Tag Archives: Margarita Marinova
On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation
To the extent to which translation is a new re-play, a re-shaping of the given material according to the universal language rules, it is, in principle, just as independent as the original. It is simply that same original, only re-cast in a new form, and continuing to live in that new form. The original appears to be original only outwardly, in a temporal sense. In essence, that is, in its relation to the possibilities of human speech, it is not more original than the translation. The original is lost, imprisoned in its private form. Translatability rescues it from those constraints.
Bibikhin’s Task of the Translator
Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin (1938-2004) was a philosopher, translator, and philologist. 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.