Review article
Consciousness or Cognition? (Problems with Translating Bakhtin; or, How to Translate Bakhtin Well?)
Zdenka Matek Šmit
; University of Zadar
Eugenija Ćuto
; University of Zadar
Abstract
Perhaps the above title might suggest that we are about to propose a variation on the dilemma voiced in the joke about one blonde asking another whether the right spelling is Iraq or Iran. For, in truth, there is no dilemma since consciousness and cognition are not synonymous, just like Iraq is not a misnomer for Iran (nor vice versa). Consciousness and cognition are among the key terms in a rather slim book by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) published in 1929 as Problemy tvorčestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art), which some thirty years later – in 1963, to be exact – would appear in its second, expanded and improved edition, under the canonical title Problemy poètiki Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics).
The essay addresses some of the problems we encountered when working on the first Croatian translation of Bakhtin’s seminal study, which introduced the concept of textual polyphony (i.e. of several voices speaking in the text) into philology. According to this ground-breaking work, the text is a dynamic object generating meanings and it lives only when engaged in dialogue with another text or context (the novel as a dialogic form). This philosophical notion of culture as dialogue, as developed by Bakhtin in the course of his reading of Dostoevsky’s prose, provides nowadays the foundation for the study of culture.
Keywords
Bakhtin; dialogue; translation; polyphony; novel; consciousness; cognition; text
Hrčak ID:
247752
URI
Publication date:
13.12.2020.
Visits: 1.087 *