the Byzantine tradition among the Novgorod school was the
motif of Spas Nerukotvornyj (Holy Mandylion). The story of Mandylion is
essentially about an autogenetic image of Christ. The icon (Fig. 2) is, typically
of the Novgorod school of iconography, exceptionally expressive and dynamic
in its simplicity – at the same time it is one of the images related to the legend
about the emergence of icon painting itself.
Figure 2. Spas Nerukotvornyj. Figure 3. David Burlyuk: Portret poeta

Novgorod, 12th c. V. Kamenskogo, 1917.
478 Tomi Huttunen
It is exactly through this primitively simple, yet expressive iconographic

tradition of Spas Nerukotvornyj that there is a logical way of relating the
question of autogenesis to the aesthetics of Russian avant-garde painting. The
most striking likeness with this particular tradition can be seen in David
Burlyuk’s (the so-called “father of Russian Futurism”) portrait of the Futurist
poet Vasilij Kamenskij (the so-called “mother of Russian Futurism”) – a
portrait, which is an obvious imitation of Spas Nerukotvornyj (Fig. 3).
The influence of traditional icon painting on Russian avant-garde art was
enormous. Even Kazimir Malevich called his Black Square on White Canvas (1915)
“the icon of icons”, and the Suprematists generally used icons as their source of
inspiration. Analogous intertextual pairs to Spas and Portrait of Kamenskij are easy
to find from the avant-garde art of the early 20th century (Spira 2008: 46, 56). One
exciting example from the mid-1920s’ avant-garde art is Kliment Red’ko’s Revolt
(Vosstanie, 1924), a dynamic painting (Fig. 4) that is filled with contrastive
elements and whose relation to icon painting has not, to my knowledge, been
previously studied (see, however, Zlydneva 2007: 281). Red’ko’s painting was one
of the many art works made on the occasion of Lenin’s death:
Figure 4. Kliment Red’ko, Vosstanie, 1923–25.

Figure 5. Soshestvie v ad s izbrannymi svjatymi. Pskov, 15th–16th cc.
This dramatic and apocalyptic scene with its strong geometrical forms and
hierarchical representations of Bolshevik party officials in Moscow’s Red
Square calls for comparison with a particular Russian iconographic tradition.
First, the Russian title of the painting can be read as a reference to Vosstanie iz
mertvyh (Resurrection from the dead), which is also known as Soshestvie v ad
480 Tomi Huttunen
(Descent into Hell). This tradition had already reached its formal unity in the
10th-century icon painting. Kliment Red’ko, well educated in icons, had by the
time the picture was painted left the group of Malevich’s Suprematists, who
relied heavily on themes and styles derived from traditional Russian icons. He
was now active in planning his own ideas of elektro-organizm and lyuminizm,
participated in the work of the Projectionists, and had turned from
abstractionism to figurative art (Zlydneva 2007: 278). Considering the
contrasting combination of red and black with occasional golden light (a
typical combination of the Pskov school of iconography), as well as the
political hierarchy and Lenin’s posed gesture at the centre of the painting (the
dialogue between dynamics and stability), there is all the more reason to
juxtapose Red’ko’s avant-garde creation with one of the most famous icons
from the Pskov school, the extraordinarily dynamic Descent into Hell (Fig. 5).
What is common to all four images presented is the theme of resurrection.
It is taken as a means of re-contextualization in avant-garde art with its specific
cultural and political contexts. This mechanism of auto-communicative self-
references, highly typical of Russian culture, could also be characterized as a
cultural analogy to self-replicating phenomena.
The Futurist Burlyuk’s intertextual treatment of Vasilij Kamenskij’s portrait
refers not so much to the Christ-likeness of the Futurist poet, but rather to the
Russian culture’s general autocommunicative need for self-references and to
the Futurists’ way of declaring themselves a self-emerging spontaneous
phenomenon without any possible connection with Filippo Tommasi
Marinetti’s Italian Futurism, even though Marinetti’s manifestos had been
published years before the first Russian Futurists’ declarations. Apart from
rejecting Marinetti and the Italians, the Futurists wanted to reject everything
that they had learned from their own culture. In 1912 they signed the famous
declaration “A Slap in the Face of the Public Taste”. Symptomatically enough,
it was entitled “Unexpected”.
To the readers of our New First Unexpected.

We alone are the face of our Time. Through us the horn of time blows in the art of
the word.
The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than
hieroglyphics.
Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of
Modernity.
He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last. […]
And if for the time being the filthy stigmas of Your “Common sense” and “good
taste” are still present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer
with the Summer Lightening of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-
centered) Word. (Lawton 1988: 51–52, italics original)
This kind of declaration of autogenetic rootlessness was typical of the Russian

avant-garde. The poets, painters, filmmakers and performing artists were eager
to declare themselves the newest, the most innovative, independent and
impressive artists of their time. Their predecessors, the Symbolists, were
rejected just as aggressively as the Western European influences, though both
were, inevitably, sources for Russian avant-garde writers. This is one of the
most obvious reasons why these artists turned to the idea of autogenesis.
Declaring themselves self-created implied the rejection of tradition.
Paradoxically, autogenesis in the Russian avant-garde is very often related to
the image of Christ, as we can see in the way icons were reproduced, even
though it clearly belongs to the rejected world of the old and is an essential part
of the past culture’s language. However, the Christian motif of autogenesis is
related not only to the image of Christ and thus to the paradoxical rejection of
previous tradition, but also to the emergence of human language according to
the Bible.
Returning to the diagram (Fig. 1), translation (circle 6) is the last metatext
before reaching the emergence of language. Of course, even a partial
translatability of an “unknown” and incomprehensible phenomenon already
proves that it has created a language of its own in culture. However, it is
possible to speak of intersemiotic translation in all of the above cases of meta-
textual mechanisms.
Thus, according to the diagram, we have reached the moment where
unpredictable becomes predictable – text achieves a language (circle 7) that is
going to be understood by the recipients, by the culture where the originally
autogenetic text had appeared. Only in time, through the emergence of a
language and with the help of heterogeneous texts and metatexts that interact
with the spontaneously formed text, does the reconstruction of logical chains
become possible. This could be described as a historical process of
reconstructing steps that lead to the unpredictable event or phenomenon.
According to Lotman (2009: 154), these steps turn out to be gradual and
predictable, so that eventually the occasional and spontaneous phenomenon
becomes the only possible conclusion in this particular situation.
482 Tomi Huttunen
All the above-mentioned metatextual processes represent the act of

gradually relating the spontaneous phenomenon to its contemporary culture.
They are more stable, structured and predictable in the cultural context of the
event. Typical of the semiosphere’s activity, these metatextual processes appear
in the form of a dialogue between cultural languages. At the same time, these
metatextual processes eventually lead to the formation of the language of the
phenomenon which was originally unknown, since it did not have a language in
the culture. So, the result is its structuration. Only this kind of emergence of
language makes it possible for contemporaries to reconstruct certain historical
causalities, leading to understanding the incomprehensible, predicting the non-
predictable, knowing the unknown.
After an autogenetic phenomenon, in all its ultimate unpredictability, has
turned into a gradual, predictable process in culture (achieving its own
language with the help of metatexts and other languages), it is possible for the
recipients to begin, on the one hand, to understand the phenomenon, and thus
its historical framing becomes possible. In other words, after the explosion has
changed into a more gradual process, people are able to decipher reasons
behind it and processes leading to it. This is the case with wider cultural,
historical and even political explosions as well as revolutionary phenomena.
For contemporaries they are eschatological, but for future generations they are
understandable phenomena with their own laws. Suddenly something that had
seemingly happened by chance, unexpectedly, appears as the only possible
choice. The unpredictability comes to be replaced by predictable regularity.
References
Kull, Kalevi 2005. Semiosphere and a dual ecology: Paradoxes of communication. Sign
Lawton, Anna (ed.) 1988. Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Lotman, Mihhail; Kull, Kalevi; Torop, Peeter 2004. Dialogue and identity. In: Puronas,
Vytautas; Skirgailiene, Violeta (eds.), Globalization, Europe and Regional Identity.
Vilnius: Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, 143–155.
Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London: I. B.
Tauris.
– 1992. Izbrannye stat’ji v treh tomah. Tallinn: Aleksandra.
– 1997. Pis’ma. 1940–1993. (Egorov, Boris, ed.) Moskva: Yazyki russkoj kul’tury.
– 2005[1984]. On the semiosphere. (Clark, Wilma, trans.) Sign Systems Studies 33(1):
205–229.
– 2009. Culture and Explosion. (Grishakova, Marina, ed.; Clark, Wilma, trans.) Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Prigogine, Ilya; Stengers, Isabelle 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with
Nature. Toronto: Bantam Books.
Smirnov, Igor 1986. Katahreza. Russian Literature 19(1): 57–64.
Spira, Andrew 2008. The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting
Tradition. Aldershot: Lund Humphries.
Torop, Peeter 2005. Semiosphere and/as the object of semiotics of culture. Sign Systems
Studies 33(1): 159–173.
– 2009. Lotmanian explosion. In: Lotman, Juri, Culture and Explosion. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, xxvii–xxxix.
Zlydneva, N. 2007. “Opyat’ rasskazali strashnoe”: ob odnoj kartine Klimenta Red’ko v
svete emblematicheskogo narrativa 20-h godov’. In: Zaionts, L. O. (ed.), ‘Na mezhe
mezh Golosom i Ekhom’. Sbornik stat’ej v chest’ Tat’yany Vladimirovny Tsiv’yan. Moskva:
Novoe izdatel’stvo, 277–288.
К семиотическому описанию автогенезиса в культуре

Статья посвящена понятию автогенезиса и механизму непредсказуемости явлений
культуры. Понятие обсуждается в контексте семиотики культуры и теории семио-
сферы. Примеры приводятся преимущественно из культуры русского авангарда.
Kultuuri autogeneesi semiootilisest kirjeldamisest

Artikkel on pühendatud autogeneesi mõistele ja ennustamatuse mehhanismile kultuuris.
Mõistet käsitletakse kultuurisemiootika ja semiosfääri teooria kontekstis. Näitematerjal
pärineb peamiselt vene avangardkultuurist.
The mythopoetical model and logic

of the concrete in Quechua culture:
Cultural and transcultural translation problems
Ileana Almeida
Department of Communication, Universidad Central del Ecuador
Calle Gatto Sobral O E 9–16 Y Ritter
Sector Alto de Lagasca
Quito, Ecuador
e-mail: ilalo@andinanet.net
Julieta Haidar
Social Anthropology Department, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia
Antiguo Camino a la Sierra 15, Casa 1
San Andrés Totoltepec – Delegación Tlalpan
Código postal 14.400 México, D. F., México
e-mail: jurucuyu@gmail.com
Abstract. This article deals mainly with problems of cultural/transcultural translation

between the Quechua and Spanish cultures, analysing these on the basis of some ideas by
Juri Lotman and Peeter Torop. The process of translation implies considering the
Quechua semiosphere’s internal borders as well as the external borders related to the
cultures that existed at the time of Tahuantin Suyo, and all changes that have come from
the Spanish conquest of Latin America. In the case of the Quechua culture, the problems
are numerous and conflicting in several dimensions. First of all, Quechua is an
agglutinating language that creates problems for translation into a flexional language such
as Spanish. Secondly, and more importantly, there exists a mythopoetical model of the
world that has been built in this culture, which does not use concepts of rational logic, but
poetic images integrated into mythical thinking: it represents a different cognitive pattern.
Thirdly, the presence of the logic of the concrete in Quechua culture, articulated with the
mythopoetical model, makes translation from Western abstract formal logic difficult.
Reflections on these issues provide new analytical possibilities.
The mythopoetical model and logic of the concrete in Quechua culture 485
“The value of archaic world, of myth and folklore, is not

opposed to later art values. It is rather comparable in a complex
way with the highest achievements of world culture.”
Juri Lotman and Zara Mints (1996)
Introduction
The main objective of this article is to analyse the mythopoetical model and the
‘logic of the concrete’ present in the Quechua culture that manifest unique and
complex performances. These two organically articulated features produce a
series of problems of cultural translation between the Quechua and Hispanic
worlds in Ecuador. In other words, the processes of cultural/transcultural
translation (Lotman, Uspenski 2000b; Torop 2002, 2003, 2010) between the
Quechua and Hispanic semiospheres are complex, full of tension, conflicting
and lead to theoretical, methodological and analytical challenges which we will
be considering in the course of this article.
We start by considering the epistemological perspective of complexity and
transdisciplinarity (Morin 1997, 2002; Nicolescu 2009) and relate these to the
approach of the Tartu School, as well as to the Quechua cultural episteme.
Second, we explain some features of the Quechua world that deserve to be
better known. Third, we consider the mythopoetical models of this ancient
culture that can be detected also in other ancient cultures. Fourth, we apply
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1964) notion of the ‘logic of the concrete’, also
developed by A. Spirkin (1965), that may be a feature of most non-writing
cultures as opposed to the abstract logic of Western languages.
Epistemologies of complexity proposed by Edgar Morin (1997, 2002) and
of transdisciplinarity proposed by Basarab Nicolescu (2009) are two foremost
cornerstones in the study of the Quechua culture and thus make place for it on
the same trajectory of importance as other ancient cultures and other
hegemonic cultural developments in the current processes of worldwide
globalization.
To begin, it is important to differentiate, in cognitive terms, the episte-
mology from the epistemic, seeing the former as accepted by the academy,
while the latter is seen as excluded. However, from the perspective of
complexity and transdisciplinarity it is mandatory and necessary to integrate
with the same validity all knowledge generated in ancestral and ancient cultures
like those of the Chinese, Egyptian, Quechua, Maya, and Aztec, among others
486 Ileana Almeida, Julieta Haidar
(Haidar 2004). This allows discussing on an equal footing the hegemony of

scholarly thought in the Western culture and the hegemony of other types of
thought like the mythical, mystical, magical or religious thought which are
developed in the East. In other words, Michel Foucault (1972) and Julieta
Haidar (2004) propose that both the epistemological and the epistemic1
should be regarded as having the same cognitive value and, keeping in mind the
aspects of complexity and transdisciplinarity, should be represented as main-
taining a spiral relationship between these two axes. The cognitive processes in
ancient cultures, such as the Quechua, relate to the epistemic realm which
explains the workings or performances of the mythopoetical model.
In this sense, Morin (2002: 167–183) insists that one type of knowledge –
that acquired by science – is not enough to access all cognitive complexity,
adding that in myth we can see a particular, also complex type of knowledge. As
an example of the relationship between scientific and mythical knowledge, we
can use the law of modern physics according to which galactic movements have
a spiral pattern. These cosmic spirals (the macrolevel) can be argued to
resemble the sacred snail with a spiral shell (the microlevel) that is known in the
Quechua and other cultures in Mesoamerica. The snail in the Quechua culture
(Aguilar Páez 1970) was a polysemic symbol, and so the dancers or sacred
subjects carried it over their heads in order to remain united to cosmos.
In the works of Morin (1997: 77–84) and Lotman (1996a: 22–23; 1996b:
43–51) there is a remarkable similarity regarding the continuum between the
natural sciences, social sciences, quantitative sciences and arts, which is a
cutting-edge approach being developed for following the purpose of rescuing
the cognitive continuum which the Western culture has lost. It is most
significant that in the mythopoetical model of Quechua we can find a way of
thinking that establishes a continuum between nature and culture (also seen in
other ancient cultures of Africa, Asia and America), between science and art,
between science and religion, thus proposing holistic cosmo-conceptions.2
From the perspective of transdisciplinarity as studied by Nicolescu (2009),
we address the concept of pacha, as a potential crossing of knowledge: pacha as
time, space, order and clothes. This is evident in the names of gods and deified
1
A note on episteme: this category refers to kinds of knowledge that are not related to
Western cognition. We argue for a cognitive continuum between the epistemological and
the epistemic perspectives.
2
Cosmo-conception is a category to explain the concepts that different cultures have of
the cosmos, of the universe, of the whole world.
kings: Pachakutek, the one who refounds the world, Pachakamak, the one who
orders the universe, Pachayachachik, the one who reveals the world. In the
mythopoetical model, the spider is Pacha, because it weaves the cosmos from
itself, and Pachamama is the feminine creative principle of nature (Torres
1982; Almeida, Haidar forthcoming).
In short, we cannot stick to the idea of static, structural or inherent systems.
Thus it becomes necessary to analyse complex, dynamic, recursive and holo-
grammatic systems, and this requires the construction of transdisciplinary
models in order to display all the theoretical and methodological axes involved
in an analysis from this perspective. Consequently, the Quechua semiosphere
is understood proceeding from these parameters as a non-structural, complex,
dynamic, recursive and heterogeneous system, composed by texts and
languages with features proposed by Lotman (1996a), Torop (2010), and
several other authors.
The Quechua culture: main features

The Quechua culture3 (Quichua in Ecuador) has been studied since the
Conquest, so the first Indian and Spanish writers strove to testify and explain
the original and heterogeneous set of cultural features which the Quechua
people had acquired through long historical processes. In recent decades, such
studies have become more complex due to the use of new theories and
methods, and also because contemporary research guidelines take into account
the characteristics that persist today, as well as how these have become adapted
to historical changes.
The Quechua language and culture were widespread even before the
consolidation (approximately in the 15th century) of the Inca-Quechua empire
Tahuantin Suyo,4 bringing about an organic and rapid synthesis, as well as
cultural and linguistic homogenization that allowed the development of an
original model of the world. The formal characteristics of this model, which
achieved greater cohesion in the 16th century, were structured as a set of
languages and texts, in which the linguistic, religious, mythical, technical,
ethical, political components, as well as all kinds of art, were interconnected.
3
Quechua and Quichua (Kichwa) are different dialects of the same language.
4
“Tahuantin Suyo” refers to the four directions of the world and of the universe, the
cardinal points, and the limits of the world (horizontal axis).
Tahuantin Suyo was a theocratic monarchy. Its main ethnic core consisted
of the Quechua people, but there were also people from various other cultures
that constituted Tahuantin Suyo. The Quechua language prevailed, as did the
solar religion. By the time the Spanish arrived, the Inca state had a stable social
system disseminated throughout a vast territory encompassing Peru and much
of today’s Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, while many of
these territories were inhabited by Quechuanized populations.
The Quechua culture, which defines the history of Tahuantin Suyo, must be
understood in the context of interaction with other cultures, especially those
that made great achievements in the material and spiritual spheres, such as the
Aymara and the Chimú. To use the terms of Lotman and Torop, there were
different semiospheres between which continuous and complex cultural and
transcultural translation processes took place. These processes produced
drastic changes in the Quechua semiosphere. Throughout its history the
Quechua culture received powerful impulses from peoples who were at a stage
of development close to the one reached by Tahuantin Suyo; some of these
were the Chavin, the Tiahuanaco and the Wari (Doig 1973).
The Quechua cultural life has been conditioned by the peculiarities of a
social form which exists also at the present time: local village communities,
which retain some features of the old ayllus, where residing groups kept a
lineage kind of kinship, land ownership was communal, and the land was
periodically redistributed among households (Godelier 1974). Ayllus com-
munities retain and recreate many characteristics of the ancestral culture
through the memory function of culture, transmitted from generation to
generation.
In the recent decades, however, there has been a constant and growing
migration of the Quechua people from the countryside to the cities. Migrants
occupy marginal areas of the cities and have conflictive contact with “mestizo”
(mixed race) culture. These conflictive semiotic border issues generate
continuous processes of cultural/transcultural translations.
Already in the time of Tahuantin Suyo, the Quechua culture had very
important and advanced features, such as the notions of the cosmos and space-
time, predecessors of “historical cycles”, of family relations, and the role of the
Inca as the child of the higher deity (Valcárcel 1964, Vol. II: 471). In all orders
of social life, mythic-religious symbols were developed and rites were refined.
The quipus5 (textile art that shows a type of writing and mathematical systems)
and architecture (that contained mythical meanings dictated by the official
spheres) reached a high degree of perfection and cities were organized
containing administrative–religious centres (Valcárcel 1964, Vol. II: 556).
Power gave meaning to the artistic and proto-scientific principles, on the basis
of which the stars were named, cranial trepanations were made to high
warlords, the remains of the rulers were mummified, the quipus were woven,
bridges and an extensive network of roads – the Kapak Ñan (the Inca Trail) –
were built (Valcárcel 1964, Vol. I: 683).
In an analysis of changes in the Quechua culture it is necessary to take into
account the cultural dialectic movement between the centre and the periphery
(Lotman, Uspenski 2000b) which occurs when the peripheral culture
penetrates the official culture that aims to extol royal power. Movements in the
Quechua semiosphere occur dialectically, between the elite culture and the
culture of the community ayllu, and it can be seen that the latter has a great
impact on the former in several aspects, although undergoing some transfor-
mations: in the development of language to the point of acquiring official
status; in the change of a popular cult of Pachamama to that of the cultural god
Wira Kocha (a powerful god of the official Inca religion that could not be
replaced completely even by the religion of Inti (the Sun), the supreme deity
that symbolized the consolidation of the State); in certain Quechua foods
which acquired a symbolic status at Incan rituals, e.g. maize that was regarded
as a food of sacred offerings; in monumental dimensions reached by the palaces
and temples based on the model of the peasants’ cancha6; in the refined
ceramics of the nobility which differed from commonly used pottery; in Incan
textiles that were produced with a great degree of perfection to honour the
nobility and divinity (tucapu) and incorporated sacred symbols representing
the cosmos; in the solemn music accompanying royal rituals – dedicated to the
official deities – that mixed music and crying (Valcárcel 1964, Vol. III: 164); in
the emergence of priests that came to replace the shamans; in the emergence of
historical myths about Incan rulers instead of popular myths about natural
phenomena; in the symbolic crop, made by Incas in the chakras (farmland),
that was dedicated to the emperor but reminded of the agricultural rites of the
community; in the establishment of the royal panakas (urban communities that
5
Knotted cords for counting and narrating with the help of number, colour and texture
codes which still remain in the memory of culture.
6
Walled precincts, built in a rectangular shape to represent cosmos.
assembled the Incan nobility of the Cusco, from which Tahuantin Suyo’s
sovereignty grew out) that, although being inspired by the ayllus or primitive
community, were dedicated exclusively to the rinri sapa (“nobility of blood”);
in communal obligations such as the minga (collective work) and the ayni
(which was more of an exchange of services according to a social agreement)
(Nuñez 1978: 49).
The impact of the ayllu culture on the elite culture is very significant in
terms of explaining the complexity of cultural change. The ayllu organization
was altered by the Incan power; agricultural products were no longer
distributed to all community members, because a large part of the crops were
destined for the Incas and for temples (Choy 1978). High culture and the most
refined arts fulfilled major social and political functions. It is not difficult to
distinguish the Incan rulers’ and nobility’s ideas of greatness from the
spontaneity and simplicity of ayllus communities which were not free from the
influence of high culture. Religion and language were ordered by official norms,
which make explicit the internal borders of these semiospheres, among which
cultural translation processes take place.
The Spanish invasion superimposed their own culture on the Quechua, but
the indigenous people have not become detached from their ancient cultural
heritage and have often resorted to disguised and alien ways of preventing
traditions from disappearing. In general, the manifestations of the culture of
the ayllu community are the ones that have persisted more tenaciously, a
phenomenon that is linked with the survival of rural communities. In Ecuador,
in the community of Agato (Imbabura province), people still dance the solemn
dance of Inca with two pallas (noble women of Cusco); the communities of
Alangasí (parish of Quito) celebrate the Fiesta de la Palla that is centred
around a figure dressed and decorated in the manner of Cusco; in the city of
Pujilí, each year the world-men (disguised dancers) perform a highly sacred
ritual of the representation of the cosmos with the levels of heaven, earth, and
underworld. Heaven is represented by a golden plume decorated with
diamonds that stand for the Sun, the stars and the Earth, all together in a cross-
shape ornament with four directions; the underworld is represented by
hanging ribbons. The dance takes place on the summer solstice day. Despite
the persistence of the memory of the ayllu community culture, there remains a
certain nostalgia for the greatness of the ancient culture (see Almeida, Haidar
forthcoming).
As in other ancient civilizations – Sumer, Egypt, Greece, the Crete-Myce-

naean culture, the Mesoamerican cultures of the Mayas and Aztecs (Toporov
2002f: 331) – also among the Incas-Quechua a mythopoetical model of the
universe was formed, and this model summarizes and classifies several repre-
sentation fields of cosmos, nature and society. This Quechua model unifies
thought and artistic creation, and it expands to the entire cultural production.
Quechua culture, the historical and the present one, reveals a splendid and
unique historical experience. The task of preserving and extolling it will not
only help to reaffirm the pride of the people, but also to enrich world culture
with the unusual typological peculiarities of the Quechua.
The mythopoetical model of the Quechua culture

To address the mythopoetical model of the Quechua semiosphere, we argue
that models of the world in general encompass the systematic representation of
a diversity of ideas which summarize the essence of natural, cultural, social, and
historical phenomena (Toporov 2002f: 330). In many cultures, these models
include the tree as a universal symbol, such as the seiba tree in the Mayan
culture, which has several dimensions that link the world below, the visible
world of the earth and the world above; also in the Quechua culture the
quishuar tree has been considered divine and it still preserves traces of this
meaning (Almeida, Haidar forthcoming).
From this perspective, a mythopoetical model of the world is a specific form
of intellection of reality, which involves a synthesis of the symbiosis between
humans and nature. Through myth and rite, the whole world becomes visible,
perceivable and intelligible (Toporov 2002f: 331). We believe that the analysis
of any model of the world must engage different theoretical and metho-
dological angles, assuming the need for a transdisciplinary approach which may
involve philosophy, art theory, psychology, sociology and other fields of
cognition. However, for the analysis of the mythopoetical model of the world,
it seems that semiotics, and semiotics of culture in particular, provide the most
comprehensive and richest heuristic tools. To address the mythopoetical
model, it is worth pausing to consider the polysemous and polemic discussion
concerning mythological characteristics and peculiarities. Studies of the
appearance of myths are countless and virtually all anthropologists have
addressed the subject both in the West and in the East. For Claude Lévi-Strauss
(2002), myth is a special kind of thought and knowledge that is developed for
understanding the world. The essence of the mythical logic, according to

Yakov Golosovker (Zenkin 1988: 300), lies in the possibility that at any time
the elimination of the properties and qualities of the sensorial-perceived
material world can happen, without invalidating this world’s materiality.
As suggested by Lotman (1998a: 83–84), the first myths we know were not
narrated, they became visible in the rock paintings and lithic carvings of the
Paleolithic. In addition, according to Lotman (1998b: 29) in primordial myths
the arrangement of elements is not linear, so “being” is represented in an
arrangement of concentric circles, between which a relation of homeo-
morphism exists. Let us check Lotman’s suggestions with regard to a lithic
sculpture called Estela Raimondi at a Peruvian archaeological site Chavin de
Huantar. The sculpture represents a deified being in a headdress that
conventionally “descends” along his back with the central image reproduced
several times as waves that spread to the periphery (Doig 1973).
The earlier forms of mythopoeisis are complex to understand, because they
involve continuous processes of cultural/transcultural translation, which is
always a challenge to face, as we have mentioned before. In cognitive terms, a
very important question arises about the motivations that lead human beings to
try to know through imagination, creating mythological images to perceive
reality. According to Golosovker, a specialist in mythological subjects, there
exists an instinct of culture or of imaginative absolute in humans (Zenkin
1988). Mythology is the most emblematic example of the intellection of the
world based on imagination, through the image-sense (images of conventio-
nalized content) which is not separated from cognitive processes. The image-
sense has the function of appointment and substitution of reality, not only by
its tangible character, but by its semantic capacity to condense meanings.
The Quechua mythopoetical model of the world contains elements of the
universality of mythological thought that can be found in diverse and remote
cultures with which extraordinary similarities can be found. According to
Lotman (1996c: 95), one feature of the mythologically oriented culture is the
rise of a connecting link between language and texts: the code-text, which we
will try to illustrate or exemplify through some myths and symbols, such as, e.g.,
the llama coming down from heaven; the world-men; certain buildings like
Kenko near Cusco, which are simultaneously a text and a code (we will address
this in more detail later on). As Lotman points out in several articles, the
importance of myth lies in that it embodies the memory of culture, which is
generated and regenerated in the collective dimension, which explains the
importance of mythical stories in the conservation of culture, for they contain

distinctive mnemotechnical processes of the oral tradition, not of the written
word. In other words, collective memory explains how in the context of a new
era, the text, with all of its interpretations, preserves the quality of being
identical to itself (Lotman 1996e: 157–158).
In the ancient Quechua mythopoetical model of the world, space is one of
the most transcendental elements, linked to time. It is a concept related to the
operations of spatial segmentation and integration, signalling the key spaces. In
addition, what needs to be highlighted is that mythological consciousness, the
chronotope (Torop 2002) expresses an indissoluble unity of space and time
that can be illustrated with the lexeme ‘spacetime’ which we will discuss below
in the section dedicated to the logic of the concrete.
According to Vladimir Toporov (2002e: 178), a specialist from the Tartu-
Moscow School, for mythic consciousness “the space is animated, spiritualized
and qualitatively heterogeneous. It is not abstract or empty and does not
precede the things that fill it; on the contrary, it is constituted by them. It is
always full and always by things; apart from things that do not exist.”
In Lotman’s (1996d: 83–84) view, the construction of the order of the
world is conceived on the basis of a spatial structure that organizes all its other
levels. In case of the archaic world model of the Quechua culture, it is essential
to characterize the mythopoetical model spatially, because spatial conceptions
are the ones that shape it and cosmologize the most important parts of the
universe (Almeida 2009).
In ancient mythological space, the world is represented by two kinds of
schemes: vertical and horizontal. The Quechua vertical scheme has the
meaning of number three as its reference, and it is directed syntagmatically, as a
top-down succession, on a single temporal plane. The Quechua vertical
scheme is composed of the upper world or Hanan Pacha, “Sky”; the world
“here” or Kay Pacha, “Earth”; and the Uku Pacha, the underworld, in which the
logic of the concrete can be seen.
The embroidered suit of a Pujilí dancer (Ecuador, Cotopaxi province)
represents the three levels of the Quechua cosmos: the Hanan Pacha or upper
world, where stars and birds are located; the Kay Pacha or the earth with its
four paths or ways, and the Uku Pacha or underworld, where chaos and its
diffuse forms reign. In the context of an approach involving complexity and
transdisciplinarity, the three levels must be thought of as a continuum.
494 Ileanaa Almeida, Julieta Haidar
Figure 1. Pachha.
The three leevels are preesent in this image; the rreading shouuld be carried
d out
starting from
m above aloong the vertiical scheme or axis (thiis spatial sch heme
constitutes a cultural uniiversal):
Hanan Paacha: Upper woorld (birds and stars);

Kay Pachaa: Earthly worlld (in which the square and thhe circle overlaap, showing thee four
ways oor paths of the universe);
u
Uku Pachha: Underworrld (presence of chaos, waater, loose veggetation or weeds, w
darkneess).
The three worlds are communicated through the semantic base of the
terrestrial world, Kay Pacha. The vertical division of the world also determines
the distribution of beings. A mythical tale collected by Luis E. Valcárcel (1964)
in his History of Ancient Peru shows in pictures (examples of image-sense) the
vertical representation of the universe:
Two large snakes in charge of uniting the worlds came out from below, the
ophidians’ natural den, to go through the earthly world, one slithering in the shape
of a great river, under the name of Yaku Mama or mother of the waters; the other
one walking vertically, bearing two heads, of which the lower one picks up bugs
from the surface and the upper one feeds on flying insects, barely moves and looks
like a dry tree; it is the Sacha Mama or the mother of vegetation. After that, they go
to the upper world, where the Yacu Mama becomes thunder or Illapa and the Sacha
Mama becomes rainbow or Koychi. (Válcarcel 1964, Vol. I: 85)
The second, horizontal scheme is also ruled by the logic of the concrete and
defined by two coordinates: from left to right and from front to back, creating a
square shape which relates to number four, related in an isomorphic way to the
four horizons. It is interesting to mention that the four paths or ways are space-
time universals, which constitute a complex chronotope, and it is necessary to
know how to translate this for other cultures (Torop 2002, 2003).
The square was indeed a highly transcendent poetic symbol in the Quechua
culture due to a number of configurations and contributions that allow this
geometric shape to be logically associated with the trapezium (a variant of the
square), with the rectangle, with the circle, and with the number four. The
square modelled the world and put together the main parameters of the
cosmos. As can be found in the aforementioned History of Ancient Peru
(Valcárcel 1964), many objects were isomorphic in relation to the cosmos and
repeated the square shape of the world scheme: spaces inhabited by men or
gods (cancha) were square in shape as were also the cut and polished stones
with which they designed the walls of temples and palaces; the squares and the
urban layout; the figure that contained the divine symbols in the tukapus
(ancient textiles covered with geometric iconographic elements), royal fabrics
and the cradles of newborn children. The square transmitted the image of an
ideally stable structure, which was emphasized in the name of the Incan state
Tahuantin Suyo that referred to the four universal paths or directions, the four
orientations and the four ages of the world. The meaning of a set of four
components spread to other spheres: number four symbolized the tribes that
formed the confederation of the Ayar brothers; social classes were classified
with the square; it was part of a swearing ritual, performed by putting four
fingers on the mouth. Even a deity, the son of the God Wira Kocha, was named
Tawa Kapak or Lord of the Square (Almeida 2009).
Mythopoetical spatial schemes are quite ancient and, according to Toporov
(2002c, 2002d, 2002e), both the vertical and horizontal can be found in
millenary cultures. In Tahuantin Suyo, the sacred character of space (Almeida
2009) is projected onto every work of architecture, so that it can carry a myth,
for example that of primal creation: cosmos would be represented by a natural
plateau and architectural constructions with neatly defined shapes, while chaos
would be represented by the surrounding abyss, the emptiness, the formless
space.
In summary, the Quechua mythopoetical model constructs and reflects the
entire universe not only holistically, but also hologrammatically, because
everything is divisible into parts and each part belongs to a whole (Morin 2002:
112–116), while guiding us to behave correctly in accordance with the cosmos,
nature, life and ourselves.
The logic of the concrete in the ancient thought

of the Quechua culture
In this section, we shall return to the proposal that the logic of the concrete is
articulated organically within the mythopoetical dimension of the Quechua
culture, which hopefully can complement the proposals already put forward.
The logic of the concrete is a proposition of powerful heuristic value that was
put forth in El pensamiento salvaje (The Savage Mind) by Lévi-Strauss (1964)
and was expressed on an epistemological level in materialistic terms by Spirkin
(1965) in his book El Origen de la Conciencia Humana (The Origin of Human
Consciousness). For ancient cultures, this approach establishes a possibility and
an obligation of their cognitive recognition by hegemonic cultures that have
always subordinated non-writing cultures by insisting on their inferiority.
Although the logic of the concrete has been paving the way to the
recognition of other forms of knowledge for many years already, as we have
suggested with regard to the Quechua mythopoetical model, this idea has not
been taken up as frequently as it deserves. Actually there are but a few studies
that have taken up this idea and elaborated it in terms of cognitive processes;
this can be thought of as a symptomatic absence in several fields that has to be

overcome since it is directly linked with issues of cultural/intercultural
translation (Lotman 1996a; Torop 2010).
According to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, a myth responds to
thinking that, although not opposed to Western rationality, is related to savage
thinking, which is as logical as that of the modern West, but obeys the logic of
the concrete: the difference lies in that while Western thinking operates with
concepts, mythological thinking operates with image-senses, integrating a
poetic dimension to the construction of mythical schemes.
The anthropologist suggests that although in mythical thinking there are no
logical categories like the ones in Western thought, we cannot deny that there
is a well-structured logic in myths which allows us
to show how empirical categories – such as the categories of the raw and the
cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc., which can
only be accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by
adopting the standpoint of a particular culture – can nevertheless be used as
conceptual tools to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of
propositions. (Lévi-Strauss 1972: 11)
To Spirkin (1965), the first category of thinking is that of the concrete, or in

other words, what is given through the contemplation of the world. Such is the
beginning of the path that leads to the formation of concepts which reflect the
aspects and properties of objects. Concepts have their origin in the practical
activities and social relations of people. Categories of thought have their origins
in specific sensitive forms: ethics in land distribution; aesthetics in the feeling
that light produces; space in the agglomerate of things; time in motion.
The thinking in the early days of human consciousness (Spirkin 1965: 269)
has shaped key categories, including those of time and space, quantity and
quality, causality and law. We have ordered their appearance simply to analyze
their essential aspects, but the categories may at any time pass dialectically
from one into another. In Quechua thought, categories were closely inter-
related, which gives evidence to the concrete modality of thinking.
The concreteness of space in Quechua thought is evident in the
measurement of lands. In his travels through Peru, Antonio Raimondi noted
that “at many inland locations where the terrain is quite uneven, the league
(heiress of tupu in Quechua) is shorter and one could say no longer than 4
kilometres. It is worth noting that in Peru a league is a measure of time, rather
than one of distance” (Rowstorowski 1981: 386). With the development of

historical processes, “quantitative” standards for measuring space and time
were established. The word tupu refers to a unit of measurement which no
longer relates to the human body as reference as was the case in the early days
of the formation of logical categories (Spirkin 1965; Almeida 2005). The
concept of tupu had a relative meaning, i.e. rather than being a fixed measure,
the quality of soil was taken into account and according to that, the necessary
rest time was calculated so that the common people always had land for their
livelihood (Rowstorowski 1981).
Concrete thought is also evident in the measurement of time. The rhythms
of life, of nature and of people themselves served as criteria for cyclical
measuring of time. Apparently, the first division was the day (punchay), the
time of clarity, which had the night, the season of darkness, as its opposite;
these categories were linked to work, rest, food and the overnight fast (Almeida
2005). Another example of the logic of the concrete survives in the Quechua
language which preserves the original way of naming numbers in relation to
fingers. Shuk means ‘one’, and when counting with the fingers of the other
hand, the word shukta is used, which means ‘the first finger of your other hand’
or ‘six’.
The density of mythopoetical thinking, which is intrinsically linked to the
logic of the concrete, can be better studied with the complexity and
transdisciplinarity approach, resorting to sciences like psychology, linguistics,
semiotics, formal logic, mathematics and physics, among others. As we
proposed in the previous section, this thinking is based on images that
condense cognitive forms differently than does Cartesian thought.
In his famous letter to Jacques Hadamard on the psychology of invention,
Albert Einstein states that elements of thought seem to him like pictures and
more or less clear signs of physical reality, and that these images and signs are
freely generated and combined by consciousness, related to thought without
words, the non-verbal thinking (Peurose 1991: 525). In addition, Einstein
proposes a new model of space-time, in which the two concepts should be
coordinated to form a single chronotopic term, which leads us directly to the
Quechua concept of Pacha, which is simultaneously space and time
(Kuznetsov 1977: 233). We can therefore see that mythic images arouse a keen
interest in modern science, especially the physicists, who see in them
similarities with the image of the world that modern physics has proposed,
considering such categories as theoretical fields, wave-particle duality, fuzzy

relations, etc. (Rössner 1989: 6).
On the basis of everything that has so far been said about the logic of the
concrete and its relationship to the Quechua mythopoetical model of the
world, we will illustrate, with several cultural productions ranging from
language to myth and rite, these two nodal features of this ancestral culture.
Uniduality of space and time

An emblematic example of the logic of the concrete is related to the uniduality
of space and time, which are linguistically and cognitively linked: Quechua
language uses the same lexemes to refer to both space and time as a unit.
Indeed, as we have stated, these are lexemes linked to a different logic than that
of Spanish (or English), as can be seen in the following example:
Ñaupa: forward and past

Kay: here and present
K’ipa: behind and future
This spatiotemporal pattern entails a problem for cultural/transcultural

translation given the fact that Quechua’s spatiotemporal order has an unidual
character, and so differs from the Spanish (and English) at the cognitive level.
In Spanish (and English), lexemes for space and time are separated from one
another, and their order is opposite to the one in Quechua: the past is behind,
the present is the current moment, and the future is ahead. In the Quechua
language, space-time constitutes a chronotopic unit which follows a rather
different cognitive process: the past is ahead, the present is right here and the
future is behind. The spatiotemporal location can be explained by the logic of
the concrete: the past is in front because it is something known, something
already lived; the future is behind as it is something unknown since it has not
been lived or experienced yet (Almeida, Haidar 1979).
The Yacana Myth

Next, we address the myth of Yacana (the llama, a camelid of the Andes in
South America). When translating it from the Quechua language into Spanish
(or English), issues of cultural translation are amplified by linguistic
translation, since an agglutinative language, Quechua, needs to be translated
into a flexional language.
Quechua version
Imanan huk Yacana ŝutiyuq hanaq pachamanta uraykumun yakukta upyaypaq.

Kay Yacana ñiŝqanchkŝi llamap kamaqin cielo ñiqta ĉawpikta purimun. Ñuqanchik
runakunapaŝ rikunchikmi ari yanalla hamuqta. Chaymanta chay Yacana ñiŝqanchikŝi
mayu ukukta purimun. Ancha hatunmi ari. Yanayaŝpa cielo ñiqta iŝkay ñawiyuq
kukanpaŝ ancha hatun kaptin hamun. Kaytam runakuna Yacana ñinku.
Kay Yacana niŝqanchikŝi ña huk runap kuŝimpi venturan kaptin paysawa
urmamuŝpa mayqin pukyullamantapaŝ yakuta upyaq. Chayŝi chay runa ancha
millwasapa ñitimuptin chay millwanta wakinnin runaqa tiraq. Kay rikuchikuyŝi tuta
kaq. Hinaŝpaŝ qayantin pacha paqarimuptinqa chay millwa tiraŝqanta rikuq.
Rikuptinŝi chay millwaqa anqaŝpaŝ yuraqpaŝ yanapaŝ chumpipaŝ imaymana
rikchaqkuna millwaŝ taku taku kaq. Kaytaŝ kanan mana llamayuq kaŝpapaŝ tuylla
rantikuŝpa pachan rikuŝqanpi tiraŝqanpi muchaq karqan. Ña muchaŝpaŝ huk ĉìna
llamakta urquntawan rantikuq. Chay rantiŝqallanmantaŝ ñaĉqa iŝhay kimsa waranqa
llamamanpaŝ ĉayaq. Kay ñiŝqanchiktaqa ancha achka runaktaŝ ñawpa pacha kay
tukuy provinciapi hina rikuchikurqan.
Kay Yacana ñiŝqanchiktaqŝi ĉawpituta mana pipaŝ yaĉaptin mamaquĉamanta
tukuy yakukta upyan. Mana upyaptinqa utqallaŝ tukuy hinantin mundokta
pampawachwan. Kay Yacana ñiŝqanchikpi aŝlla yanalla ñawpaqnin chaytam “yutum”
ñintu. Chaymantari kay Yacanataqŝi wawayuq. Wawanpaŝ ñuñukuptinŝi riscan.7
English version (translated from Spanish by Ileana Almeida)
We will tell how a black spot came down from heaven to drink water.
Yacana, they say, is the black shadow that governs the llamas. She walks through the
centre of heaven, and we men see her becoming all dark. When she arrives, she walks
under the rivers. She is really great. She comes across the sky getting increasingly black.
She comes blackening the sky. She has two eyes and a long neck. This shadow men call
Yacana.
7
Gerald Taylor (2001) transcribes this text according to the “normalized” Quechua
writing of Peru.
They say that Yacana came down to drink water from a spring and fell on a happy
man. In this way the man was covered with her wool. Other men could shear it. This
happened during the night. At the dawn of the next day, the man looked at the wool. It
was blue, white, black, dark yellow. It had all the colours together. As he had no llamas,
he sold the wool. He bowed to the Yacana in the same spot where he fell. After the rite of
worship he bought a male llama and a female llama. With this pair, he managed to get
two or three thousand llamas. In olden times, this happened to many people of this
province. They say this Yacana descends at midnight. When no one is looking, she takes
all the water from the sea. If she did not drink it, the whole world would be covered.
The myth builds upon images from the collective memory of the ancient
Quechua culture. The llama is the animal of ritual offering, sacrificed at great
festivals dedicated to the Sun; its blood, wool and fat carry the meaning of
sacred ritual. Yacana is the proper and sacred name of the llama.8
At the same time, Yacana is also an extinguished star with no light, whose
sacred meaning is found in the continuum that it establishes between three
cosmic dimensions: the upper world, the terrestrial world and the underworld.
It is a continuum that balances the existence of these three dimensions. The
llama is a mythological figure-subject of heaven, earth and the underworld. In
other words, the llama is part of the upper world, which goes down to the
earthly world to interact with humans, and descends into the underworld to
drink water from underground rivers. The ability to establish a continuum
between the three dimensions of the cosmos, designed in a vertical pattern
(reminiscent of the symbol of the world tree), creates a link with the
Mesoamerican symbol of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent-bird or the feathered
serpent that connects the underworld, the terrestrial world, and the upper
world.
In addition, the llama clearly plays the role of a cultural hero who prevents a
catastrophe that could annihilate mankind. Evidence of this role is found in a
text which the chronicler Bernabé Cobo (Valcárcel 1964, Vol. II: 386) picked
up at the Puna of Andamarca, near Cusco: “It is said that two months before
the Flood, the shepherds noted that the llamas were possessed by great
sorrow.”
8
The myth is included in a manuscript from the end of the 16th century, which José
María Arguedas published under the title Dioses y Hombres Warochirí. It introduces us to
the realm of Quechua mythopoiesis at the time of Tahuantin Suyo, when the Incan Empire
still dominated the Andean Cordillera cultures.
According to the primary themes of mythology, the poetic image of the

llama also signifies the victory of cosmos, ordered and organized into three
levels above the primitive chaos symbolized by the sea, which is always
unpredictable and related with the aquatic abyss through mythical thinking.
Finally, the image-llama, which gives evidence of its belonging to the astral
world, comes down to Earth in a miraculous manner, bringing with it (in terms
of cosmogony) Kuichi colours or the rainbow, which is also recounted in the
myth of the two snakes mentioned earlier.
These two symbols, the Llama in Peru and Quetzalcoatl in México, have the
function of overcoming the chaos, giving coherence to the cosmos on the basis
of a particular thought, the logic of the concrete and the mythopoetical model,
bringing together on the vertical axis the three spatiotemporal levels already
analysed.
Pacha, Pachamama and Mama in the Quechua

semiosphere and semantic fields from the viewpoint
of the logic of the concrete
In the Quechua cosmogony, pacha is the universe, the cosmos with a sense of
wholeness, meaning infinite space-time; therefore it is a unidual concept,
inseparable and complex. As mentioned above, it is also space-time related to
the vertical axis of the three dimensions and to the horizontal axis which covers
the four directions of the world. Pacha is a nucleus with different meanings that
can encompass several semantic fields; it appears as a lexeme in syntagmas and
proper names attributed to the Inca rulers who were the only ones who could
have a proper name linked to this sacred core, as we will exemplify further
ahead.
Among the complex meanings this concept may have, we refer to a very
unique one: pacha also means the spider, a symbol-image of the cosmic weave,
the primal substance of the universe. According to the logic of the concrete, it
was thought that there was a cosmic fabric made by a spider that was weaving
herself simultaneously (Toporov 2002a: 38); a cosmic spider weaving a cosmic
web arranging the fabrics as a symbolic material of the creation of the world.
Consequently, it can also mean woven clothing, the art of weaving or awani:
the most expressive form of Quechua aesthetics.
Additionally, spiders were also used to foretell the future, based on their
foundational relationship with the universe. They were handled by soothsayers
who were called pachakuk or pacharikuc, magicians who could guess at destiny
through spiders of a species known as Pacha by performing the following ritual:
the spider was to walk on a blanket; if she lost one leg or more it was a bad omen;
if the spider kept her legs it was a good omen (Valcárcel 1964, Vol. II: 67).
The concept of pacha appears in various agglutinating words to name the
gods, the Inca rulers, and ritual objects:
Pachakamak – The god who commands, who makes the laws.

Pachakutek – The god who refounds, re-establishes the world again. In many
cultures there is a god of this kind who recasts the world and its beings.
Wira Kocha Pachayachachik – the Andean creator god of chaos and cosmos, “The
one who reveals the world”.
Pachamanka – Pot of earth: there are heated stones in a hole in the earth; here one
can cook meat, tubers, etc. It has a ceremonial origin, and its original ritual
function is present in the memory of Quechua culture. There are several
peoples that maintain this culinary technique with variations, but with the same
sacral principle.
The concept of Pachamama has a relationship with this nodal concept in the
Quechua mythopoiesis, and includes two major categories: pacha, with all the
meanings we have mentioned, and mama that does not correspond to the
meaning it has in Spanish (‘mother’), which introduces problems of linguistic
and cultural translation. The whole syntagm presents issues of these two types
of translation not only because it belongs to various semantic fields but because
the translation of Mother Earth (Pachamama) does not have the same meaning
these lexemes have in Spanish. In Quechua, Pachamama is eternal, a symbol of
infinity; it has neither beginning nor end; it also represents the universal
principle of fertility, it is sacred and has the status of a living being – features
that are not present in the syntagm ‘Mother Earth’ in Spanish.
All that has been said so far implies the obligation of rigorous further
research on the semantic fields of both semiospheres, in order to go beyond
linguistic translations and to achieve a reconstruction of the meaning departing
from the right cultural categories (Torop 2002, 2003, 2010) based on the logic
of the concrete, which is a theoretical and methodological requirement that has
hardly been taken into account.
The concept of mama has no equivalent in Spanish, because its meaning is

linked to the worldview of the Quechua semiosphere: mama, besides being the
beginning of fertilization, the origin of life, also means the protective spirit of
everything that is alive. Mama is also used as an augmentative in current
spoken Quechua (Quichua) as illustrated by the following examples:
Pachamama – Mother of the Universe, Mother Earth

Saramama – Mother of corn, protector of corn. Large or unusually shaped cobs
were considered ‘saramama’
Kokamama – Mother of coca, the protector of coca
Yakumama – Mother of water, the protector of water
Akomama – Mother of potatoes, the protector of potatoes
Cochamama – Boundless sea
World tree and its symbol-images

The world tree, a symbol of the vertical axis of the world, is a characteristic
image of the mythological consciousness that embodies a universal conception
of the world; it is found in many cultures, in its pure form or in some variants.
The image of the world tree plays a special organizing role for concrete
mythological systems, defining their internal structure and their fundamental
parameters. This symbol helps to articulate the zones and fundamental spatial
levels of the universe mentioned above; temporal stages (past–present–future,
day–night, propitious and unpropitious times of the year); genealogical aspects
(ancestors–current generation–descendants); the etiological sphere (cause
and effect, the favourable, neutral and unfavourable); anatomy (three body
parts: head, torso and legs), and finally, three types of elements (fire, earth and
water) (Toporov 2002b: 47). In classical Quechua culture, during the
Tahuantin Suyo era, the world tree was represented by different symbol-
images: the Inti watana (a stone pillar that marks the passing of the sun, the
most important spot at Machu Picchu, and means “the world axis”); the Kenko
sculpture in the upper part of Cusco, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas; the
symbol chacana (a square with saw-toothed sides and a hole in the middle),
which appears in many architectural works and also refers to the continuum of
semantic binary oppositions, describing the basic parameters of the universe
(Gasparini, Margolies 1977).
The Pujilí dancer – world-man: symbol-images

Nowadays, even though it has lost its original meaning, at ritual festivals of the
indigenous people from the Pujilí area of the Cotopaxi province, the Pujilí
dancer figure represents the world-man, as we have mentioned, and constitutes
its central symbol-image, since it condenses many aspects of what has been
stated about the mythopoetical model and the logic of the concrete. In this
sense, it can be thought of as one of the versions of the world tree, according to
the statements of the semioticians of the Tartu School.
Figure 2. Pujilí dancer, front. Figure 3. Pujilí dancer, back.
On his head the dancer wears a high trapezoidal tuft which signifies the height,
the sky, where most of the ornaments and shine are concentrated. It is so high
that it is inaccessible. The tuft means power, being in command. The dancer
wears white clothes underneath to signify that he is a “spirit”; his face is covered
by a mask that turns him into a special being, into another person, sacralizing
him.
On the dancer’s chest, embroideries remain that remind of the relations of
the square and the circle. There is a cross on his chest marking the four
directions of the world, which are homologous to the four directions or paths
of the universe; the cross is also embroidered with human, animal, flower and
heart figures.
Another garment hangs from the waist to the knees. It is also ornamented
but not as meticulously as the top pieces. Apparently it represents the
underworld and is decorated with colourful ribbons, zigzag lines, possibly
following the thought that snakes, who represent the underworld space, are
aquatic beings.
Every year these indigenous dancers go to the (square-shaped) city squares
to celebrate their holidays; they make a stop at each corner and mark the area
with particularly vigorous steps: this is when the memory of the Quechua
culture emerges visually. It is always a sacred personage that dances with great
solemnity at the annual Corpus Christi celebration.
Rhetoric and aesthetics from the viewpoint

of the logic of the concrete
To complete our proposals regarding the logic of the concrete and the
Quechua mythopoetical model, it is fundamental to consider the aesthetic-
rhetorical dimension in mythological cultural productions. We start from
Golosovker’s views on the poetics of myth. Golosovker (Zenkin 1988: 299)
asserts that mythological consciousness corresponds to an imaginative
absolute; imagination in the mythological consciousness, claims the author, “is
a particular form of knowledge”. In non-Cartesian thinking, i.e., within the logic
of the “miraculous”, conceptions of the natural and social surroundings are
independent of concepts and formal logical categories. As Golosovker (Zenkin
1988: 299–231) affirms, myth aesthetic has its particularity, its ontological
character in which the image is not representation, but meaning, because in the
myth a concrete object becomes a symbol.
Based on these proposals, we can understand the ontological aesthetics as
linked to the concrete, which allows Lotman and Uspenski to assert that there
is no metaphor in myth (Lotman, Uspenski 2000a: 156). The above-said can
be clearly understood if we place ourselves in the logic of the concrete. What
belongs to the aesthetic-rhetorical realm for Western thinking, is thought or
understood as ontological properties, not Aristotelian figures, in ancient
cultures. The poetic language of myth obeys these ontological workings that
cannot be explained unless we adopt Golosovker’s and Lotman’s positions as
our point of departure.
In these terms, we need to address the peculiar status of the rhetorical-

aesthetic dimension linked to the sacred in ancestral cultures, and for this end,
the complexity and transdisciplinarity approach becomes a very helpful tool.
The re-founding of these dimensions is necessary in order to give an account of
their different functions in diverse cultures, mainly those guided by the logic of
the concrete.
On the other hand, considering the relationship between rhetoric and
cognition, in which cognitive processes are extended to other parameters, we
can observe that in ancestral cultures and languages the metaphor and the
symbol exceed the purely aesthetic realm and appear continuously in everyday
language. Thus, Jakobson’s poetic function (1975) is extended to influence
many productions, not only mythical, but also sacred songs as well as formulas
used in various rituals. From another angle, we take up the ideas proposed by
Lakoff and Johnson (1986) concerning the cognitive function of metaphor and
its presence in several kinds of language.
In American, African, Australian and non-Western languages, figures of
thought are universal as such, but analogies, comparisons, contradictions may
have other materializations based on the logic of the concrete. In ancestral
languages such as Quechua, Nahuatl, Zapoteco or African and Australian
languages, space becomes metaphorized, which allows us to think that there is
a continuum between metaphor and symbol. For example, we can take the
myths of the two snakes and the llama in which the tropes appear linked to the
mythopoetical model and to the concrete, in order to visualize the three
dimensions on the vertical axis. In other versions of this model, we can find
mountains, sacred trees, caves as symbols, as well as lexemes referring to body
parts projected onto dwellings besides other operations that we have analysed.
Conclusions
In this article, we have taken the Quechua culture as our primary object of
study in order to awaken and enhance a renewed interest in it. We have also
shown how the history of Quechua culture, much like its typology, can be
described in the form of a deep theoretical interpretation with innovative
concepts and categories that enable dialogues and cultural translations within a
global consciousness that opens up spaces for necessary cross-cultural contacts.
Every culture is in itself the result of long translation processes, which means
that all cultures, beyond their differences, find points of contact with others.
Like every culture, Quechua is the result of extensive processes of translation,

through which it maintains the ability to adopt and adapt external or alien
features (even those imposed at different stages of its history) to its own
semiosphere, which opens perspectives for the future.
Every culture is a source of creativity and as such it is universal. Every
culture reflects in its own time and way basic human life experience and
contains universal elements, as we have seen. In this regard, the study of
Quechua culture constitutes a humanistic priority due to the memory of
culture that has persisted in it, in a movement from the past to the present, up
to the future.
From a transdisciplinary perspective, we have explained mythopoiesis as a
peculiar form of knowledge which combines cognitive and poetic creative
processes, linked to the logic of the concrete. Mythopoiesis regards myths as
involving cyclical, repetitive, and dynamic movements represented by spirals,
symbols of infinite space-time. Therefore, joining episteme to epistemology, as
Edgar Morin suggests in various texts, we may be able to reconstruct the
complexity of human cognitive processes, which cannot be fully explained by
Western Aristotelian or Cartesian logic alone.
The issues of cultural translation raised by Juri Lotman and Peeter Torop
pose challenges for intercultural and transcultural relationships that every
culture has to face throughout its entire historical development. Due to
globalization, cultural translation implies transcultural translation processes
that keep getting more conflictive and tensive. In this article, which is part of a
larger research work on the semiotics of the Quechua culture, we have only
outlined some difficulties that may arise in cultural translations between
Quechua and Spanish; we have not attempted to propose solutions, but rather
to problematize aspects involved in any cultural/transcultural translation.
Finally, we present how the Ecuadorian indigenous movement represents
Pachamama visually:
Figure 4. Pachamama (www.conaie.org)
In this image (Fig. 4), Pachamama is presented as Mother Earth that incorpo-
rates the principle of fertility of everything living, emphasizing the continuum
between nature, animals, plants, rivers, hills, humans, the four universal ele-
ments: water, earth, fire and air. Figurative construction produces multiple
meanings in order to give account of this ancient symbol, present in the
memory of culture. The symbolic construction of Pachamama undoubtedly
projects meanings other than what our planet Earth means to Western cultures
and this constitutes a problem for cultural/transcultural translation, which can,
however, be solved by following the guidelines that take into consideration the
logic of the concrete of ancestral thought.
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Мифопоэтическая модель и логика конкретного в культуре

кечуа. Проблемы культурного и межкультурного перевода
В статье рассматриваются (меж)культурные проблемы перевода между испанской
культурой и культурой кечуа, которые анализируются исходя из идей Юрия Лотмана и
Пеэтера Торопа. В процессе перевода нужно учитывать как внешние так и внут-
ренние границы семиосферы кечуа, оформившейся в кругу культур эпохи Империи
Инков (Тавантинсуйу) и испытавшей влияние конкисты. Проблем, связанных с
культурой кечуа, много и они многплановы. Во-первых, язык кечуа агглютинирующий,
что создает проблемы при переводе на флективный испанский язык. Вторая и более
сложная проблема – мифопоэтическая модель, исконно присущая культуре кечуа,
которая пользуется не понятиями рациональной логикой, а характерными для
мифологического мышления поэтическими образами, представляя иной когнитивный
паттерн. В-третьих, логика конкретного, которую выражает мифопоэтическая модель
культуры кечуа, затрудняет перевод с присущей Западу абстрактной формальной
логики. Обсуждение этих тем создает новые возможности для анализа.
Mütopoeetiline mudel ja konkreetsuse loogika quechua kultuuris.

Kultuurilise ja transkultuurilise tõlke probleeme
Artikkel tegeleb peamiselt quechua ja hispaania kultuuri vahelise tõlke kultuuriliste/
transkultuuriliste probleemidega, analüüsides neid lähtuvalt mõningatest Juri Lotmani ja
Peeter Toropi ideedest. Tõlkeprotsessi puhul tuleb arvesse võtta nii quechua semiosfääri
sisemisi kui ka välimisi piire, mis on seotud Tahuantin Suyo ajal eksisteerinud kultuuridega
ning samuti kõigi muutustega, mis on tulenenud Ladina-Ameerika vallutamisest hispaan-
laste poolt. Quechua kultuuri puhul on probleeme palju ja need on mitmeplaanilised.
Esiteks on quechua keel aglutineeriv keel, mis tekitab probleeme tõlkimisel flekteerivasse
hispaania keelde. Teiseks ja keerulisemaks probleemiks on sellesse kultuuri olemuslikult
kuuluv maailma mütopoeetiline mudel, mis ei kasuta ratsionaalse loogika mõisteid, vaid
müütilisele mõtlemisele omaseid poeetilisi kujundeid, esindades teistsugust kognitiivset
mustrit. Kolmandaks, quechua kultuuri konkreetsuse loogika, mida väljendab müto-
poeetiline mudel, teeb tõlkimise lääne abstraktsest formaalloogikast raskemaks. Arutelu
nende teemade üle loob uusi analüüsivõimalusi.
The city as a mediating device and

as a symbol in Finnish poetry of the 1960s
Harri Veivo
CIEH&CIEFi
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
1, rue Censier
75005 Paris, France
e-mail: harri.veivo@univ-paris3.fr
Abstract. In Finnish poetry of the 1960s, the city, and above all the capital Helsinki, is the
scene where the metamorphosis of Finland from an agrarian into an urban society is staged,
analysed and commented. It is also a symbol that serves to situate the country in the global
context, with all the contradictions that were characteristic of the position of Finland in the
cold war system. Writing about the city was a means to reflect on the transformations of
social and political reality and of the physical environment, a means to represent the
confusion these transformations produced or to work towards understanding them. The
article analyses the city in texts belonging to the “new poetry” of the 1960s, as well as in
texts representing the modernist poetics of the 1950s, arguing that the very co-existence of
two contrasting poetic discourses was crucial for the semiotic development of Finnish
culture in the period of time in question.
In 1964, the Finnish writer Matti Kurjensaari noted in his journal a sharp
difference between the 1960s and the earlier decades. If in the 1930s the Finns
had been praying and hoping, and during the war only hope had been left, the
1960s were a time of thinking. “Never before have there been so passionate
debates in Finland as today,” Kurjensaari wrote in the entry of June 20
(Kurjensaari 1973: 16). From today’s perspective, Kurjensaari’s claim seems to
be correct. The sixties saw a series of transformations that changed Finland
from a mainly agrarian society into a modern consumer society. TV started to
invade the living rooms and to acquire a dominant position among the media.
Hand in hand with the TV came the tabloid press and western entertainment
production, which in turn fed the rising youth and underground cultures.
Income levels, free time and mobility were constantly increasing, all this
causing a profound transformation of habits, social roles and identities.
The city as a mediating device and as a symbol in Finnish poetry of the 1960s 515
At the same time, the “physiognomy” of the country was under negotiation
on two fronts. The two preceding decades had seen a short revival of rural
culture, but the sixties was a period of rapid urbanization. Construction works
changed old city centres as well as suburbia, demolishing old buildings and
producing new living environments often marked by a lack of historical roots
and of traditional social cohesion (see Peltonen et al. 2003). On the other
hand, Finland’s place between the two blocks of the Cold War had to be
redefined constantly. The country carefully avoided expressing opinions that
could have been interpreted as hostile towards the Soviet Union, yet on the
other hand it was a democratic western-type society with a market economy.
Foreign policy was conceived of as a means to preserve the internal situation.
This produced a close connection between the two spheres. Discussions of the
East and the West were discussions about the Finnish society, about its
possible models and modes of functioning, and efforts to change the politics in
Finland were reflected in considerations of international relations (see, e.g.,
Ylikangas 2007: 303–317).
Literature and the arts were sensitive to these tensions and developments,
and this is especially true of the cinema, which saw the rise of a number of
ambitious young talents in the sixties (see Toiviainen 1975), and of poetry,
which is the topic of this article. Politically, the poetry of the sixties was often
connected to leftist thinking, occasionally explicitly Marxist, yet it was open to
western influences. Aesthetically it was experimental, developing techniques
such as montage and collage in order to open the space of the text to foreign
voices and materials and to connect with everyday life, politics and a wide
range of social discourses (Veivo, in press). Semiotically it gave a prominent
place to processes of creolization and contamination and to the use of proper
names, expanding the system of poetry to cover new words, objects and social
realities and also functioning as a mediator translating and negotiating the
relation between tradition and the rapidly changing contemporary world. This
was perceivable also in the editorial policies of literary journals and anthologies,
where poetry was made to coexist with articles on issues varying from real
estate market analysis and foreign politics to statistics on alcohol consumption.
Poetry was a mode of participation in the passionate debates Kurjensaari was
so fond of.
In these aspects, the “new poetry” of the sixties was opposed to the moder-
nist aesthetics of the fifties that had emphasized the autonomy of arts and
defended image-based, critical and sceptical poetry in line with American and
516 Harri Veivo
British modernism. The two poetic discourses can be interpreted as evidence

for two phases in the development of Finnish culture. The fifties was a period
of gradual development, of self-definition and metadescription in the emerging
cold-war system after the political, cultural and military defeat of 1944. The
following decade witnessed a much faster and more fundamental development,
an explosion-like redefinition of structures and categories that called for radical
responses in literature and the arts. If the modernists of the fifties had sought to
renew poetic discourse through concision, purification and elimination of
archaisms, the poets of the generation of the sixties enhanced contamination
and the intrusion of foreign voices and foreign references into poetry. If the
poetics of the earlier decade had preferred a distanced mode of contemplation
and the trope of the “no man’s land” (Viikari 1992), claiming that a man of
letters must “eat and drink only ink and think and dream only about ink”, as
Tuomas Anhava, the leading aesthetic authority of the decade had said (Repo
1954: 302; my translation), the poetics of the sixties urged for contact, em-
braced bohemian lifestyles inspired by the beatniks and developed a “culture of
crisis” (Calinescu 1987: 124) typical for avant-garde experimentation. Even
though the demarcation lines between the generation of the sixties and the
modernists of the fifties were clear, the two aesthetic movements were, how-
ever, also in close contact, the first one defining itself in opposition with the
second one, and individual poets often representing both paradigms (see, e.g.,
Haapala 2007: 280–284). The poetic experimentation of the sixties was
pluralistic also in the sense that it accommodated the modernist discourse of
the fifties, exemplifying the very co-existence of gradual and discontinuous pro-
cesses within one literary genre (for gradual and discontinuous or explosive
processes in culture, see Lotman 2004).
The two discourses, and the social tensions and transformations that
motivate them, meet in representations of the city in the poetry of the 1960s. In
modern literature, the city has been the symbol par excellence for representation
and analysis of the modernisation of society and the deep transformations it
has entailed, which have affected the status of literature as well (see, for
example, Alter 2005; Lehan 1998; Pike 1981). In Finland, the early modernists
of the Dagdrivarna-group in the 1910s and the revues Quosego and Tulen-
kantajat in the 1920s and 1930s had participated in this questioning, bringing
the first urban themes and characters into Finnish literature.1 The city in
1
The group Dagdrivarna and the revue Quesego were Swedish-speaking. Among the
influential writers in these were Torsten Helsingius, Runar Schildt, Gunnar Björling and
Finnish poetry of the 1960s inherited features from these traditions and
situated them in a particularly complex situation where the city is represented
in creolized and contaminated texts exposing disorder and dispersal, as well as
in coherent and concise texts aimed at cultural ordering and metadescription.
The city, and above all the capital Helsinki, is the scene where the meta-
morphosis of Finland from an agrarian into an urban society is staged, analysed
and commented upon. It is also a symbol that serves to situate the country in
the global context, with all the contradictions that were characteristic of the
position of Finland in the cold war system. Writing about the city was a means
to reflect on the transformations of social and political reality and of the
physical environment, a means to represent the confusion these trans-
formations produced or to work towards understanding them.
The city: culture and nature, persuasion and confusion

One of the key questions in the process of urbanization was the relation
between culture and nature (and especially the forest), which had been
constitutive of Finnish self-understanding since the rise of national literature in
the first half of the 19th century. The new suburban housing complexes on the
fringes of the cities and sometimes quite far in the forests provided thousands
of people with high living standards, but they also deeply modified their
relationship with their natural environment that now became framed by blocks
of flats, parking lots, urban highways and occasionally also waste and dirt, that
is, objects and materials in the wrong place.
Väinö Kirstinä, one of the leading poets of the generation of the 1960s,
directly comments on this new reality where old distinctions between “pure”
nature and culture become obsolete in his poem “Keskellä kulttuuria” (“In the
middle of culture”; Kirstinä 1963: 48–49), which reads as an inventory of a
random collection of natural and cultural objects found at an empty summer
theatre site, such as birds, trees, tools, clothes, brand names and waste. The list
is interrupted by citations from the fellow poet Arvo Salo and tabloid press
headlines, bringing into the text voices other than the poet’s. Kirstinä’s poem
does not seek to order these things or to criticize their apparent disorder;
Henry Parland. Tulenkantajat was published in Finnish and edited first by Olavi Paavo-
lainen (pseudonym Olavi Lauri), who urged Finnish writers to focus on the city and to
adopt influences from European modernism and avant-garde.
518 Harri Veivo
rather, it questions the very validity of hierarchies and oppositions such as

those between culture and nature, poetry and journalistic discourse, valuable
things and waste, and, ultimately, between the real and the unreal. When the
lyrical I expresses himself, the tone is both joyful and sardonic. He claims to
“love you amateurs of culture” and to be “the lamp [and] you the light”, yet
also to “burst out in a deadly laugh” (my translation – H. V.).
A similar kind of complex attitude can be found in Pekka Lounela’s 1964
poem “Kaupungit, mustetahrat” (“Cities, blots of ink”; Lounela 1964: 15) in
which the lyrical I declares, in a complex manner, his love for both the forest
that is being invaded by TV and radio antennas, symbols of technological
progress, and for the popular music that is transmitted through the antennas.
The metaphors in the poem describe antennas as forest and music as flowers
and thus tend, like Kirstinä’s inventory, to transcend the separation of the
domains of culture and nature. The title of the poem, on the other hand,
compares cities with ink and thus implicitly with writing and culture, yet also
with dirt, with material that is accidentally in the wrong place. The expansion of
the city is seen as a brutal and disordered process, but it entails also progress of
culture, multiplicity, diversity and hybridization. This offers a definition of the
poet’s task, as he claims in the last lines of the poem that “my task is thus to
moderately preach puberty / alone amid cities and literatures, / amid paper,
languages and useless inventions” (my translation).
For Lounela, the city with its brutal intrusion into nature and the contrasts
and oppositions it produces provides a rhetorical space that can be used in
argumentation to define the poet’s role. A similar kind of approach with a
similar kind of function can be found in texts that address another fundamental
set of relations that was being modified by the process of urbanization, namely
the relations between the individual and society, and between different social
groups. In Brita Polttila’s, Pekka Lounela’s and Claes Andersson’s poetry, for
example, Helsinki becomes a series of juxtaposed and conflicting scenes and
figures. The strongly contrasting elements of the city – such as the new
buildings for commerce and banking and the poverty and decay next to them
(Polttila 1970: 15; Lounela 1967: 28–47), or the TV broadcasts on civil war in
Bolivia and the hippies hanging around in the streets (Andersson 1996[1969]:
41) – are conceived as parts of a topos, as material for an argument that seeks
to draw attention to the unequal distribution of wealth and to the generalized
feeling of solitude, the two being considered the most urgent problems of the
welfare society that was still at its beginning. The representation of the city
supports a claim on the society as a whole. Even though the texts represent
strongly contrasting elements, they remain subjected to this defining mode,
and in this sense belong to the self- and metadescriptive moment in cultural
dynamism characteristic of the poetics of the 1950s, even though the texts were
published in the late 1960s and in 1970.
The use of the city as a rhetorical space presupposes an intention of
persuasion, and thus an instrumental approach to the topic. The city was,
however, perceived also as a place of confusion that did not permit such an
attitude, but rather questioned the very foundations of the poet’s identity. At
the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Matti Paavilainen
represents in several texts the city, and especially Helsinki, where he was born,
as a philosophical space prone to fundamental dialectical reflection (see, for
example, Paavilainen 1970: 43–59; 1972: 15–28). He argues that in urban
space creation has replaced nature, demolition is loss but also renewal, and
diversity and multitude bring disagreement, but also transcendence of dis-
agreements. “Everything you see,” he writes in his collection Kaupunki
enemmän kuin kohtalo (City more than destiny, 1972), “is an answer to the
question you didn’t have time to make […] The city lives in my heart like I /
live in the city. The houses rise in me and I want to be / an eternal question to
the city, which gradually is an answer to everything” (Paavilainen 1972: 18–21;
my translation – H. V.). In Paavilainen’s poetry, the lyrical I deeply identifies
himself with the city, but he is also constantly out of step with the development
of the urban environment. Demolition and construction change the familiar
places that serve for the poet’s projective self-identification. However, this does
not lead to nostalgic melancholia as in Charles Baudelaire’s paradigmatic texts
on the modern city experience in Les fleurs du mal (1857). If the city questions
the very premises of his constructed identity, it also offers, with diversity and
multiplicity, new models for shaping oneself.
Paavilainen’s dialectic urban space is reminiscent of Pentti Saarikoski’s
approach, which the latter characterized with the term “dialectic poetry” in a
famous programmatic text from 1963 (Saarikoski 1963), and also of Arvo
Turtiainen’s poems from the 1960s. The poets share the understanding of the
city as a complex space characterized by difference and disagreement.
Turtiainen, who had started his career already in the 1930s, portrays Helsinki
and its recent history using slang and through fictional characters as well as
personal memories (see Turtiainen 1962 and 1968). Saarikoski, the leading
young poet of the 1960s next to Kirstinä, is interested in the city as a
520 Harri Veivo
heteroglossic space of different kinds of discourses that represent different

kinds of value systems and approaches to reality, and which he wants to
incorporate in his texts. In his 1965 collection Kuljen missä kuljen (I’m going
where I’m going, Saarikoski 2008: especially 109–134) this poetic principle is
realized through an extended use of citations from varying sources extending
from everyday discussions to newspaper headlines. The citations expand the
space of the city – on this occasion, again Helsinki – towards global politics and
distant places mentioned and commented in the material Saarikoski works
with. On the other hand, the citations are embedded in a series of impressions
and reflections that permit the reader to chart the lyrical I’s wanderings in the
city and the thoughts this urban environment provokes. Thus Helsinki
becomes a site that gathers indexical references to the global world and
heterogeneous citations into a local scale organized around the lyrical I (on the
notion of ‘site’, see Cauquelin 2007). The movement is that of a flâneur, but
whereas the classic Baudelairian figure of the flâneur retains a critical distance
to the city space (see Benjamin 2002: 57–100), Saarikoski’s lyrical I is
constantly addressed by other people, traversed by their talk, and only
occasionally does he take a stance towards the observed phenomena, and even
then in an interrogative mode.
The city between the East and the West,

the local and the global
As I mentioned earlier, the “physiognomy” of Finland was not only changed by
the process of urbanization; it was also affected by the constant process of
negotiation that concerned its position in the geopolitical space of Europe. The
city – and above all the capital, Helsinki – is a key element also in this respect. It
functions as a multivalent symbol in texts that seek to articulate Finland’s
position in the bipolar space of the Cold War and in relation to cultural centres
and peripheries at the scale of Europe and the world. Here as well we can
observe the two tendencies of integration and creolization at work. Saarikoski’s
1962 poem “Minä asun Helsingissä” (“I live in Helsinki”) is a good illustration
of self- and metadescriptive use of the symbol of Helsinki at the level of
geopolitical relations:
Helsinki is where I live.

Helsinki is the capital of Finland.
It lies by the sea 120 miles to the west from Leningrad.
Helsinki is an expanding city, and the rents are high.
We sit here surrounded by our forest, backs turned to the giant
and stare at his image in a well’s eye. He wears a dark suit,
white shirt, silver-grey tie. In his country everything is
quite different, there people walk on or without their heads.
We sit here in the midst of our very own forests,
but far away in the West there is a land where huge eyes float
by the shore, and they can see us here.
Helsinki is in the process of reconstruction, according to the
plans made by Mr Alvar Aalto.
(Saarikoski 1967: 23; translation by Anselm Hollo)
The poem begins with a simple, encyclopaedia-like discourse stating banal facts
about Helsinki, but adopts a more figurative mode as it moves on to discuss
Finland’s position in relation to the East and the West. At this point, Helsinki
functions as the symbol for the whole country, and the lyrical I moves from the
first person singular to the first person plural, giving voice to what the poet
proposes as a collective experience. The giant stands for the Soviet Union, and
the clothes have been identified as referring to Nikita Khrushchev (see editorial
notes in Saarikoski 2008: 295). Interestingly, the giant is not faced directly, but
observed as a reflection in a well that is in the middle of the Finnish forest. The
forest as a natural phenomenon obstructs sight, and the fact that it belongs to
the Finns (“our forests”) is underlined, adds a self-ironical note to the text,
whereas an image on the surface of water is traditionally loaded with signifi-
cations of fascination and mystical communication. The image can thus be
interpreted as representing the peculiar relationship of interference in the
1960s’ Finland between the internal and external politics that I commented on
at the beginning of the article. It represents Finland as a closed society where
direct contact with foreign countries is hindered, but where the influence of the
eastern superpower is experienced like a compelling force. The other super-
power, on the other hand, is represented indirectly as an observer. In a geo-
political reading, this can be understood as a comment on the West’s interest in
Finland’s somewhat experimental and atypical position as a basically neutral
country between the two spheres of influence. Historically this position was
particularly evident in 1962, when the Soviet-dominated World Festival of
Youth and Culture was organized in Helsinki, transforming the city for a
522 Harri Veivo
couple of weeks into a field where the balance between the West and the East
was disputed principally in terms of cultural and political propaganda, but also
in fights between the festival supporters, their adversaries and the police (see
Krekola 2009).
Saarikoski’s poem, a “humorous and ironical definition of a condition” that
is a resignation according to Herbert Lomas (1991: 11), is based on the
coherent use of concise images and as such follows the poetic principles of
Finnish modernism of the 1950s. Interestingly, texts using the typical poetic
techniques of the 1960s – such as a floating and undulating layout, citation
technique and montage – articulate geopolitical and geocultural relations in
more flexible ways. Anselm Hollo’s 1964 poem “Teräsmies pienenä” (“The
Superman as a child”) exemplifies this technique:
[...]
Les Tricheurs
did Pound have to leave
the little Athens of Idaho
yesterday today
Neruda germinates
in Pitäjänmäki
in Wiesbaden
sunglasses during the night-time
hipsters
vingt ans après
Der Miles
and der Miles Davis
so schön
a couple of thousands of miles
away booms «Zone»
in the attic on the 8th street
a frightening voice
howls in Allen’s head
[...]
(Hollo 1964: 17–18; my translation – H. V.)
The city of Helsinki, represented here metonymically by one of its suburbs,

Pitäjänmäki, is weaved into a textual fabric that consists of references to world
cities, to authors and works representing the tradition of avant-garde
modernism and the American beat-generation, and to symbols of jazz music
and French cinema. What is particularly interesting here is the use of proper
names (on proper names in semiotics of culture, see Lotman 2004: 57–65,
171–176). The names of places connect Pitäjänmäki to the 8th street and to
the “little Athens of Idaho”, but also to Wiesbaden and, through the names of
Marcel Carné’s film Les tricheurs, Apollinaire’s poem “Zone” and the Chilean
poet Neruda, to Paris and Latin America. The names of the artworks, as well as
those of Miles Davis and the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, serve as tools situating
the text in relation to the artistic landmarks of the1960s, but also in relation to a
certain lifestyle, that of the be-pop, hipsters and the existentialist youth of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The elements are treated equally by the text, without
rhetorical operations that would place one element as central in relation to the
others. Over and above this play of connecting and identification, the use of
proper names shows also the intrusion of external factors into the semiotic
space of Finnish culture, and testifies to the poet’s willingness to come to grips
with this intrusion, to insert them into the poetic discourse that becomes thus
transformed. At the same time, tension is created between the text and the
reading community in the sense that the reception of the text necessitates
specific cultural competencies that permit to understand the references
established by the names that are delivered without explanations.
Similar kind of texts are to be found in Veijo Polameri’s (1967), Kari
Aronpuro’s (1964: 31–39) and Jarkko Laine’s (1967; 1970) poetry, and also in
many of Saarikoski’s works from the mid-1960s (Saarikoski 2008: 109–134).
Here, the city – Helsinki in Polameri’s and Saarikoski’s case, the Tampere of
Aronpuro and a less recognizable Turku in the case of Laine – is further related
to entertainment and consumer culture, to global events like the war in
Vietnam and the revolution in Cuba, and to yet other symbols of avant-garde
modernism and the emerging pop culture. The geocultural and geopolitical
space is not organized around two dominating poles, but is rather constructed
around a plurality of centres, and it is a space of a multitude of cultures,
languages and intertexts that makes efforts of coherent meta-description
impossible.
For Saarikoski in the 1960s, Helsinki was the essential place to be, even
though he occasionally spent long periods of time elsewhere. The poem
“Helsinki” from 1966 expresses the complex function the city has as a central
symbol in a network of references connecting the everyday living environment
to contemporary discussions on poetry and politics, to the poet’s youth and
childhood and further to figures in classical literature Saarikoski was translating
524 Harri Veivo
and strongly identified with. The poet’s relationship to the city appears as
fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand, he declares that “Helsinki my
City remains in my mind, in good order / and when I am gone, it still moves
like a tree”. The city is a stable element that creates continuity, yet this
continuity is also movement, change, and thus source for alienation and loss as
it appears in Baudelaire’s poetry and in many other central works of modern
urban literature. On the other hand, the poet claims to “carry a bomb in [his]
briefcase” and to “destroy Helsinki” (Saarikoski 1967: 46–47; translated by
Anselm Hollo). This claim, that reminds of the bomb in Andrei Belyi’s
Petersburg (final edition 19222) is, however, not an expression of hatred, but
rather of the avant-gardist impulse to create conditions for a new society
through making a tabula rasa of what exists. From the beginning of the 1960s
onwards, Saarikoski defended new poetry by calling for a “construction plan for
culture” and by warning of “the dispersion of avant-garde into individuals”
(Saarikoski 1965: 6; 1964: 4). Twice he also stood as a candidate at
parliamentary elections and was generally recognized as the leading left-wing
intellectual of his generation. This public role was, however, in contradiction
with Saarikoski’s poetry, where an intellectual, analytical and distanced mode
of observation is dominant, despite the use of montage and the calls for
dialectical poetry. In “Helsinki”, the poet seeks to adopt two roles or personae
that give expression to this contradictory situation and its conflicting demands
and desires. He is Odysseus, the subtle and cunning one, the polytropos who
has travelled much; yet he is also Oudeis, that is, ‘no one’ (the name Odysseus
claims to be his when he escapes from the Cyclops’s cave), which in
Saarikoski’s words signifies also “not skilful, not widely travelled”. Helsinki is
the place where these two roles meet. It is the city of public action, of skilled
and brilliant texts and close intellectual contacts, but also of hesitation,
tiredness, of the desire “to be an outsider”, and the travels Saarikoski as
Odysseus has travelled are as much travels in the city as travels in time, from
childhood’s metaphysical questions to a writer’s career.
2
An excerpt of Petersburg was published in issue 8 of the revue Parnasso in 1964,
followed by the translator Esa Adrian’s essay on the novel that mentions the motif of the
bomb. Although we cannot be sure whether Saarikoski had read the translated excerpt and
Adrian’s essay, it is quite likely that the text was discussed in Saarikoski’s circles.
The city in the cultural dialogue of the 1960s

Saarikoski’s Helsinki is a mediating device that brings multiple and, in many
respects, contradictory elements into contact with each other. It is the place of
identification with figures from classical literature, as well as that of
experimentation with new forms of writing; it is the capital of a small nation
involved in global politics as well as the poet’s home town of personal
memories and private thoughts and emotions. When observed at the level of
explicit description and detail, the city in “Helsinki” is reduced to basic
elements such as speech, human contacts, the street and walking, interrupted
by bucolic elements from the ancient Greek tradition. It is not the generic
modern city of technology, transport, industry and crowds, but the space of a
quest and of what is essential to it. Helsinki in the 1960s was, nevertheless, a
huge construction site: the city was not only expanding into the surrounding
nature, but also its core was engaged in a constant process of destruction of the
old and construction of the new. It is tempting to think that Saarikoski’s
complex play with forking references and identifications was possible only in
this period in the development of the city when change was the dominating
impression and the modernist idea of progress was still widely accepted, yet the
old and the new still coexisted side by side and between each other like phrases
in a conversation. In the 1970s, the pace of modernization and especially of
urbanization slowed down after the peak year of 1974 (Sarantola-Weiss 2008:
26–28), and the writers’ search for new forms of writing and a new readership
that had caused a profound reorganization of the genre system in Finnish
literature was also over (Laitinen 1981: 573–574 and 587–590).
The relation between urbanization and literature – and especially poetry –
is not a fortuitous parallelism, but of a more profound, dialogical nature.
“Dialogue creates identity,” as Peeter Torop writes when commenting on
Lotman’s theory of cultural dynamism (Torop 2002: 401). Dialogue here is
not to be understood in its everyday meaning of verbal exchange, but as a
fundamental semiotic mechanism of culture, as a mediating and creative
relation between cultural languages. This is particularly valuable for the analysis
of Finnish culture in the 1960s. It was a decade when Finns discussed and
debated more than ever before and poetry was brought into contact with most
varying contexts and discourses. This discussion was not only about opinions
and arguments, but also, and more profoundly, a dynamical process in which
poetry reacted to the intrusion of new realities into Finnish culture and the two
dominating poetic languages, the modernism of the 1950s and the new poetry
526 Harri Veivo
of the 1960s, reflected and redefined each other, thus working towards new
ways of conceiving of the world and of poetry. The use of concise imagery to
represent Finland’s geopolitical situation and the treatment of the city as a
rhetoric space exemplifies a tendency towards integration and self-under-
standing and metadescription characterizing the culture as a whole. On the
other hand, the dialectical approach to the city and the willingness to open up
the space of the poem to diverse citations, intertexts and discourses, the
weaving of Helsinki and Finland into the fabric of world culture and global
information flow, represent creolization of cultural languages and the in-
creasing communication between different areas of culture, beyond the levels
of national culture. The city was a central element in both of these discourses,
mediating in varying ways between the old and the new, the East and the West,
culture and nature, and thus offering the country multiple connections, paral-
lelisms and reflections, step by step building up its identity as a modern state.
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528 Harri Veivo
Город как посреднический прием и символ

в финской поэзии 1960-х гг
В финской поэзии 1960-х гг город и прежде всего столица Хельсинки становятся
сценой, с которой представляют, анализируют и комментируют превращение
Финляндии из сельскохозяйственного общества в городское. В то же время сам город
является символом, с помощью которого эта страна помещается в глобальный
контекст вместе со всеми противоречиями, характерными для Финляндии в ситуации
холодной войны. Выбор города объектом описания явился средством, с помощью
которого можно было размышлять об изменениях социальной и политической
реальности, окружающей среды, изображать сопровождающий изменения беспоря-
док или стремиться к пониманию изменений. Статья анализирует город в “новой
поэзии” 1960-х и в текстах, отражающих модернистскую поэтику 1950-х; указывая при
этом, что именно сосуществование двух противоположных поэтических дискурсов
имело решающее значение в семиотическом развитии финской культуры рассматри-
ваемого периода.
Linn kui vahendav võte ja sümbol 1960ndate aastate soome luules

1960ndate aastate soome luules on linn, ja ennekõike pealinn Helsingi, selleks lavaks, millel
esitatakse, analüüsitakse ja kommenteeritakse Soome muundumist põllumajanduslikust
ühiskonnast linlikuks. Samuti on linn sümbol, millega see maa asetatakse globaalsesse
konteksti ühes kõigi vastuoludega, mis iseloomustasid Soome positsiooni külma sõja
süsteemis. Linnast kirjutamine oli vahend, mille abil mõtiskleda sotsiaalse ja poliitilise
reaalsuse ning füüsilise keskkonna muutuste üle, kujutada muutustega kaasnenud segadust
või püüelda muutuste mõistmise poole. Artikkel analüüsib linna 1960ndate “uues luules”,
aga ka tekstides, mis esindavad 1950ndate modernistlikku poeetikat, osutades, et just kahe
vastandliku poeetilise diskursuse koosesinemine oli otsustava tähtsusega soome kultuuri
semiootilises arengus vaadeldaval perioodil.
Theses about the poietic principle of metonymy
Aare Pilv
Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences
Roosikrantsi 6, Tallinn 10119, Estonia
e-mail: aare.pilv@mail.ee
Abstract. The paper observes the relation of fictional/figural discourses to language-games

that are active in reality. The starting point for the discussion is the “theory of two
contexts” by Arne Merilai, the basic idea of which is distinguishing between fictional and
factual speech acts on the basis of their different contexts of truth value. It seems to be
justified to expand it to the whole sphere of figurality. After that the paper views John
Gibson’s Wittgensteinian theory of fiction as an archive of standards/etalons of language-
games and a laboratory of reshaping and creating these standards. The fictional/figural
sphere can be described as the area of possibility that creates language-games of reality via
poiesis. The article describes some cases where the logic of figural sphere is introduced
directly into real political discourse, forcing the reality to act according to the rules of art,
but thus excluding the ethical freedom of our real-life language-games. It means that there
exists a certain principle of metonymy between the figural sphere as archive and laboratory
of standards, on the one hand, and the language-games of reality, on the other hand, while
violation of that principle involves a danger of losing the reconciliatory power of
fictionality/figurality that, according to Jaak Tomberg, is a significant function of literature
as a human practice. There are several possibilities for further analysis: the cases where the
danger can be turned into something positive; the problems and gains of art forms (certain
forms of the theatre, happenings) that use techniques of intrusion into reality; the question
if such violation of the “principle of metonymy” is specifically connected with modernist
avant-gardism or not.
1. Starting points
We can distinguish between two textual/discursive spheres – factual discourse
on one side and poetic/fictional discourse on the other side (we might call the
latter figural discourse). By factual discourse we understand different
descriptions of the world, depictions of reality and its circumstances – it is the
discourse in which people believe that language has a direct truth-relation with
530 Aare Pilv
reality. Besides descriptions it also consists of declarations, performative

speech acts that establish certain states of affairs or of reality (such as marriage,
or giving a person a scholarly degree, or political elections where changes in
reality are made by purely linguistic acts). Figural discourses (the use of the
plural is intentional here) are characterized by the fact that the validity of the
speech acts performed in these discourses is limited by a certain horizon
(literary, poetic, artistic etc.) and their relation to reality seems to be secondary,
mediated, in need of some figural interpretation techniques in order to have its
specific validity.
Of course, the distinction cannot be made on the basis of purely textual
features, as it always depends on contexts and conventions; however, the
distinction is actual and practical, not merely theoretical. This distinction is my
starting point.
It is based on an original conception by Arne Merilai, his “theory of two
contexts”, which is meant to be an explanation of the relations between
fictional and factual language use while retaining the possibility of analysing
both uses within the same theory of linguistic behaviour. He proposes
(referring, by the way, to Juri Lotman’s ideas about literature as secondary
modelling system that are one of his sources of inspiration) a scheme in which
the difference between fictional and factual speech acts is not a result of some
essential difference between the two, but is simply a difference of context of
their truth validity (see Fig. 1). Merilai writes: “In the narrow, or linguistic-
semantic context, the type of the utterance is interpreted generally, against the
background of possible worlds, while in the broad, or semantic-pragmatic
context, the particular meaning gets fixed according to the actuality” (Merilai
2007a: 386).1
Although Merilai speaks mainly about fictionality, it is possible to widen the
scheme also to cover other cases of figural language use (including poetry),
because the basic criterion in this theory is not actually the notion of fabulation
that should distinguish fictional and factual speech, but merely the distinction
between the contexts of validity of speech acts. The focus on contexts of truth
validity rather than some fixed criterion of fictionality makes it possible to
interpret also other forms of poetic language use as phenomena of the “narrow
context”, so that fiction becomes one of many species of figurality (fiction is
1
The article can be found in digital form at http://lepo.it.da.ut.ee/~amerilai/
Pragma.html. A more elaborated version of Merilai’s theory is presented in Merilai 2003.
Theses about the poietic principle of metonymy 531
metonymy of a specific kind in relation to the factual language use2). Thus,

figural discourses are characterized mainly by the fact that their context of truth
value is not immediate and concrete, but rather is a generalization that needs
interpretation/translation and is waiting for a concretization according to
reality. This is important for understanding the level of abstractness of my
further considerations.
BROAD CONTEXT
NARROW CONTEXT
Internal content and form, implied author
Fiction, imagined reference and belief (belief1)
Virtual/non-virtual de re deixis and speech acts
External/expressional content and form, real author

Actuality, scepticism towards belief1, actual belief (belief2)
Actual de dicto / de se self-defeating speech acts
Poetic self-referentiality, discourse deixis
Figure 1. Merilai’s scheme of the theory of two contexts (Merilai 2007: 386).
There exist cases where transfers or “translations” from figural discourses to the
factual are made – for example, if poetic or fictional means are used in an
autobiography or in political or historiographic discourses (all these are ways of
describing/establishing identity – autobiography regarding personal identity,
and the others concerning collective identity, respectively). It is possible to
transfer different aspects: content (themes, problems), structural peculiarities,
modalities, specific silent “blind spots” of the chosen speech mode etc.
For example, several autobiographical books have appeared in Estonian
literature in recent years that abandon the traditional mode of self-account and
use techniques that are characteristic of figural texts. Tõnu Õnnepalu has
written several autobiographical books, of which The Spring and the Summer
and (Kevad ja suvi ja, 2009) is maybe the most articulated example of what I
mean: this is a diary about the writer’s everyday actions and thoughts, but it is
2
Towards the end of the paper I will broaden this metonymy into a generalization that
characterizes the whole sphere of figurality, as I am broadening the character of fiction to
figurality as a whole here.
532 Aare Pilv
written in free verse, so that the experience of living is filtered immediately

through some poetically distancing sight; the poetical mode allows to show the
ambiguity of the experience of the “now”-moment and brings the diary out of
its everyday simplicity. The writer and philosopher Madis Kõiv has written six
volumes of memoirs Studia memoriae (1994–2010) that explore only his
childhood until the age of 15. These memoirs knowingly ignore the coherence
of memory that is usually presumed to underlie texts of such type; instead, Kõiv
wanders in labyrinths of the process of memorizing and recollecting, so that the
text often resembles stream of consciousness, moving between different
possible fabulations about what happened, although in principle it is a factual
text. The aim and modality of these books is not the objectivism of personal
history, but rather seeking a state where recollections would come to mind as
though for the first time, only at the moment of writing. A recent example is the
book by the writer and diplomat Jaak Jõerüüt A Changing One (Muutlik,
2010) – a diary written during a year, telling about his activities as a diplomat in
Riga and about his changing moods and thoughts. However, the temporal
order is broken, the diary entries are not presented in their real sequence, and
large portions of the book are temporally turned inside out, moving backwards
in time. With the simple figural step of recomposing a year-long period of time,
the essence of time, its non-teleological nature is thematized and the possibility
of “eternity of moment” accentuated, without losing the factual credibility of
the text.3
We can find this kind of rhetorical transfer also in the spheres that play a
significant role in creating and maintaining collective identity, e.g. the figures
that shape the consciousness of history (“700-year-long night of slavery” in the
Estonian case, or the figure of “the Dark Ages” in the case of the Medieval
epoch, or “the Thaw” in the case of the Khrushchev era); in fact, every narrative
about a nation’s history follows certain patterns that are taken from the sphere
of figural discourse – the scholar whose work elaborating on the concept of
figural techniques in historiography is best known is probably Hayden White
(see, e.g., White 1999).
Also political discourse often uses rhetorical techniques borrowed from
figural discourse. The simplest examples can be found in slogans of election
campaigns (e.g., punning, such as “Aitab!”, meaning both “that’s enough” and
“[our party] helps”; or “Parem Eesti”, meaning both “better Estonia” and
3
For a more thorough analysis of Õnnepalu and Kõiv from this perspective, see Pilv
(2010) (in Estonian, but with an abstract in English).
“right-wing Estonia”). A vivid example is provided by a phrase of George W.

Bush when he gave a cause for the bailout of major companies at the beginning
of the economic crisis in September 2008 – the main message that all the media
caught up for headlines was formulated as a poetic figure, as Bush gave special
power to his idea using a rhyming pun: “The rescue effort we’re negotiating is
not aimed at Wall Street; it is aimed at your street.”
Intuition says that there is actually nothing special in such blending – it
happens anywhere every day; but more thorough thinking might still raise
questions concerning some principles of our use of language – especially when
problems of ethics are taken into account as will be shown below.
2. Poietic laboratory of establishing the reality

Let us move closer to the heart of the matter. John Gibson, the American
theoretician of aesthetics and philosopher of language, proposed a new view on
the nature of fictional texts and their relation to the real world. According to
Gibson, the different approaches to the problem of the relation between fiction
and reality cannot properly solve the ambivalent nature of fiction. On the one
hand, the view that fictional texts somehow represent the real world overlooks
the peculiar traits that distinguish fiction from factual texts and in fact reduces
fiction to a mere illustration or allegory of reality. On the other hand, the
theories that claim the autonomy of the fictional text, that is, claim that there is
nothing in a fictional text that would correspond to anything in the real world
in the strict sense and instead of this a novel or film creates its own world,
overlook the fact that people read literary works not only for literature’s own
sake, not only for experiencing the style and power of imagination, but also for
their own life; literary works can have impact on the way the people lead their
lives.4 So there is a constant ambivalence between the claims that fiction has no
truth value and the fact that it has effect on people’s decisions about the truth
in their own real life, i.e. fiction still seems to have a certain truth value.
In order to avoid these problems, John Gibson (2004) proposes his own
approach that is inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language-games
presented in his Philosophical Investigations. In it, among other things, Wittgen-
4
Gibson refers to works by Catherine Wilson, Susan Feigin and Gregory Currie in the
first case and to Peter Lamarque, Lubomir Doležel and J. Hillis Miller in the second case.
534 Aare Pilv
stein gives an example of the etalon or standard of metre that exists physically
in Paris. In paragraph 50 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes:
“There is one thing, of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor
that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard of metre in Paris. – But
this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to
mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule.”5
Then Wittgenstein changes the example – instead of the standard of metre,
he writes about imaginable standards of colours, or, more exactly, of the sample
of sepia colour that would be preserved in Paris like the standard of metre. He
writes: “Then it will make no sense to say of this sample either that it is of this
colour or that it is not. We can put it like this: This sample is an instrument of
the language used in ascriptions of colour. In this language-game it is not
something that is represented, but is an instrument of representation.”
Gibson takes the example and transforms it into a problem of literature.
Fictions do not so much represent the real world or any other imaginary,
possible worlds, the core characteristic of fiction is not to mime some world
(mimetically), but rather they act as an archive of standards of how we speak
about “terms and concepts that describe significant sorts of human activity and
response, that bring to view ways in which human lives can assume
significance, come undone, thrive and so on” (Gibson 2004: 120). Literary
texts, according to Gibson, are such archived standards for those extremely
complex representational practices that are designated for example by such
concepts as “love”, “suffering”, “exploitation” or “devotion”. Literature “offers
us a shared fabric out of which we can weave such intricate visions of our
world” (ibid.: 121). Such standards “open up a way of seeing the world [...]
Literature shows us reality, but at a level we might call foundational rather than
representational” (ibid.: 122).6
It seems to me that Gibson’s further elaborations of this idea in his
monograph Fiction and the Weave of Life (2007) move in a direction somewhat
different from that of my own thoughts, so maybe he would not agree with my
conclusions that I am about to make from the same starting point.
I think that the role of literature (and figural language techniques in
general) is not only to be the archive of the etalons or standards of language-
games we live by; it is actually also the laboratory where the standards are
created, experimented with and recreated, and that is why the literary field has
5
Philosophical Investigations are cited according to Wittgenstein 1997.
6
See also a similar approach in the same collection of essays (Harrison 2004).
a special position among other modes of language activity – that is why it is

(like arts in general) free from pragmatic constraints and limitations, why it is
very problematic to take a nasty character as an insult to its prototype and why
it is natural to read a novel or watch a film through the filter of the disclaimer
that “any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”. It
is like a polygon where a game of reality is played in order to experiment with
the ways in which we can act (in the sense of language activity) in reality.
In essence, this is actually nothing new – it is the principle of poiesis,
building the world by word, and the intuition is expressed for example in the
Bible, the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning there was the Word”, or
in Genesis: “And God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light”. In the
Estonian literary sphere, the poet and novelist Viivi Luik, in her quite well-
known essay “A word is more than a word” (“Sõna on rohkem kui sõna”,
written in 2005), speaks about several cases in which she started to see certain
phenomena only after someone had formulated these in a poem or a novel. For
example, she writes about a novel by Mati Unt titled Autumn Ball (Sügisball,
1979),7 which was one of the most important Estonian novels of the late Soviet
period. The action of Autumn Ball takes place in Mustamäe, a residential
district of high-rise blocks of flats in Tallinn that was built in the 1960s. Viivi
Luik claims: “Before Autumn Ball no one knew that Mustamäe existed” (Luik
2006: 118). She means that the novel by Mati Unt created the standards of
how to treat Mustamäe in our language-games, standards for conceptualizing
the experience of a modern Soviet high-rise residential district. By today, the
image of Mustamäe is quite inseparable from the novel.8
It means that in the shadow of any mimesis there exists a primordial poiesis –
a narrative or a poem that appears to act as a representation of reality,
representing something only to the degree to which it has actually founded the
mental and discursive standard for the reality it seems to represent. This is one
7
The novel has been translated into English as Autumn Ball. Scenes of City Life (Tallinn:
Perioodika, 1985; trans. Mart Aru).
8
In 2008, a conference dedicated to the novel and its role in speaking of modern urban
environment took place (see Laaniste, Tomberg 2010). The essay by Luik has been a
crucial text for both Merilai in his article about poiesis (Merilai 2007b) and Jaak Tomberg
in his monograph The Reconciliatory Purpose of Literature (Kirjanduse lepitav otstarve;
Tomberg 2011: 88–89).
536 Aare Pilv
possible answer to the riddle of literature that seems to exist as a parallel world
outside our real world, yet is simultaneously read as if it were life.9
An important aspect of this is that the figural language sphere as the
laboratory of these standards recreates, remodels, questions the existing
language-games, offering parallel or alternative rules. Estonian literary theorist
Jaak Tomberg recently published a monograph titled The Reconciliatory
Purpose of Literature (Kirjanduse lepitav otstarve, 2011), in which he shows how
literature, by creating alternative worlds or speaking modes that are not
reducible to the real world and its language, has reconciliatory value and
redeems people from the necessity of the limited actuality of our life and world,
offering to people a liberating and infinite sphere of possibility (of course, this
is but a brief and reductive summary of Tomberg’s nuanced theory).
Translating it into my present terms – literature as the archive of standards of
language-games is also a laboratory where the standards are broken if a
language-game has become unproductive or repressive.
All this can be presented as follows:
9
Viewing literature – and the figural language sphere in general – as the archive and
laboratory of language-games of culture seems to have a certain similarity or structural
overlapping with the Lotmanian approach to art as a secondary modelling system,
especially with his thoughts about literature/art as having certain common elements with
game as a tool for creating models of the world and of acting in the world (see Lotman’s
theses from 1967 in Lotman 1998). Of course in the light of such an approach the question
arises in what sense art is a secondary modelling system (in other words – how can the
archive of standards of language-games be secondary in relation to these language-games).
However, in his article from 1981 titled “Text in text” Lotman indicates that this
secondarity is a question of methodological operationality, because on the practical level
of cultural communication (which is always the basic level in Wittgensteinian thought
perspective), especially in case of art, language (as code – the “primary modelling system”)
and text “change their places”: “Text is given to community earlier than language, and
language “is calculated” on the basis of text” (Lotman 1992: 150). Merilai also touches
upon the question of secondarity from his perspective: “The secondary modelling system
that has concentrated around the poetic function enters the horizontality of ordinary
language-use on the vertical axis, whereas the secondary (or self-referential) becomes the
main aim and therefore primary; the usually primary (or referential) can be made virtual
and therefore it remains secondary – a spring-board, a stage prop ...” (Merilai 2007a: 388).
reshaping of
poiesis standards
Narrow
context
Archive of the and laboratory

standards of of the standards
language-games
Figural language sphere

Metonymic
relation
between
contexts
Broad context – language-games of the reality
Figure 2. Relations between the figural sphere of language and language-games of

reality (modification of Merilai’s scheme).
We could find numerous examples of how some literary work or literary

phenomenon has preceded the rise of some concepts or discourse modes in
real life (such as Dostoyevsky’s depiction of complex internal features of
humans that preceded psychoanalysis; or the term Kafkaesque that was used to
describe the absurdity of censorship and bureaucracy in Soviet society), but I
would like to make a brief mention of two instances that may be especially
illustrative on the background of our “normal” language-games. The first is the
phenomenon of shishōsetsu or “I-novel” in Japanese literature. It peaked during
the second and third decades of the 20th century and is characterized by an
autobiographical effect, so that often these novels were perceived as accounts
of the author’s personal life. As more detailed examination shows, most of the
Japanese “I-novels” were actually fictions and their peculiar effect came from
the fact that they employed the viewpoint of interior personal consciousness
that was new in the Japanese literary tradition, which had been more used to an
objectifying and collective scope even in case of personal diaries. The period of
emergence of shishōsetsu was the epoch of Japanese cultural “modernization”
(i.e., westernization), and it is remarkable that ways of speaking of the “modern
538 Aare Pilv
self” that consists of personal interior singularity were introduced via texts that
were actually fictions.10
The other case is quite a new literary “genre” – “autism fiction” that tries to
depict autistic experience. Autism is a disorder of neural development in case of
which the person’s ability to engage in social interaction and communication is
impaired or restricted, while at the same time their intellectual abilities and
emotional needs can be similar to “normal” (or, using the term coined by
autists themselves, “neurotypic”) people. This raises the question which should
be the language that would allow to express autistic experience without
stereotyping the autists – and the main question is not only whether the
speaking mode makes autists better understood by “neurotypicals”, but also
whether the speaking mode allows autists to express themselves. As the
philosopher Ian Hacking has said:
I believe that the genre is helping to bring into being an entire mode of discourse,
cementing ways in which we have recently begun to talk, and will talk, about autism.
It is developing a language, or, if you will, a new language game, one that is being
created before our eyes and ears. This speech is, in turn, creating or extending a way
for very unusual people – namely, autistic ones – to be, to exist, to live. (Hacking
2009: 501)
So – it is the real poiesis that creates existence.
3. Ethical aspect: the principle of metonymy and

its violation
Of course, the examples of the standard of metre in Paris or the standards of
Mustamäe created by Mati Unt are but superficial examples, for the literary
fabric from which the weave of life is woven (to use Gibson’s figure) consists
not only of themes and terms, but also of style, modulation, speech registers,
zones of silence etc. Of course, a constant struggle is going on between actual
language-games and the experimental products of the literary laboratory – and
the defence mechanism of literature in that struggle consists of its
10
The three main analyses of shishōsetsu are Fowler (1988), Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1996)
and Suzuki (1996) (the first of these can also be accessed in the digital library of the
University of California Press – http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/; here, I thank
Japanologists Alari Allik and Lauri Kitsnik for their helpful guidance.)
aforementioned specific attribute: literature can always defend itself, saying

that in a strict sense it designates nothing, it is only a game. At the same time,
occupying the field of game in the linguistic sphere, literature also hides the fact
that any language-game is actually a game – the fact must be hidden in
everyday life in order to maintain the coherence of human practices. So the
relations between literature and reality are very complex.
I would like to point at one of such complexities in which the aspect of
ethics manifests itself.
In his Nobel Lecture, Joseph Brodsky spoke about the purifying and
liberating function of literature. Poetry and literature act as liberators thanks to
the fact that literary experience is a private one and educates the taste of
readers, thus weaning them from the tendency to give in to political ideologies:
A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man

tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct – free of any go-betweens – relations. [...]
It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular,
is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the
masses, heralds of historical necessity. [...] For a man with taste, particularly literary
taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to
any version of political demagogy. (Brodsky 1988: 240– 243)
This seems quite convincing. However, among Brodsky’s arguments are also
claims that the crimes of Lenin, Hitler and Mao are connected to the fact that
their literary experience was not deep enough, although, as he says, Mao even
wrote poetry. At this point, for me, the question arises – was the poetry of Mao
Zedong not poetry in the proper sense? If we study Mao’s poems, we can see
that these were quite refined and followed the ingrained traditions of Chinese
poetry.11
11
For example his poem “Swimming”, which is a commentary on Mao’s action that had
both poetic/performative and political sense – his swimming across the Yangtze River in
1956 to symbolize his power over Chinese nature and people (he repeated the act ten years
later, confirming his position as the mighty leader for the years of the Cultural Revolution):
“I have just drunk the waters of Changsha / And come to eat the fish of Wuchang. / Now I
am swimming across the great Yangtze, / Looking afar to the open sky of Chu. / Let the
wind blow and waves beat, / Better far than idly strolling in courtyard. / Today I am at
ease. / “It was by a stream that the Master said – / ‘Thus do things flow away!’” / Sails
move with the wind. / Tortoise and Snake are still. / Great plans are afoot: / A bridge will
fly to span the north and south, / Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare; / Walls of
stones will stand upstream to the west / To hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain / Till a
540 Aare Pilv
Therefore, there must be something else, an additional condition that

differentiates such poets as, e.g., Rilke and Mao, for the political extremities of
the modern era have been viewed as a poetry in a sense. For example, Slavoj
Žižek has written about the war criminal Radovan Karadžić, the leader of
Bosnian ethnic cleansing, suggesting that by no means was it a weird coinci-
dence that Karadžić was an evil public leader and, at the same time, also a
poet – Žižek says that the Bosnian ethnic cleansing was in fact a continuation of
poetry by new means (Žižek 2008).12 The idea is not new – the culture
researcher Boris Groys has also spoken about the specific artistic nature of the
totalitarian regimes of the 20th century in his “Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin” (Grojs
2003).13 The Soviet project was in some respect a huge modernist art project in
which the logic of avant-garde artworks was introduced directly into reality, so
that society and people themselves became the material for the techniques of
modernist art, real lives and real society were so-to-say rephrased, paraphrased
etc. as it usually occurs in a work of art, an artistic text.
As one of the most astonishing examples of that attitude the works and
activity of the Russian avant-gardist Alexey Gastev could be introduced. Gastev
abandoned writing poems and started to develop his own theory of work –
which was not only a theory, but was also practised in his scientific institute in
Moscow in the 1920s. His attempts to redesign working people and their lives
according to his strict machinist ideology were perceived by him as an artistic
activity, which followed his own artistic manifesto. He finished his Manifesto of
proletarian art (1919) with the sentence: “We are moving towards the
objective expression of things, mechanized masses and striking open
grandiosity, that does not know anything intimate and lyrical” (Gastev 2000:
248; my translation – A. P.). As we can see, this is in straight opposition with
the vision of Brodsky. Although Gastev became a victim of Stalinist terror at
smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges. / The mountain goddess if she is still there /
Will marvel at a world so changed” (the text is retrieved from
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/poems/poems23.htm).
12
Žižek gives an example by Karadžić: “Convert to my new faith crowd / I offer you what
no one has had before / I offer you inclemency and wine / The one who won’t have bread
will be fed by the light of my sun / People nothing is forbidden in my faith / There is loving
and drinking / And looking at the Sun for as long as you want / And this godhead forbids
you nothing / Oh obey my call brethren people crowd” (cited in Žižek 2008: 17).
13
According to Groys, the Russian translation of 2003 is more accurate than that of
1993; the English version The Total Art of Stalinism was published by Princeton University
Press in 1992.
the end of the 1930s, his artistic ideas made a contribution to weaving the
rhetoric and techniques of Soviet totalitarianism.
As Žižek says concerning Karadžić, and as we could say also as concerns
totalitarianism as one branch of modernist art: these cases give us a hint why
Plato wanted to expel poets from his ideal polis – because there is always a
possible weird shortcut between literature as a laboratory of standards for
language-games, and the language-games themselves.
Here I am coming to the main point of my paper. Thinking about the
Gibsonian theory of archive (and laboratory) in the light of Merilai’s theory of
two contexts, we can see that between the archive of standards (or the narrow
context) and the real language-games (or the broad context) there is a certain
relation of transference. I think that it is right to say that this relation is
metonymic; more exactly, the metonymy exists in the relation between the
areas of validity of truth value of speech acts, the contexts of validity. I find it
justified to speak of the principle of metonymy – in order to read fiction, poetry
or other cases of figural language use so that they would act adequately as parts
of the archive of standards, they must be taken as metonymic in relation to real
language-games. It is probable that Jaak Tomberg means something similar
when he claims: “Real fiction does not change reality itself but the balance
between necessity and possibility in reality: wasted possibilities reach reality
(get their embodiment) not by becoming real, but by preserving their quality
of possibility, namely by remaining possibilities as such.”14 (Tomberg 2010: 76,
my translation – A. P.)
If we understand the relation between the figural area and reality in such a
way, we can also avoid a simplified understanding of the Gibsonian theory of
archive – we have to see the archives of standards as a kind of possibilities,
whereas there is a principle of metonymy between possibilities and necessity
(reality).
In the same article Tomberg also uses the notion of archive, describing how
literary histories are thought to play the role of the archive, while they can only
be a partial actualization of that archive (Tomberg 2010: 78–81), and I add –
each literary history is metonymic in relation to the imaginable archive of the
literary history.
14
“Tõeline väljamõeldis ei muuda mitte tegelikkust ennast, vaid paratamatuse ja
võimalikkuse tasakaalu tegelikkuses: luhtunud võimalikkused pääsevad tegelikkusesse
(saavad omale kehastuse) mitte eneste tegelikustumise kaudu, vaid oma võimalikkuse
kvaliteeti säilitades, just nimelt võimalikkuste kui niisugustena.”
542 Aare Pilv
The case is similar when it comes to the figural area that acts as an archive
for real language-games: in the same way that demanding archive-like
exhaustiveness from a literary history means a violation of the principle of
metonymy, this also happens in the case of the more fateful instances that were
shown previously. I would call this the expansion of the laboratory across its
borders, the invasion of mental etalons into the mentality of reality. This could
be depicted as a scheme in which the narrow context has broadened to overlap
the broad context, or the borders of the narrow contexts have become so
fragmentary that they “leak”. In this case the result is very repressive and
destructive, quite opposite to the reconciliatory purpose of literature. The
sphere of standards/etalons breaks into the real language-game, and the
language-game becomes over-determined, the rules become excessively rigid
(as Wittgenstein (see PI par 68) – or also Lotman (1998: 391–392) – says, one
condition of any effective game is that its rules do not determine everything –
for example in tennis there is no rule as to how high the ball can fly). It is a rigid
ritual without a reconciling force, where the modality of possibility has been
changed for that of actuality, it is a game from which you can step out only by
death (real or moral or social). Secondary modelling systems take the place of
primary modelling systems. It is as if any time we wanted to measure a metre,
we would have to go to Paris and check the standard. Formal perfection
prevails over pragmatic effectiveness, aesthetic and artistic aims prevail over
ethical ones. The standard – let us remind that according to Wittgenstein it has
neither positive nor negative truth value – is suddenly torn into a sphere where
things do have truth values; where, more exactly, things cannot lack truth value.
Such misunderstanding and misuse of fiction, poetry and the figural sphere
can have so devastating results for the very reason that they have such a
crucial – and not at all peripheral or secondary – position among human
linguistic activities. The destructive and reconciliatory abilities of the figural
sphere are mutually dependent upon each other; one would not be possible
without the other and vice versa.
4. Possibilities for further thinking

I see mainly two possibilities for further thinking. One of them concerns Merilai’s
theory of two contexts. Although the scheme is meant to depict a situation
involving fictional speech acts, I think, having shown the possibility of a wider
interpretation of the scheme, that it can be generalized on more levels. There can
be more than just two contexts in the scheme, so that each broader context acts
as an actualization of a narrower context (which is a certain sphere of possibility).
For example, we can imagine a scheme in which the narrowest context is a
fictional text; around it there is a context of an ideological system that has been
built on the basis of that text; around it there is a broader context of, for example,
a national culture; around it there is a broad context of some general language-
game (and around it we can imagine one more context where language-games
are seen as games, as for example the philosophical analysis by Wittgenstein).
Each narrower context acquires a certain character of fictionality/figurality if
looked at from the perspective of a broader context, and at the same time each
narrower context acts as an archive that a broader context must actualize
according to the principle of metonymy. Such approach would allow – as we are
dealing with contexts that differ in their truth value – to point, among other
things, at the differences of ideological and non-ideological discourses (which are
always relational – as also fictionality is always a question of relation).
Another possibility to develop my thoughts further is concretizing and
nuancing the principle of metonymy by viewing particular cases of acting and
violating the principle. For example, the above-mentioned cases of violation
belong to modernist avant-gardism, but obviously this is not characteristic only
of modernism – let us think, for example, of past occidental or present oriental
religious fundamentalism in which fantasies of paradise are transferred into
reality without any metonymy. We could ask whether avant-gardism has some
specific traits when it comes to such violation (for example, if it was a specific
reaction to modernist l’art pour l’art?), or whether the avant-garde is nothing
more than a transfer of ancient religious and ecstatic patterns into a godless
world? An important question is whether the violation of the principle of
metonymy does not also justify such changes in society that are described as
positive? The only thing that is clear is that the violation always involves a
certain danger. In that respect it would be very interesting to analyse the
project “Unified Estonia” (Ühtne Eesti) produced by Theatre NO99 in spring
2010 – a simulated establishment of a new populist party which aroused
intensive reaction, both positive and negative; it was an artful and skilful
simulation of the violation of the principle of metonymy. The project made it
possible to observe how people act in such a situation of danger, as well as to
imagine what would grow out of this danger. It also posed questions about
artistic practices that use invasion into real language-games as their tool, while
maintaining the metonymic frame: how exactly is the frame preserved in such a
544 Aare Pilv
borderline situation, and by which features such invasive art differs from those
human practices that lose the frame and become manipulative and repressive
real language-games? These questions seem important to me for we are not
dealing only with defining fictionality, figurality etc. We cannot proceed
without facing the questions of human freedom and responsibility – for is not
this the actual reason to be interested in literature and art?15
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Тезисы о пойетическом принципе метонимичности

В статье рассматривается отношение фикциональных/фигуральных дискурсов к
языковым играм действительности. Начальным пунктом является “теория двух
контекстов” Арне Мерилая (Merilai 2007a), основная идея которой – разница между
фикциональной и фактуальной речью – определяется на основе их разных контекстов
значения истинности. Эту идею можно распространить на всю сферу фигуральности.
Далее статья рассматривает теорию Джона Гибсона (Gibson 2004), которая
546 Aare Pilv
основывается на идеях Виттгенштейна и согласно которой фикция – архив

стандартов/эталонов для языковых игр и лаборатория для перерабатывания и
создания этих стандартов. Фикциональную/фигуральную сферу можно описывать как
территорию возможностей, на которой через пойезис создаются языковые игры.
Описываются некоторые случаи, где логика фигуральной сферы перенесена прямо в
реальный политический дискурс, заставляя реальность действовать по законам
искусства, устраняя таким образом этическую свободу из языковых игр реальности.
Это означает, что между фигуральной сферой (как архива и лаборатории стандартов),
с одной стороны, и языковыми играми реальности, с другой, существует некоторый
принцип метонимичности, и нарушение этого принципа содержит в себе опасность
лишения примирительной силы фикциональности/фигуральности, которая по Яаку
Томбергу (Tomberg 2011) является значительной функцией литературы как
человеческой практики. Некоторые возможности последующего анализа: случаи, где
эта опасность может быть трансформирована в нечто позитивное; проблемы и
возможности форм искусства (театр определённого вида, хэппенинг), которые
изпользуют техники вторжения в реальность; вопрос о том, связано ли специфически
это нарушение “принципа метонимичности” с модернистским авангардом или нет.
Teese poieetilisest metonüümsuspõhimõttest

Artikkel vaatleb fiktsionaalsete/figuraalsete diskursuste suhet tegelikkuses toimivate keele-
mängudega. Lähtepunktiks on Arne Merilai (2007) “kahe konteksti teooria”, mille põhi-
ideeks on fiktsionaalsete ja faktuaalsete kõneaktide eristamine nende erineva tõeväärtus-
konteksti alusel. Seda ideed on mõttekas laiendada kogu figuraalsuse sfäärile. Seejärel vaatleb
John Gibsoni (2004) wittgensteinlikku teooriat fiktsioonist kui keelemängude standardite/
etalonide arhiivist ja nende standardite töötlemise ja loomise laborist. Fiktsionaalset/
figuraalset sfääri võib kirjeldada kui võimalikkuse ala, mis loob poiesise kaudu tegelikkuse
keelemänge. Seejärel kirjeldab artikkel mõnesid juhtumeid, kus figuraalse sfääri loogika on
otseselt üle kantud tegelikku poliitilisse diskursusesse, mis sunnib tegelikkust käituma kunsti
reeglite kohaselt, kuid välistab sel moel meie tegeliku elu keelemängude eetilise vabaduse. See
tähendab, et figuraalse sfääri (kui standardite arhiivi ja labori) ning tegelikkuse keelemängude
vahel on teatav metonüümsuspõhimõte, ja selle põhimõtte rikkumine sisaldab ohtu, et
fiktsionaalsus/figuraalsus kaotab oma lepitava jõu, mis Jaak Tombergi (2001) järgi on
kirjanduse kui inimpraktika tähtis funktsioon. Edasiseks analüüsiks on mitu võimalust:
juhtumid, kus selle ohu võib pöörata millekski positiivseks; tegelikkusse sekkumise tehnikaid
kasutavate kunstivormide (teatud liiki teater, happeningid) probleemid ja võimalused;
küsimus, kas selline “metonüümsuspõhimõtte” rikkumine on spetsiifiliselt seotud modernse
avangardismiga või mitte.
Semiotics of mediation
Theses
Peeter Torop
Jakobi 2, 51014, Tartu, Estonia
e-mail: peeter.torop@ut.ee
Abstract. Semiotics of mediation is based on comparative analysis of mediation processes,

on typology of forms of mediation and on the subsequent complementary analysis of
culture. Not only does cultural analysis that is based on semiotics of mediation proceed
from communication processes, it also searches for possibilities of correlation between
concepts of describability, analysability, translatability. Depending on the strategy of
mediation semiotics it is possible to create an overview of the main parameters of cultural
analysis and to specify the boundaries of semiotic analysis of culture. The main types of
mediation are simultaneously parameters of cultural analysis. The main types include
autocommunicative mediation, metalingual mediation, intertextual mediation, inter-
discursive mediation, and inter- or transmedial mediation. Typology of mediation types
facilitates the understanding of the autocommunicative aspect of culture and creates the
basis for analysing communication processes not on the level of the immediate sender and
receiver but as part of the culture’s communication with itself. Semiotics of mediation
starts from semiotic mediation and ends with a culture of mediation in which one and the
same cultural language or text operates as a means of dialogue with itself, as a means of
communication with others, as part of some textual system or discourse, or as a transmedial
phenomenon. Semiotics of mediation is a means of studying the correlation between
implicit semiotic mediation and forms of explicit semiotic mediation, thus complementing
cultural semiotic study of culture.
1. Semiotics of culture is one of the fields of semiotics searching for its

disciplinary identity, which it has been doing for more than forty years already.
Meanwhile, semiotics of culture has been strongly related to the development
of general semiotics. One of the examples could be Roman Jakobson’s
endeavour to create a new science with three distinct disciplinary levels:
(1) study in communication of verbal messages = linguistics;
548 Peeter Torop
(2) study in communication of any messages = semiotics (communication of

verbal messages implied);
(3) study in communication = social anthropology jointly with economics

(communication of messages implied). (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 666.)
Within the same period, Umberto Eco’s work A Theory of Semiotics was
published. In the preface, dated with the years 1967–1974, Eco distinguishes
between two theories: a theory of codes and a theory of sign production. In
relation to the former he stresses: “In its first part, devoted to a theory of codes,
I have tried to propose a restricted and unified set of categories able to explain
verbal and non-verbal devices and to extend the notion of sign-function to
various types of significant units, so-called signs, strings of signs, texts and
macro-texts...” (Eco 1977: viii). Roland Barthes comes very close to this logic
in his S/Z from 1973, where he differentiates between the code in general, the
code of actions, the empiric code, the hermeneutic code, the cultural or
referential code as being simultaneously present in a single literary work
(Barthes 2002: 18–20, 261–262).
2. In the collective programme of the Tartu–Moscow School from 1973,

semiotics of culture is defined as “...the study of the functional correlation of
different sign systems. From this point of view particular importance is
attached to questions of the hierarchical structure of the languages of
culture...”. On the one hand, this approach synthesizes the views of Jakobson,
Eco and Barthes. On the other hand, ‘sign system’ and ‘language’ become
synonyms in this context, and the notion of language is metaphorized,
especially, when the notion of modelling system is added. A field of notions
emerges: language – sign system – modelling system, to which a differentiation
of object language and metalanguage (descriptive language) is added. The
Tartu–Moscow School does not represent a unified system of knowledge in
semiotics of culture. Nevertheless, Juri Lotman was searching for a disciplinary
synthesis – a fact that was first noticed by Karl Eimermacher who entitled his
introduction to the German collection of Juri Lotman’s works as “Ju. M.
Lotman. Bemerkungen zu einer Semiotik als integrativer Kulturwissenschaft”
(Eimermacher 1974) (“J. M. Lotman. Notes to a semiotic version of
integrative culturology”). ‘Integrative’ is an appropriate word, taking into
account Lotman’s special position in the typological studies of culture. If we try
Semiotics of
o mediation 549
to summarize his worrks from thee 1970s, wee get the fo ollowing piccture.
According to Lotman, the typologgy of culturre should be b based on the
universals of culture. Thhe most univeersal feature oof human cuultures is the need n
for self-desccription. Eveery culture has
h its own sspecific mean ns for it, its own
languages of descriptiion. The descriptive
d llanguages facilitate
fa culltural
communicaation, perpetuuate cultural experience and model cultural c mem mory.
What the cooherence of culture
c is bassed on, is thee repetition and interpretaation
of the same things. The more
m descrip ptive languagges a culture has,
h the richer the
culture is. C
Consequentlyy, every cultu ure is describbable as a hierarchy of ob bject
languages annd descriptivve languages,, where the iinitial object language is a so-
called hom me language and is surro ounded by semiotic sysstems related to
everyday rittuals and boddily techniqu ues. There arre certain languages of culture
that can servve the functioons of both object languagge and metalanguage from m the
point of view
w of everydayy cultural exp perience:
While hom me language, native langguage and eeveryday rituuals as sem miotic
mediation aare object lannguages, the experience
e off literature, art
a and mediaa can
be both object and metaalinguistic, deepending on their positio on in and on their
impact on a person’s (esspecially child’s) life. In aan ordinary situation it caan be
claimed thaat literature, arts and media
m chann nels depict a certain reaality;
criticism innterprets it in
i a languagge of the giveng medium that is easily
e
550 Peeter Torop
understandable for the audiences; the humanities do this in their metalanguage

in which strict terms exist alongside with metaphors; and exact and natural
sciences do this, using strict terminological systems ranging to formal
languages and artificial languages.
Humans acknowledge their relations to the world by means of object
languages and shape their individual identities by learning and using
metalanguages. Culture does the same. The more descriptive languages there
are in culture, the more numerous are the possibilities for self-identification
and the constitution of a cultural identity. The immediate identity is based on
object languages, the created identity on metalanguages. The immediate
identity is thus born out of a living cultural environment or traditional culture,
which turns into a culture of mediation in the process of human development.
On the other hand, metalanguages form a culture of interpretation, and
relations with the lost past remain in the realm of heritage culture.
Identity becomes the implicit key term of the semiotics of culture: as human
identity in culture, the identity of cultural texts and languages, a culture’s own
identity and the identity of the researcher of culture. First, cultural identity
means the relationship of immediate and created identities in time and space.
Semiotics of mediation 551
This relationship is dependent in its turn on the relationship between

traditional culture that is inseparable from everyday life, heritage culture that
belongs to the past, school, the culture of interpretation formed by cultural
research and criticism, and the culture of mediation that influences the
consumption of culture. Seen against this background, cultural identity
depends on the relation between the preserved and the created, or between the
old and the new, in the life of a human being or of a culture. From another
aspect, cultural identity is expressed in the ways of merging the contemporary
and the heritage culture, or in the specificity of interpreting of one’s own
present and past. These keywords constitute the field of cultural identity and
this field in turn forms an implicit background system for semiotics of culture.
From the position of a complex understanding of cultural identity, culture
has to be understood as a relation between traditional, heritage, interpretative
and mediational cultures. In understanding identity it is important to dis-
tinguish between the immediate, created, temporal and spatial identities. These
parameters of culture and identity make the definition of cultural identity
possible through four processes: preservation, creation, interpretation and
relating. Thus, they facilitate the understanding of culture in a process based on
mediational activity.
3. The similarity between the notions of (cultural) language and sign system in
semiotics of culture, makes it possible to distinguish between two typological
approaches. The first distinction is based on the juxtaposition of primary and
secondary modelling systems:
I. Language as a primary modelling system

II. Secondary modelling systems:
1. language as a higher sign system (myth, literature, poetry)
2. language as a metalanguage or a part of metalanguage (art, music, dance,
etc. criticism and history)
3. language as a model or analogue (language of film, dance, music,
painting etc.)
Proceeding from this classification, language as a primary modelling system is

the humans’ main means of thinking and communicating. As a secondary
modelling system, language is the preserver of the culture’s collective expe-
rience and the reflector of its creativity. As a metalanguage, natural language is
552 Peeter Torop
the translator and interpreter of all nonverbal systems, and from the metho-
dological perspective, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, language offered
cultural analysis a possibility of searching for discrete (linguistic) elements also
in such fields of culture where natural language either does not belong to the
means of expression, or does it only partially.
The second distinction is based on the possibility of differentiating between
the statics and the dynamics of cultural languages:
I. Statics:
1. continual (iconic-spatial, nonverbal) languages
2. discrete languages (verbal languages)
II. Dynamics:
1. specialization of cultural languages
2. integration of cultural languages:
(a) self-descriptions and meta-descriptions
(b) creolization
While the level of statics is based on the distinction between verbal and non-
verbal languages, the level of dynamics is related to different paces of develop-
ment of the different parts of culture. This means that during any given period
in culture there are certain fields where there is balance between creation and
interpretation (criticism, theory, history) and it is possible to speak about
specialization and the identity of the field. At the same time, there are fields
where, either due to the fast pace of development or for other reasons, a split
between creation and interpretation brings along the need to integrate the field
into culture. This can be done in two main ways – by using the creators’ self-
descriptions also for general interpretation, or by borrowing tools of analysis
from other fields and, combining them, creating new creolized languages of
description.
4. Cultural identity is based on relations and relations are based on the

processes of mediation in culture. The importance of the processes of
mediation, their fast transformation in time and their importance for under-
standing culture as a whole have created the need for systematic description. If
the functional correlation of different sign systems in culture can be regarded as
the main object of research for semiotics of culture, this is a correlation created
in processes of communication that simultaneously are processes of mediation.
Semiotics of culture leads us to semiotics of mediation. Semiotics of mediation

begins with the comparative analysis of cultures and a search for universal
characteristics in order to typologize cultures. The peculiarity of Juri Lotman’s
semiotics of culture is expressed in his collection of papers from 1973 titled
Articles on the Typology of Culture 2 (Статьи по типологии культуры. Вып.
2), which elevates every culture’s need for self-description to the status of a
cultural universal): “The need is realized on the metacultural level in the
creation of self-descriptive texts which can be regarded as grammars that
culture creates for describing oneself” (Lotman 1973: 5).
Understanding the types of mediation starts from distinguishing implicit
semiotic mediation from explicit semiotic mediation. The former operates in
traditional culture, the latter in culture of mediation. Both in the case of
traditional culture as well as in that of culture of mediation, the relatedness with
contemporary culture and heritage culture is important.
The importance of self-description in culture also means that an important

feature of culture is being simultaneously an environment of learning and a
554 Peeter Torop
system of teaching. The complementarity of learning and teaching begins with

the activity of learning object languages and saving them in cultural memory
and leads to the cultivation of metalanguages of culture within the studies of
culture or within the acknowledgement of culture as the basis for identity. The
experience of culture, together with cultural self-description as a way of
conscious recognition and mediation of the experience, form the basis for
typologizing mediation.
5. The basis for semiotics of mediation is the complementarity of types of

mediation. In order to speak about types of mediation, one has to start from the
arrival of the term in science in the works of Lev Vygotsky: “The central fact of
human existence is mediation” (Vygotsky, 1997: 138). In interpreting
mediation, the term of semiotic mediation has gained currency, and based on
this, in turn, researchers have arrived at distinguishing between explicit and
implicit mediation (Wertsch 2007: 180–181). The foundation of semiotics of
mediation is still a comparative analysis of the process of mediation, the
typology of the forms of mediation and the complementary analysis of culture
that stems from it. The analysis of culture within the framework of semiotics of
mediation does not stem from communicational processes only, but is also
looking for the possibilities of correlations between the notions of
describability, analysability and translatability. Proceeding from the strategy of
mediational semiotics, it is possible to create a depiction of the main para-
meters of cultural analysis and to specify the boundaries of semiotic analysis of
culture. The main types of mediation are simultaneously also the parameters of
cultural analysis:
1. self-communicative mediation (culture as a process of learning, culture as
inter- and intra-personal communication);
2. metalingual mediation (culture as a hierarchy of object- and metalanguages,
culture as a mechanism and metamechanism on the mythological, artistic
and scientific basis);
3. metatextual mediation (culture as a system of texts and metatexts; culture as
translation);
4. intertextual mediation (culture as a polylogue between texts);
5. interdiscursive mediation (culture as a hierarchy of discourses);
6. inter- and transmedial mediation (culture as media diversity, culture as a
storyworld).
The typology of the modes of mediation facilitates a better understanding of

the autocommunicative aspect of culture and generates prerequisites for an
analysis of the communicational processes in culture not on the level of the
immediate sender and receiver but as a part of the culture’s communication to
and with oneself. The process of learning and teaching culture as the
environment of the generation and development of cultural identity and
cultural memory can best be analysed as mediation, for the essence of
mediation stems from the different levels of conventionality that are created by
the metalanguages, textual collections, discourses and media in the processes of
communication. Semiotics of media begins with semiotic mediation or with
the conventionality of words in the signification of a given world, and ends with
the culture of mediation where one and the same cultural language or one and
the same text operates as a means of dialogue with oneself, as a means of
communication with others, as part of a textual system or discourse, or as a
transmedial phenomenon. In its simplest shape, semiotics of mediation is a
means of studying the correlation of the forms of implicit semiotic mediation
and explicit semiotic mediation, and, as such, it supplements cultural semiotic
study of culture.
References
Barthes, Roland 2002. S/Z. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Eco, Umberto 1977. A Theory of Semiotics. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.
Eimermacher, Karl 1974. Ju. M. Lotman. Bemerkungen zu einer Semiotik als integrativer
Kulturwissenschaft. In: Lotman, Jurij M. Aufsätze zur Theorie und Methodologie der
Literature und Kultur. (Eimermacher, Karl, hrsg.) Kronberg Ts.: Scriptor, vii–xxv.
Jakobson, Roman 1971[1967]. Linguistics in relation to other sciences. In: Jakobson,
Roman, Selected Writings. II. Word and Language. The Hague: Mouton, 655–695.
Lotman, Juri 1973 = Лотман, Юрий. Материалы к курсу теории литературы. Выпуск 2:
Статьи по типологии културы. Тарту: Тартуский государственный университет.
Vygotsky, Lev S. 1997. The problem of consciousness. In: Rieber, Robert W.; Wollock,
Jeffrey (eds.), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol. 3. Problems of the Theory and
History of Psychology. New York: Plenum, 129–138.
Wertsch, James V. 2007. Mediation. In: Daniels, Harry; Cole, Michael; Wertsch, James V.
(eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 178–192.
556 Peeter Torop
Семиотика опосредования
Основой семиотики опосредования является сопоставительный анализ процессов
опосредования, типология форм опосредования и последующий комплементарный
анализ культуры. Основанный на семиотике опосредования анализ культуры
занимается не только коммуникационными процессами, но и ищет корреляцию между
понятиями описываемость, анализируемость и переводимость. На основе стратегии
семиотики опосредования можно создать представление об основных параметрах
анализа культуры и уточнить границы семиотического анализа культуры. Главные
типы опосредования одновременно являются параметрами анализа культуры. В число
главных типов входят автокоммуникативное, метаязыковое, метатекстовое, интер-
текстовое, интердискурсивное, интер- и трансмедийное опосредование. Типология
типов опосредования помогает лучше понимать автокоммуникативный аспект
культуры и создает предпосылки для анализа коммуникационных процессов в
культуре не на уровне отправителя и получателя, а в рамках автокоммуникации
культуры. Семиотика опосредования начинается с семиотического опосредования и
кончается культурой опосредования, где один и тот же язык или текст культуры
является средством диалога с самим собой, средством общения с другими, элементом
текстовой системы или дискурса, трансмедийным явлением. Семиотика опосредо-
вания является средством исследования корреляции между имплицитным семиоти-
ческим опосредованием и формами эксплицитного опосредования, дополняя тем
самым изучение культуры в рамках семиотики культуры.
Vahendussemiootika
Vahendussemiootika aluseks on vahendusprotsesside kõrvutav analüüs, vahendusvormide
tüpoloogia ja sellest lähtuv komplementaarne kultuurianalüüs. Vahendussemiootiline
kultuurianalüüs ei lähtu üksnes kommunikatsiooniprotsessidest, vaid otsib korrelatsiooni-
võimalusi mõistete nagu kirjeldatavus, analüüsitavus, tõlgitavus vahel. Vahendussemiootili-
sest strateegiast lähtuvalt on võimalik luua ettekujutus kultuurianalüüsi põhilistest para-
meetritest ning täpsustada kultuuri semiootilise analüüsi piire. Vahendamise põhitüübid on
ühtlasi kultuurianalüüsi parameetrid. Põhitüüpide hulka kuuluvad autokommunikatiivne
vahendus, metakeeleline vahendus, metatekstiline vahendus, intertekstiline vahendus,
interdiskursiivne vahendus ja inter- või transmeedialine vahendus. Vahendustüüpide tüpo-
loogia aitab paremini mõista kultuuri autokommunikatiivset aspekti ning loob eeldused
kultuuris aset leidvate kommunikatsiooniprotsesside analüüsiks mitte vahetu saatja ja
vastuvõtja tasandil, vaid osana kultuuri suhtlemisest iseendaga. Vahendussemiootika algab
semiootilisest vahendusest ja lõpeb vahenduskultuuriga, kus sama kultuurikeel või -tekst
toimib dialoogivahendina iseendaga, kommunikatsioonivahendina teistega, mingi teksti-
süsteemi või diskursuse osana või transmeedialisena. Vahendussemiootika on implitsiitse
semiootilise vahendamise ja eksplitsiitsete semiootilise vahendamise vormide korrelat-
siooni uurimise vahend, täiendades sellisena kultuurisemiootilist kultuuri-uurimist.
Peeter Torop for Italian science

of translation1
Bruno Osimo2
This is not a research paper: it is an abridged version of my preface to Torop’s

La traduzione totale (2010). In my intention, the presence or absence in it of
subjects, explications, considerations may be a window on the Italian reception
of Torop’s work.
Inner speech
In the 1930s Lev Vygotsky explained that the inner language we use to think
and to formulate the verbal text is a nonverbal code. This simple fact gives
much food for thought regarding the translation process, as it becomes very
probable that the three types of translation proposed by Jakobson (intralingual,
interlingual, intersemiotic, 1959) are actually intended, among other things, as
different facets of the same, only apparently interlingual, process. In “trans-
lation proper” intersemiotic processes occur both during the prototext
deverbalization when it is perceived (Vygotsky’s “volatilization into thought”;
Vygotskij 1990: 347) and translated into mental awareness by the translator, as
well as during the metatext reverbalization with which words, phrases, and texts
are synthesized from the mental magma.
Although the study of Peirce was not widespread in the Tartu School before
the 1990s, local semiotics tending to rely more on Morris (1946) and Lotman
(semiotics of culture), we still realize when considering the notion of ‘inter-
pretant’ that it is made of the same nonverbal material as inner speech.
Following this path, the sign-interpretant-object triad may be accompanied by
the prototext-translatant-metatext triad, where by ‘metatext’ we mean the
translated text and by “translatant” we mean the Peircean ‘translatant’ (Gorlée
1
This text is an abridged version of Osimo 2010.
2
Author’s address: ISIT Milano Lingue – Fondazione Milano; via Alex Visconti 18 20151
Milano, Italy; e-mail: osimo@trad.it
558 Bruno Osimo
1994); translatant meant not as a “word of the metatext which is a translation

of a word of the prototext”, but as an idea formed in the translator’s mind to act
as intermediary between the original and the translated text.
Adding a ‘mental’ passage to the classical simplistic translation process
diagram – and a consequent intersemiotic decoding-coding operation from
discrete to continuous and back – has obvious important consequences, so that
Torop excludes the possibility of a lossless reverse translation (re-translation
into the language of the original), and explicitly defines translation as evolution
of meaning, not as equivalence:
the text is a process that takes place between the consciousness of those who
created it and the consciousness of the recipient; in other words, the beginning and
the end of this process are hidden in human psyche. The birth of the text can be
seen as a gradual transition from oral speech to written speech, so in the different
stages of this process, we can see the correlation between inner speech and
expressive speech (Zhinkin 1964: 36–38). During text generation you have a sense
of unity of beginning and end, and also the difficulties associated with assessing this
unity. (Torop 2010: 115)3
Inner language, as “machine code” of the brain, has a dual function: it is the
language in which thoughts are expressed, but also the raw material used to
manufacture the “application programs” that run the operations of verbali-
zation/deverbalization. Inner language is the metalanguage of intermediation
between the (original) verbal text and the (translated) verbal text; it is the code
that allows translation with its interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic
components. Conceptually related to this metalanguage there is also the
disciplinary metalanguage of the science of translation, a most serious and most
urgent problem Torop has his own view on.
Metalanguage and method

Semiotics of culture has begun to use the notion of ‘translation’ in an abstract,
metaphorical sense, for reasons internal to semiotics itself – as in the case of
Peirce who used it to explain semiosis (““meaning,” which is, in its primary
acceptation, the translation of a sign into another system of signs” (CP 4.127);
“it is no other than the very proposition of which it is the meaning: it is a
3
All quotes from Torop 2010 are translated into English by me – B. O.
Peeter Torop for Italian science of translation 559
translation of it. But of the myriads of forms into which a proposition may be
translated, what is that one which is to be called its very meaning?” (CP 5.427);
“Thought must live and grow in new and higher incessant translations, or it
proves itself not to be genuine thought” (CP 5.594)) or in Lotman’s case who
used it to explain the semiosphere (Lotman 2000: 265) – but this metaphorical
use is likely to have ended up having implications on the inner debate within
translation science.
Torop speaks of “consciousness of the lack of a comprehensive metho-
dology, of univocity of disciplinary self-awareness” (2010: 5) as an essential
first step in addressing any question relating to translation. Each school has
developed its own “dialect”, not always consisting of exact terms, most often
consisting of generic words which are not defined with precision, and the
attempt to communicate between the various schools clashes with their mutual
(in)comprehension: a translation problem of the translation metalanguage!
On the one hand, the abundance of metalanguages hinders mutual understanding

within a single scientific discipline. On the other hand, the over-exploitation of one-
two metalanguages into which the results of all analyses are translated, and this very
translation into semiotic metalanguage, create the illusion of gaining knowledge,
bringing a semblance of scientificity to trivial results, too. (Torop 2010: 6)
After the analysis of conceptual fragmentation, a sharp line should be drawn

between the period in which impressionistic words were used and the scientific
phase in which exact terms are used.
One possibility is to re-translate, so to speak, from the metalanguage into an object

language, to get out in this way from a self-referential metalinguistic system. (Torop
2010: 7)
Translation of culture and semiotics of culture

In Europe, Peirce’s influence was minimal, or at least indirect, in the 20th
century. We also have direct evidence that Peirce was little known in Poland:
Peirce is not well known in my country. My teachers [...] never lectured on his
philosophy. Also I do not recall ever seeing a mention of Peirce in works [...] For
that matter none of the other logicians of the first half of this century and
philosophers of language from the Polish school of logic [...] ever mentioned him
560 Bruno Osimo
[...] in the post-war years, Peirce continued to be largely unknown in Poland. (Pelc
1990: 13)
In fact, in “Within thinking worlds” Lotman (2000: 149–390) mentions

Saussure but does not mention Peirce, he even refers to the abused signifier-
signified dyad, of which he by the way has very little need: it is a dualism in
stark contrast with the theory of “bilingual translation filters” he explains in the
semiosphere, that instead blends very well with Peircean triadic logic. Based on
this, the sign produced by a culture is interpreted by a bilingual filter and sent
to an object belonging to a different culture.
In Torop’s book, culture is also seen as a pre-translation. Each text (in the
broadest semiotic sense: every object, every phenomenon) is perceived by a
culture different from the one that produced it, and this (filtered) perception is
itself an a priori translation. Since each of us belongs to collective and
individual cultures, to each of us there are as many pre-translations as there are
cultures we feel we belong to:
Each book can be read, every movie can be seen and each symphony can be played
freely, and this freedom of perception (which reaches arbitrary interpretation) is a
fact of any culture. But there is also culture as education, memory and perception
by the reader of each new text, depending on the cultural experience of the
perceiver, so that in a sense any text that ends up in the hands of a reader has
already been read; in other words, it is immediately conventionalized. (Torop
2010: 70)
This phenomenon is fundamental also to the study of interlingual verbal

translation. It means that the translator, even before she has written the first
word of her translation, has pre-translated the text in her own mind (in her own
culture). It is easy to imagine what may be the consequences of this imprinting
of the text on the translator for the final product that according to someone
should be “objective” or “equivalent”.
Although some researchers in the humanities twist their nose at the views
“too technical for them”, the contribution of the mathematical theory of
communication (Shannon, Weaver 1949) is invaluable. The notion of ‘residue’
or loss is the cornerstone of the Toropian view of translation. In terms of
semiotics of culture, if by ‘culture’ we mean an area within which the same
things are taken for granted (“the role assigned to the unsaid in communication
is called culture”; Osimo 2002: 35), the relationship between explicit and
implicit is essential:
But in the ontological characterization of the prototext, from the perspective of

translatability we should distinguish the characteristics of the relationship between
explicit and implicit. The translator, in principle, can not express the syncretism of
the author. The metatext, by definition, is a more rationalized text than the
prototext, the author’s intuition becomes knowledge (or misunderstanding) of the
translator, the implied properties of the text often have to be explained. The
metatext therefore not only renders the prototext, but it also lays bare the structure,
exposes it, shows it. (Torop 2010: 63)
It is a concept similar to that expressed by Leopardi in the Zibaldone when he

says: “And certainly every major beauty in the arts and writing – comes from
nature and not by affection or research. Now the translator necessarily affects
in that he strives to express the character and style of others, and to repeat the
words of another in the manner and taste of the same” (Leopardi 2004: 319–
320). This oxymoron called “translator” must accomplish a rational analysis,
processing and synthesis, and in synthesis she must strive to appear sponta-
neous, natural, casual. The translator is the one who poses in pictures, is never
taken by surprise by the lens, but woe to her if you see that her smile is fake,
that she is embracing those around her but does not really care for them or,
conversely, who is indifferent side by side with someone and it does not
transpire that she is in love with him.
In the never vanished debate between homologating and alienating
translation, between smooth and readable translation and translation as a
magnifying glass on a different culture, Torop takes a clear stance in favour of
the latter:
I consider one of the missions of translation (ideally) the fight against cultural
neutralization, levelling, leading in the various societies, on the one hand, to
indifference towards the “cues” of man or of the text (especially in multiethnic
states), on the other, the fight against neutralization helps searching for national
identity and cultural roots. (Torop 2010: 64)
This view is similar to that expressed by Lotman in Semiosphere (1984),

according to which the membrane (the organic metaphor is that of culture-
cells) that acts as a filter between the different cultures passes information that,
at the same time, if it increases the entropy within the individual cultures
562 Bruno Osimo
through the placing of ‘other’ items, lays the groundwork for the subsequent
decrease in entropy due to the greater global dissemination of particular
cultures recognizable as such. In Lotmanian terms, therefore, the smooth
translation strategy is appropriation of other cultures, while the alienating
translation strategy is the inclusion of the culture of others (in part) in one’s
own. In the beginning, the other element is incorporated in one’s own culture
but it is not yet semiotized, not understood, as when one eats a ball of
polystyrene that the body is unable to digest or assimilate: there are no suitable
“receptors”. Then the principle of redundancy takes over, however: infor-
mation redundancy can also decode information encoded in an unknown way,
provided that there is some replication of the stimuli such that the receiver can
reconstruct the value of the missing information in an indirect way:
This is also confirmed by the daily language practice. We read (and understand)
foreign newspapers and magazines, even when we do not understand a word. In
about the same way we read telegrams, whose letter combinations are sometimes
quite arbitrary. The human is able to translate these messages into an under-
standable language. As long as there is the possibility of such a translation and
interpretation, communication is possible. In short, the communication process
depends on the ability to control language, on the translatability of a verbal or
figurative message through the meaning and reason of man. And of course the
opening of the communication is possible only up to a certain extent, different in
different individuals. On this basis, communication into the framework of a certain
culture or between cultures is also a pedagogical problem, since the opening forces
the person to orient herself, to be active and to evolve.4
Without being rhetorical, how a culture is presented to other cultures depends

on the translator (in a broad, semiotic, sense, as any mediator from any culture
into any other culture) and her necessary mistranslation. Into this context of
the enlargement of the semiotic concept of ‘translation’ Torop fits the concept
of ‘metatextual translation’ or perception of a text from another culture by
indirect means, not perceiving the text itself but its detectable echoes,
reflections, cross-references, notes, appendices. ‘Metatext’ in this sense – a term
coined by Anton Popovič – refers to any reflection of a text except the text
itself, any “translation” with the exception of the “original”:
4
Miller, Mitchell, Montgomery, in Torop 2010: 161.
metatextual translation indicates the penetration of the prototext into another

culture in the form of any metacommunicative tool: author entries in
encyclopaedias, manuals, reviews for the translation, publicity, radio broadcasts,
publications and citations and so on. Taken together, these metatexts shape the
image of the prototext and become a complementary preventive reading, or re-
reading. (Torop 2010: 11)
Those layers of the translated text that many despise and some even deplore5
are considered key elements in intercultural communication by Torop:
The metatext is a cultural phenomenon as the prototext and, in principle, one can
say that any version is a translation from one culture into another. In fact language,
the text and the text function are different reflections of a same culture. Therefore,
from the standpoint of total translation, it is more appropriate to speak of
‘translatability of culture’. ‘Translatability of culture’ is a complementary concept
that includes a number of different parameters. (Torop 2010: 62)
Sometimes it is the mere possibility of accessing information about other

cultures that triggers intellectual pleasure. So the least embellished translation
gives the most pleasure.
The functioning of translation in culture does not always depend on the quality of
language, and a translation with low quality standards from the stylistic point of
view can be very valuable on a cultural level. (Torop 2010: 61)
Far from justifying those who translate in a sloppy way, this gratifies the
translator who has bothered to present a culture outside her own one, striving
for the greatest possible care to detail.
Translatability, loss, metatext

Fortunately, there is no longer anyone who wonders abstractly about the
possibility and impossibility of translation. Pragmatically it is noted that
translations do exist and that therefore the problem of translatability is to be
5
For example Eco (2003: 95): “There are losses that could be called absolute. There are
cases where it is not possible to translate, and if such cases are involved, say, during a novel,
the translator uses the last resort, to put a footnote on page – and the footnote on page
ratifies her defeat”.
564 Bruno Osimo
seen in relative, not absolute terms, as practical and not theoretical. The
problem exists even at the subjective level, for reasons inherent in the very
process of understanding, which is not universal:
The overall concept for each individual person is the designatum ‘stone’. And
finally, there is a concrete stone with a certain size and shape, with its concrete
meaning to the observer, which is the denotatum stone. So thinking of the stone
means establishing interrelationships between a sign (the word), designatum
(concept) and denotatum (single stone). From a logical point of view they are
three aspects of a whole. (Torop 2010: 161)
Strange as it may seem, although there is no more anyone who claims absolute
translatability, there are no theories except Torop’s that take into account
relative untranslatability and provide strategies for comparison; in this, Torop’s
total translation stands out. Following this vision of the translation process,
thinking in simplistic terms with excessive enthusiasm for a given version or
railing against another one becomes impossible. Of all versions you tend to see
how much of the source culture has been translated and what is left to some
extent in terms of its inevitable loss:
In principle from all approaches follows an indeterminacy of translation, namely the

inability to precisely define the meaning of a word, the impossibility of complete
univocality both within a single language, and between different languages.
Consequently, there cannot be even a universal definition of ‘translatability’, there
can be only types or levels of translatability. (Torop 2010: 61)
You can easily recognize the echo of Quine’s (1960) teachings. Widening the
spectrum of observation allows us not only to consider the rendering of a
verbal text translation, but also to take into account all clues about the text
scattered in a given target culture; like it or not, translating basically means
explaining. And from the practical point of view it is very rare, if not impossible,
that you get an idea of a certain text directly from the text itself, and not
through a series of what Torop, with Popovič, calls ‘metatexts’:
In the process of making explicit the hidden properties of the text, whose
explicitness is essential to the translator or metatext reader, the potential of the
book can be exploited: translatability, and the existence of the translated book as an
object, are complementary phenomena. Therefore, the bulk of prototext is
translated into the metatext, but some parts or aspects can be “translated” into the
commentary, glossary, in the preface, illustrations (pictures, maps) and so on. In
my opinion, in such a complementarity you cannot see incompleteness in the

metatext: simply, for the reader of the prototext and the reader of the metatext the
boundary between textual and extratextual is not the same. (Torop 2010: 64)
This lack of coincidence between textual and extratextual rendering – between

the translated text in the text, and elements of the text rendered in a paratextual
apparatus, or otherwise physically separated, such as advertising, encyclopaedia
entries, reviews, news – does not concern only total translation strategies: it is a
universal constant. In any translation, the author decides – whether con-
sciously or not – to explain this or that element of the prototext, in some cases
he is forced by purely linguistic reasons to explain a given element: “Languages
differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they can convey.
[...] Naturally the attention of native speakers and listeners will be constantly
focused on such items as are compulsory in their verbal code” (Jakobson 1959:
264, 265). The issues to be clarified and those that can be taken for granted
seem obvious to each individual. This is what creates apparent problems in the
revision phase when the obviousness of the translator clashes with the editor’s:
The problem of the translatability of one’s own works is implicitly solved by each
author or each textual current. It is the prototext itself that dictates the conditions
of its optimal translation and the translator and editor of the book have only to
consider explicit evidence and to explicate implicit evidence. (Torop 2010: 83)
Perhaps one could notice that Torop extends Kantian theory of synthetic a
priori judgment to the reception of the text. Such a view of translatability also
covers the notion of intersemiotic translation, for example the attempt to
express in words what happens in nonverbal art forms:
Man uses language in relation to all types of art, which, of course, says nothing
about their translatability into natural language. Any kind of art has its own means
of expression, its own language, and an attempt to relate these to natural languages
would be an oversimplification. Does it make sense to think that analogues of
phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences in film, painting, dance or music can be
productive? The language of all art articulates itself in its own way, its elements may
be completely different. Natural language, however, can be used to describe them
(metalanguage). (Torop 2010: 164–165)
The comfortable but unscientific notion of ‘equivalent’ is unusable here too;

the dialectic between an individual text and an individual interpreter of that
566 Bruno Osimo
text has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. We will have as many versions
as there are interpreters, each of whom will decide to focus on a given
dominant and to sacrifice a certain characteristic of the prototext to render the
other ones:
Lossless translation does not exist. Therefore, at the base of translation activity is
the “choice of the element you consider most important in the translated text”
(Bryusov 1975: 106) that is an objective analysis of the text that locates the
dominant as the peak of the hierarchical structure around which the text finds its
unity. (Torop 2010: 99)
There is a direct link between the concept of ‘translatability’ and the concept of
‘dominant’. Each interpreter chooses her own translation strategy (or decoding
and recoding strategy) dictated by her own criteria for translatability (or
comprehensibility), and this strategy aims at maintaining a dominant over all
others:
You can distinguish between: translatability as a cultural-linguistic and poetic

characteristic of the text, translatability of the perceptual or conceptual unity of the
text, translatability as predictability of the reception of the text in a given culture. All
these different aspects can be considered different dominants, only partially
compatible, of the translation activity. (Torop 2010: 71)
This view of translatability as a culture, and therefore dependent on subjective

culture, but also on collective cultures of the groups to which the individual
belongs, introduces us to the next paragraph.
Dominant
The first scholar to apply Ukhtomsky’s psychological notion of ‘dominant’ to
the text was Jakobson in 1935. The application of this notion to translation
occurred with Popovič in 1975, and then in Torop 2010. Who has to interpret
and choose the dominant? There is no prescriptive answer to this question.
There are three poles of signification and communication, and there are three
possible origins for the localization of the dominant: source culture, translating
culture, receiving culture.
In the translation process the dominant, as a basis for the conceptuality of the
translation activity, may be in the prototext, in the translator or in the receiving
culture. In the first case, it is up to the prototext to dictate its own optimal
translatability. In the second case the translator as a creative personality realizes
herself through the choice of her translation method, and the method indicates the
definition of the degree of translatability. In the third case the translator bases
herself on the potential reader of the metatext or on cultural (social, political)
norms; in other words, she defines the degree of translatability based on the
conditions of perception. (Torop 2010: 71)
According to this distinction, translatability is located in the space among these

three poles, three cultures. The choice of the dominant implies the preventive
choice of loss. In a sense, the choice of the dominant may depend on the choice
of loss: choosing in favour of something means choosing to the detriment of
something else:
Locating the element/s which, if necessary, must be sacrificed without affecting too
much of the text integrity is, of course, as much important. (Torop 2010: 79)
Integrity which, actually, is one of the many possible integrities, depends on the
mediator’s strategic choices. Within the notion of ‘dominant’, it is important to
understand that Torop uses the expression ‘keyword’ in a way very different
from the most used one, at least in Italy. We usually think that those words are
particularly relevant to the notion they semantically express. But some words
are not semantically very meaningful in the context while they are meaningful
as intratextual or intertextual links (‘bridge words’); the so-called ‘expressive
fields’, typical of an author’s macrostyle (for example, the European Com-
mission’s jargon); realia, referring to the source culture; deictics, recreating a
particular network of individual psychological relationships between text
elements; syntactical stylemes, recurring constructs characterizing or marking a
given expressive mode (Osimo 2004). The following quote explicitly refers to
poetry, but applies to any kind of text:
In poetry translation, of particular importance is the preservation of the

recognisability of keywords, symbols, images, motives, technical tools through
which interrelations are set not only among individual poems of a given cycle, an
anthology or the whole work of a poet, but also among poems of various members
of the same current (in the case of inner unity or conceptuality within it). (Torop
2010: 92)
568 Bruno Osimo
In Italy, we are used to distinguishing between observations applicable to

literary and poetic texts only, and general observations about texts; however,
observations about a text often apply to any kind of text, because there are no
texts totally immune from connotation, affect, emotion. Which brings us back
to the keyword of the book, and its title.
Total translation
‘Total translation’ was first used by John R. Firth in “Linguistic analysis and
translation” (1956); ten years later it was referred to by J. C. Catford with a
different intent: Catford in 1965 realized what Cicero had written some two
thousand years before. Torop uses it in a completely different way. If viewed
from a narrowly terminological point of view, Torop’s point is to put an end to
translation schools meant as self-referential centres producing material not
compatible with papers written elsewhere because it is formulated in an
idiosyncratic (untranslatable) way. Hence Torop’s invitation to use a scientific
descriptive language, with terminologically precise definitions and absence of
synonyms and extended semantic fields within the metalanguage:
Recognizing translation as a total process implies – if we want to find a place to

such a totality within translation science – also the need for a scientific description
of such a process. (Torop 2010: 9)
Moreover, in this view (following Popovič and the Czechoslovak semiotic

school for text analysis) the interlingual translation process is assimilated to a
variety of other phenomena having a prototext and a metatext and
characterized by a transformation process, i.e. a variant and an invariant
component. This is for example the case of the edition. Being an editor of a
non-translated book means selecting what has to and what should not be
published, deciding how it is to be published, and sometimes even when and
why: the editor takes a series of choices and offers the readers a book that has,
as compared to the ‘original’, an invariant and a variant component:
Translation and edition are equivalent processes and, for example, an edition of
Blok in one volume can give the contemporary Russian reader a view of symbolism
as incomplete as a translated anthology to an English-speaking reader. (Torop
2010: 83)
In this example, the Russian edition in one volume of Aleksandr Blok’s poems
gives the Russian-reading reader a partial and distorted idea of Russian
symbolism, as much as it could happen to an English-reading reader with a
similar translated edition. Translation loss is present in any work of cultural
mediation, and the notion of ‘translation process’ is extended by Torop to all
types of imaginable cultural mediation.
To me the notion of ‘total translation’ is essential, which implies, first of all, the
quantitative enlargement of problems and phenomena endorsed by translation
science. Total translation, on the other hand, symbolizes the search for a
comprehensive method, the attempts to methodologically translate the experience
of different sciences into a single interdiscipline. (Torop 2010: 8)
This interdiscipline, according to Torop, must use semiotic terminology.

Semiotics, as a general science of signification, is certainly the fittest. Even
because within general semiotics the notion of ‘translation’ is often used to
discuss questions not dealing directly with interlingual translation:
Difficulties in semiotics, a discipline characterized by greater uniformity and

terminological stability, arise from the fact that, using semiotic methods and
semiotic metalanguage, the subject of debate is greatly enlarged. (Torop 2010: 6)
Such enlargement is coherent with Torop’s intention to investigate translation,

a subject that in Italy has been considered unscientific both in practice and in
theory, scientifically. There are still many Italian scholars refusing to view
translation studies as a scientific discipline, maybe because they fear that, by
doing so, the expectations on published papers would be too great. But such a
development is inescapable: a researcher is such only if she meets the quality
demands of the international academic background.
Translation criticism
Translation criticism is not literary criticism or text criticism applied to
translation; it means writing essays whose subject is the way a text was
translated, translation strategy and its results and quality. It is seldom applied in
Italy, also because the notion of ‘translation-aimed analysis’, complementary to
translation criticism, is not well known:
570 Bruno Osimo
In works about translation you still feel the inertia of the old polemics between
‘linguists’ and ‘literati’; there are few works dealing with general problems of
translation, its method. Until the general bases for translation analysis are not set, a
critic does not know what to found himself on. Ultimately, criticism is completely
absent, or textual and verbal analysis substitute translation analysis. (Torop 2010:
32)
In most cases, translation criticism is carried out on the metatext alone. In this
way, the original is reconstructed by inferences, and mistranslations and good
quality of the prototext are considered based not on the comparison of the two
texts, but on the translated text only. Sometimes publishers dismiss translations
that, according to such a hasty criticism, are ‘nasty’, but they don’t care about
the ‘nastiness’ of the original:
Understanding the final text implies, if not understanding such channels, at least
knowing about their existence, and in this case the final text becomes an architext to
the scholar, i.e., a hypothetical text created on the basis of the semantic invariant of
the metatexts referring back to a missing (or unidentified or unknown) prototext.
(Torop 2010: 116)
On the other hand, precisely the culturological and semiotic view of translation
suggests that it is impossible to set a single version as the Right and Perfect
version: such a view would look more like a totalitarian than total translation.
The comparison between the two texts is not to see if a version is the “right
one”, but to reconstruct the translation strategy and its consistency. Within a
given logic, anyone (as a reader, or as a theoretician) can feel more or less
consonant with the translator, which does not prevent him from appreciating a
methodologically correct setting:
The analysis of the translation process and the comparative analysis of prototext
and metatext are indispensable both to locate the different typological possibilities
in translation activity and to scientifically ascertain that there is no absolute or ideal
translation, that on the basis of a single prototext it is possible to create a series of
different metatexts of potentially equal value. (Torop 2010: 79)
If such principles were known to Italian editors and project managers,

translation quality would improve. The subjective component of translation is
inescapable. Translation work, as Lûdskanov (2008) shows, is creative by
definition. Any a posteriori intervention not accounting for individual principles
guiding such a work is necessarily doomed to be a rape of the text. And

accounting for these principles means asking the translator herself, allowing her
to metatextually explicitly say what she textually implicitly means. Any other
attempt at reconstructing the translator’s strategy is doomed to misinterpret
her intentions:
By ‘character’s expressive aura’ I mean that set of characteristics that constantly

accompany him in the text, the lexical field defining the character’s unity of
perception. Strangely enough, in new, reviewed editions of old translations such a
unity may be disrupted; in other words, the editor’s psychology is different from the
translator’s. (Torop 2010: 75)
The translator’s psychology is different from the editor’s, like anyone’s psyche
is different from anyone else’s. Whoever shares Peircean semiotic view, and the
notion of ‘interpretant’ as something subjectively necessary, easily understands
that editor’s interventions on the text only make sense if they are coordinated
with the translator. Future generations of editors, hopefully educated on
Torop’s and Popovič’s thought, will have one more precious working tool
which will improve the quality of translation and the relationships with
translators.
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the support of the European Union through
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Sign Systems Studies 40(3/4), 2012

Sign Systems Studies

Труды по знаковым системам

Töid märgisüsteemide alalt

Sign Systems Studies

Sign Systems Studies is an international journal of semiotics and sign processes in

Address of the editorial office:

International editorial board:

Myrdene Anderson (Purdue, USA)

Copyright University of Tartu, 2012

University of Tartu Press

Literature and Cultural Mediation

Ileana Almeida, Julieta Haidar

Reviews and notes

On the paths of translation semiotics

“Humanities and social sciences as feedback sciences

in semiotics on many occasions (e.g. Lotman 2000[1990]; Petrilli 2003a;

various discourses, such as factual and fictional discourses (Pilv), discourse of

– 2000a. Intersemiosis and intersemiotic translation. S – European Journal for Semiotic

– 2007a. Methodological remarks on the study of translation and translating. Semiotica

Translation and semiotic mediation

Donum natalicium viro doctissimo Peeter Torop sexagenario

Abstract. Translation, according to Charles S. Peirce, is semiotic mediation. In sign

2. The interpretant as an interpreter, semiosis

3. Icons and indices as mediators in translation and

sentation itself represents. Such a mediating representation may be termed an inter-

4. Meaning, translation, and the interpretant of a sign

5. Translations as replicas of signs,

and was a translator himself.6 In a footnote on semantic equivalence in

aspects of meaning are reflected in his distinction between verbal and

Перевод и семиотическое посредничество

Tõlkimine ja semiootiline vahendamine

knowledge claims, such as that translation is a thoroughly semiotic category,

subjects. Furthermore, many researchers in translation are also practising

imitative ideas of re-writing, re-creation, and (r)evolutionary strategic re-

Those semioticians who are interested in the phenomenon of translation in fact

61). However, as demonstrated above, advocating does not necessarily imply

[…] translation activity is also an activity that explains the mechanisms of

Sign translation, or representing, lying,

While verbal signs appear to be something that we start from in interlingual

semiotic and intersemiosic to the resultant translational constraints. Different

From the point of view of a new audience, subtitles could be considered to

Signs in growth, or anything goes!

This quotation emphasizes the deep-rooted translation-theoretical notion of

According to the Peircean conception of the sign, a sign is “anything which

(CP 2.228, c. 1897). Nonetheless, if we pose the earlier question concerning

Lefevere, André 1992. Introduction. In: Lefevere, André (ed.), Translation/History/

Translator Training and Translation Studies in Kouvola. Helsinki: Helsinki University

Новый взгляд на переводо-семио-теоретические отголоски

Uus pilguheit tõlke-semiootilis-teoreetilistele järelkajadele

comparative analysis. This is probably why it is unlikely to encounter the name

determining “what it means to be French”, thus setting the boundaries of

“dominated”. The hypothesis that by adopting the colonizer’s cultural patterns,

The inside and the outside:

Structuralism extended the procedure of totalization that Saussure had

An initial examination of the strategies followed by Lotman and Derrida in

Rethinking totality: semiosphere and textuality

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Lotman also employed, on the systemic

The construction of identity: metalinguistic

According to Derrida, the onto-theological exorcism of the mirror structure

(Lotman 1990: 407–408; 2000: 222; Lotman, Uspenskij 2001: 39–68).15 In

Guaranteed translatability, given homogeneity, systematic coherence in their

Lotman wrote in the same vein of the risks of metalinguistic self-description