What is it about?
The paper is a reading of Juri Lotman's book Culture and Explosion in terms of his own claim that translation between languages is an essential guide to the boundaries between semiospheres and the extrasemiotic. I agree, and argue that there are blind spots in Lotman's own argumentation that would have been better served had he published his work bilingually, in say Russian and English.
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Why is it important?
Lotman is an extremely important semiotician whose work is too little known in English, or outside the Russian-speaking world; and his translational principle should really have been applied to his own work as well.
Perspectives
The original inspiration for this article was frustration with the substandard quality of Wilma Clark's English translation of Lotman's Culture and Explosion--and when I checked it against the Russian, I found not only that the Russian was clearer but that in it Lotman frequently broke his own rules and made stabilizing/ontologizing claims that really should have been relativized by his translation principle.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reading Translational Semiotics Hermeneutically: Juri Lotman’s Культура и взрыв and Wilma Clark’s Culture and Explosion Imagined Icotically as a Single Translingual Text, Crossroads A Journal of English Studies, January 2018, University of Bialystok,
DOI: 10.15290/cr.2018.20.1.01.
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