By Anna Alsufieva and Margarita Marinova
Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin (1938-2004) was a philosopher, translator, and philologist. Although the order of these descriptors can vary, what they all have in common is the careful attention to the “word as an event” (after Bakhtin) in their attempt to uncover the ontological foundations of language. This complex issue was the focus of Bibikhin’s thought in general.
Bibikhin graduated from Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages (later Moscow State Linguistic University) in 1967 and for a number of years taught translation theory and foreign language courses at various Moscow universities. He then continued his graduate studies at the Philology department of Moscow State University, where in 1977 he defended his doctoral dissertation, titled, “The Semantic Potencies of the Linguistic Sign.” From 1972 to 2004, Bibikhin worked at the Philosophy Institute at the USSR/ Russian Academy of Sciences, where he selected for publication and translated the latest works on philosophy and philology published outside of the USSR/Russia. He also wrote articles for encyclopedias, and edited translations for the Nauka [Science] publishing house, which was then the main scientific publisher of academic books and journals. In 1989, Bibikhin secured a lecturer position in the newly established Institute of Theory and History of World Culture at the Philosophy department of Moscow State University. He worked there for fourteen years (until 2003), during which he developed about twenty courses. The variety of their topics is striking: e.g. “The World,” “The Inner Form of the Word,” “The Language of Philosophy,” “Wittgenstein: Change in/of Aspect,” “Property and its Philosophy,” “The Grammar of Poetry,” “The Face of the Middle Ages,” “Energy,” “Renaissance,” “Philosophy of Law,” “The Diaries of Leo Tolstoy,” etc. Some of the materials prepared by Bibikhin for these courses were developed into books reflecting his own philosophical views (e.g. Woods/Forest, It’s Time, and Truth/ [Justice]).
During the 1970s and 1980s, Bibikhin established himself as a prominent translator of the most complex philosophical, theological, and literary texts, and as a widely respected humanitarian scholar of a rare and extensive erudition. His translations were remarkable not only as philological, but also as philosophical achievements, as they aggressively revised the principles of text interpretation, typical of the Russian tradition of philosophical translation—something that made many of his contemporaries suspicious of his theoretical and ideological proclivities. Among the philosophers and writers whose works he translated were Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt, Wilhelm Dilthey, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, García Lorca, and Heinrich Böll. Bibikhin also worked in classical philosophy (Aristotle), Greek patristics (Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory Palamas), Latin theology (Nicholas of Cusa), Renaissance studies (Yan Komensky, Francesco Petrarca), and German philology and philosophy of the 19th century (Wilhelm von Humboldt). His original ideas, and creative and theoretical output deserve a wider, international audience.
Bibikhin’s article we have chosen to present for the first time in English here, “On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation,” was written in 1973, but to understand its significance one must go further back in time, to the 1920s and ‘30s. During that early Soviet period, translation was viewed as a “matter of the greatest national importance” (Baskina 7), and its methods and purpose were hotly debated by its leading practitioners and theorists. In the resulting competition between the two major Soviet approaches to translation– филологически точный перевод (the philologically accurate translation, oriented towards the text) and “коммуникативный перевод” (the communicative translation, oriented towards the contemporary reader)—it was the latter that won the day, which led to the gradual reduction of all the theory, criticism and methodology of translation to the needs of the national languages of the Soviet Union, and a little later, to the cultural and political ideology of “socialist realism” (Baskina 7). “Communicative translation” dominated the field for decades, and translators and critics mainly engaged in discissions about translation techniques and methods of teaching translation of this kind. In that context, Bibikhin’s article can be viewed as an attempt to destabilize, complicate, and deepen the critical conversations of his time by refocusing them on what he believed to be much more central to translation studies: the question of the basics of human language, its ontological side.
Accordingly, he begins his essay, which is structured in 12 numbered parts, with an overview of the existing Soviet approaches to translation practices in order to “separate the essential from the accidental in the translation process.” As he finds everything in the discipline’s history to be “accidental” because relying on a single “(usually Indo-European) linguistic family during one (usually modern) epoch,” he quickly turns to a much more ambitious task: the philosophical reconceptualization of human language as such. For Bibikhin, translation is not “a special skill,” but “a development of an inborn predisposition, indistinguishable from speech in general.” The evidence he provides in support of this idea introduces the kind of universality of linguistic experience that Walter Benjamin assumed in his influential earlier essay, “The Task of the Translator,” which Bibikhin read:
First, children as young as four, three, and sometimes even younger, are capable of translating if they are more or less bilingual. Second, when sometimes an oral interpreter unexpectedly hears in the flow of the foreign text a phrase in the language into which he is translating, he often simply repeats it without noticing, believing he is still translating. Third, acquiring certain information through different languages, we often cannot remember later whether we learned something by reading or hearing it in the foreign language, or in our native language.
Bibikhin’s examples confirm and extend Benjamin’s original ideas. Translation is to be viewed as part and parcel of our linguistic abilities. It is the result of what Benjamin called “the kinship of languages” (72), which can only be realized “by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language” (74). Benjamin continues to argue that our universal human yearning for that language “manifests itself in translations” (77). Revealing that longing is the proper task of the translator, who should focus on making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language” (78): the language of truth, pure language (most clearly captured in poetry).
Bibikhin offers further confirmation of the value of thinking about translation in those terms. It’s impossible to separate translation from pure poetry, he claims, as both translators and poets strive to render into human language the language of the Gods, and serve as “intermediaries between the language of Being and human speech.” This is why literal translation is doomed to failure, as is the completely free translation, which can potentially sever the link between the two interacting languages. Having rejected both extremes, Bibikhin next reviews the possibility of what he calls “адекватный” translation as a potential middle ground.
The term proved to be a challenge to translate into English. “Corresponding,” “analogous,” “equivalent” presented themselves as possible English choices, but they all lacked the ambiguity of the Russian word. Ultimately, we decided to keep the one that sounded the most like the Russian “адекватный”– “adequate”–throughout the text, and thus preserve both the repetitions in the source, and the ambivalence of the original semantic choice. In Russian “адекватный” can mean “analogous,” but also “subpar,” which is an interpretation that reveals itself later on in the essay when Bibikhin jokes that the “adequate translator” can “never catch up with the author because while the latter always runs free, the former is weighed down by various dictionaries.” Bibikhin thus concludes that adequacy can only serve as “an external, rather than an internally meaningful concept of translation, which is why it cannot become its principal foundation.”
So what can serve as the proper foundation of translation? Bibikhin’s answer is unequivocal, and reminiscent of Benjamin’s once again: “the common human language.” There’s a difference, however, between “всеобщий язык” (common language) and “универсальный всемирный язык” (universal world language), both of which are phrases Bibikhin uses in the later sections of his essay. Translating them correctly depended on understanding fully the deeper meaning Bibikhin attributes to them. Simply put, he posits the “universal world language” as problematic because extremely reductive by nature. As he writes, “[t]he adoption of a universal world language would be tantamount to the standardization of human thought that would cause irreparable damage to humanity.” The creation of a single world language, a universal Esperanto of sorts, is not only dangerous but also impossible, in his view, because “individual physiological distinctions, as well as climate-related and other particularities would always lead to the emergence of dialects, and it would require an enormous effort to maintain the universal language.”
In contrast, Bibikhin predicts that a “common” or “collective language” (всеобщий язык) will emerge organically in the future. The work of the translator anticipates the creation of such common language because the translator is not only aware “of the common foundation of all languages,” but also because she realizes that the “language game which created the original texts could have turned out differently, and that the material used by the original author could have been stitched together differently” (мог быть скроен иным образом). The language game of the original frees up and enables the work of the translator, who can now “re-shape” it into an independent product with the realization that the translation is “simply that same original, only re-cast in a new form, and continuing to live in that new form.” Benjamin similarly insisted that “translation is a form” and that both the translation and the original are “recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel” (78).
At the very end of his essay, Bibikhin finally announces his debt to his predecessor in a note citing Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” which he read in German. The reference is attached to the following sentence: “Thus, the mode of existence of the common human language enables the translatability of individual languages.” Herein lies the essence of Bibikhin’s whole argument about the possibility of translation, which is revealed through a symbolic merging of authorial voices. The dialogic nature of his statement exposes not just intellectual similarities in the thinking of two philosophers of language, but the possibility of a successful translation of ideas from the German into the Soviet historical context.
In the last two sections of his article, Bibikhin continues his elaborations on Benjamin’s ideas by briefly considering the relationship between the original and the translation in terms of mutual re-invigoration. It is commonplace to note that translation breathes new life into the (dead) original. What is far more interesting to both Bibikhin and Benjamin, is the effect the original can have on the target language. Benjamin notes that the translator must “expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language” (81). Bibikhin goes even further by insisting on the translator’s ability to transform their own language into a world language: “The translator is not a representative of any one language; he is a writer who connects with the common human language even as he creates in his own. No matter what the specific language he happens to work in, by using it he confirms it as a world language too (утверждает его как всемирный).” Rather than the linguistic imperialism some of Bibikhin’s critics uncover in such statements, we believe his intent was quite the opposite: when your native tongue is seen as one of many world languages, its individual power and militant ambitions are greatly diminished. As he puts it in the final sentence of this essay, instead of the symbolic occupation of other languages, it is the liberation of the “common human language from the shackles of the particular” that is the proper task of the translator.
Read Bibikhin’s essay “On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation,” translated by Margarita Marinova and published here in English for the first time.
Works Cited
Baskina M.E. “Filologichecki tochnyi perevod 1920-1930kh godov: Liudi i institutsii,” pp. 5-80. In M.E. Baskina and V.V. Filicheva, Ed. Khudozhestvenno-filologicheskii perevod 1920-1930-kh godov. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoria, 2021.
Benjamin, Walter, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. by Hannah Arendt. Tr. by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books (1985).
Anna A. Alsufieva is Teaching Assistant Professor of Russian and Assistant Director of the Russian Flagship Program at Portland State University where she teaches advanced level Russian courses and specialized courses for majors in the Russian Flagship program. She earned her Ph.D. in Language Teaching Pedagogy at Herzen State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg, Russia (2001). She is co-author of Advanced Russian through History textbook (Yale, 2007); of book chapters in the edited volume Superior Proficiency in a Second Language for Undergraduate Students in All Majors: The Language Flagship Program. Series on New Perspectives in Language Education (2016), and in the edited volume Language beyond the Classroom—a How-to-Guide for Service-Learning Curriculum in Foreign Language Programs (2018). She is a specialist in Russian grammar, stylistics, and teaching methodology.
Margarita Marinova is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Christopher Newport University, Virginia. She has published five books: Transnational Russian-American Travel Writing (Routledge, 2011, 2019); Mikhail Bulgakov’s Don Quixote (MLA, 2014); Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973 (Bucknell University Press, 2019), Russian Modernism in the Memories of Survivors (Toronto University Press, 2021), and The Art of Translation in Light of Bakhtinian Re-accentuation (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), as well as many articles about Russian and Soviet literature and culture, Cervantes and Mark Twain in Russia and Bulgaria, contemporary Bulgarian literature, women’s literature, and travel studies in scholarly collections and journals.