Symmetry of Reflective Fixations as a Principle of Translating Georgy Bogin

Artistic texts cannot be translated without considering reflectivity as the human generic property found in every recipient, the more so as artisticity is the optimal measure and variant of the awakening of the recipients' reflectivity. As it was shown by G. P. &Shachek;&chachek;edrovickij, reflectivity, in its process of changing into understanding and other hypostases, gets fixed (objectivated and turned into non-itself) every time in one of the three belts of the systemic mental activities. The numerous fixations form a unique mosaic within the system. As the understanding of the reader, his evaluations, attitudes, properly human feelings and other hypostases of reflectivity mainly depend upon this mosaic of fixations, a special approach to translation may become necessary. The principle here is translating not only factum and dictum of the original into the symmetrically created text, but also forming there a mosaic of reflective fixations symmetrical to the mosaic stimulated by the original in its recipients. This secures to a coincidence of the meaningful experiencing (Erlebnis) in the subjectivity of both the readers of the original and the readers of the translation. Foreignness of languages stops being an instrument of alienation from the experiences inherent in reading in a mother-tongue.

The first sentence in M. Bulgakov's White Guard is traditionally (without considering the recipient's subjectivity) translated like that: 1918 was a great and terrible year. Factum and dictum representing the content are translated, but the content has replaced the meaning, so another technique of understanding is not observed (the Tverian group of hermeneutic research knows more than a hundred such techniques). It is essential that the meaning is given only in the implicative (non-explicative) form, it is not written, but is being born at the moments of reflectivity fixations happening in the three belts of mental systemic activities, each representing one type of the logical space of activity (Wirklichkeit). One of the many techniques (the technique of the hermeneutic circle caused by M. Bulgakov's text looks like a complex of reflectivity fixation in a number of places within the belts of Wirklichkeit of Pure Mentality, Communication-Thought Wirklichkeit and Wirklichkeit of the Perceivable. A number of techniques of understanding regulate the distribution of the points of reflectivity fixations in the text of translation at the translator's actions aimed at the coincidence of the two mosaics. Following the recommended principle we come to be obliged to translate the quoted sentence like this: Great it was, and terrible it was, the year from the birth of our Lord Jesus nineteen hundred and eighteenth, from the beginning of the Revolution, the second. The described approach to the problem of translation puts an end to the situation in which the reader of the translation was traditionally deprived of the spiritual and experiential wealth of the original. It is a manner of justice: everyone in the world has the right to enjoy any nation's spiritual wealth!