Re: [xmca] What Does the Russian Say (3 points)?

Thanks, Anton!
 
Oh, we're completely unprofessional. It's just a weekly study group; we don't even have permission from the university to hold a seminar. I don't know if I would call us ambitious, though. Right now our ambition is to understand every word in the text, and translation seems to be the best way to go about it.
 
If we do decide to go ahead and publish, we'll go over what we've got with our Uzbek exchange students. They are both Russophones, and they studied some Vygotsky as undergraduates back in Uzbekistan. They are busy learning Korean right now!
 
The problem we have in Chapter Two really comes towards the end. LSV quotes Lenin quoting Hegel, and discusses how Piaget apparently believes that it doesn't really matter whether we start from biology and use it to explain sociology or proceed the other way around. P. 82 in Minick is a good example.
 
This last part of the chapter is quite hard to translate, but it seems extremely important to us. And so we are looking to see if there is anything in the early part of the chapter that would prepare us for this fairly profound and wide-ranging PHILOSOPHICAL  critique of Piaget. It seems to me that this paragraph does do that, and I'm annoyed that it was cut.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Fri, 9/19/08, Anton Yasnitsky <the_yasya@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Anton Yasnitsky <the_yasya@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] What Does the Russian Say (3 points)?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, September 19, 2008, 8:06 AM

RE: What's going on? Does anyone know why this was cut in the 1956 edition
and the 1982 edition? --

Three points:

1. I do confirm that the fragment that appears neither in the 1956 or 1982
Russian editions (or the Minick translation of 1987) did appear in the original
edition of 1934 as well as the recent Russian edition of Thinking & Speech
by Labirint publishers (e.g. that of 1999).

A comment: the text of chapter 2 of Thinking & Speech was in fact first
published in 1932 as Vygotsky's introduction to the volume of Piaget's
translated works; see item 220 on the list of Vygotsky's bibliography
compiled by Lifanova:
http://www.voppsy.ru/journals_all/issues/1996/965/965137.htm . The fragment that
was cut out in the subsequent editions of Thinking and Speech can be found in
this 1932 chapter, too (the chapter was republished in 1994 by Pedagogika-Press,
Moscow).

2. I personally do not think this omission dramatically changes the meaning of
the entire chapter. Thus, on the next page of Minick's translation one can
find a paragraph strating with "However, the profound crisis in
contemporary psychology inevitably had its influence on this new approach to the
study of the child's logic" where Vygotsky very critically discusses
the work of Piaget along with the three authors that were mentioned in the
1932-34 paragraph that was "lost in traslation", i.e. Freud, Blondel,
& Levi-Bruhl [sic!] (see p. 54 of the Minick's translation). It does not
sound as very much pro-Piagetian, does it?..

3. As to the WHY question, -- well, I guess we can only speculate about this at
this point, and this is definitely not the only instance of editing of
Vygotosky's text done in his posthumous publications. I don't think we
could possibly identify any concrete reason why any particular change in the
text was made and really doubt it really matters anyway...

P.S. A personal remark: creating a new Korean version of Thinking and Speech
might be a great idea, but doing so through comparing the various translations
of the text and not having an expert Russian-speaker on board looks, to me, a
little bit overambitious and unprofessional, does it not?

Finally, as to the translations, you might also try the Japanese (9. Shiko to
gengo. Tokyo: Meiji tosho shuppan, 1962. 2 vol.), German (Denken und Sprechen.
Berlin: Akademie-Verl., 1964), French (Pensee et langage. P.: Terrains, 1985) or
Spanish (
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pensamiento-Lenguaje-Liev-Semionovich-Vigotski/dp/8449301653
) translations, among other, more exotic ones (see the Lifanova's list).

--- On Thu, 9/18/08, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] What Does the Russian Say?
> To: "xmca" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Received: Thursday, September 18, 2008, 9:55 PM
> Terribly sorry, Russophiles! That went off by accident.
> Here's what I MEANT to ask:
> Our study group here in Seoul is trying to create a new
> Korean translation of
> "Thinking and Speech". We're VERY weak in
> Russian so we're
> trying to get at the original by comparing translations,
> especially Norman
> Minick's "Thinking and Speech" and Luciano
> Mecacci's
> "Pensiero e Linguaggio".
>  
> And that's the problem. At the beginning of Chapter
> Two, Minick's got
> this:
>  
> "The research of Jean Piaget represents a new stage in
> the devleopment of
> theory concerning the speech and thinking of the child; a
> news stage in the
> development of theory concerning the child's logic
> andworld view. His work
> is of substantial historical significance.Beginning with a
> new persepctive on
> the problem, and using the clinical method he developed,
> Piaget ahs carried out
> profoundly insightful investigations of the child's
> logic. Piaget himself,
> in concluding the second of his works, clearly and
> precisely noted the
> significance of his approach in the study of this old
> problem.
>      "While Piaget's studies have created new
> directions..."
>  
> Now, here's what Maccaci's got:
>  
> "The research of Jean Piaget represents a new stage in
> the devleopment of
> theory concerning the speech and thinking of the child; a
> news stage in the
> development of theory concerning the child's logic
> andworld view. His work
> is of substantial historical significance.Beginning with a
> new persepctive on
> the problem, and using the clinical method he developed,
> Piaget ahs carried out
> profoundly insightful investigations of the child's
> logic. Piaget himself,
> in concluding the second of his works, clearly and
> precisely noted the
> significance of his approach in the study of this old
> problem.
>  
> Piaget himself, in concluding the second of his workers
> (i.e. “Reasoning and Judgement of the Child” says this:
> “We therefore believe—and we affirm—that one day we
> shall be able to put the thought of the child on the same
> plane as the thought of a normal, civilized adult, the
> thought of the primitive mentality defined by Levy Bruhl,
> the autistic and symbolic thought of Freud and his
> followers, and the “morbid consciousness” of Charles
> Blondel.” (p. 408). In reality, this first work (i.e.
> “Language and Thought of the Child”), for its historical
> significance for the development of the hidden side of
> psychological thought, must be placed alongside and compared
> with “Mental functioning in inferior societies” by
> Levy-Bruhl, “The interpretation of dreams” by Freud, and
> “The morbid conscience” by Blondel. Moreover, we observe
> between these findings in various fields of scientific
> psychology not only an external likeness,
> determined by their level of historical significance, but
> a profound and intimate internal affinity, a common essence
> in the philosophical and psychological tendencies that they
> contain and embody. Not without reason does Piaget apologize
> in an exaggerated manner for the research and theories of
> these three works and their authors.”  
>  
>      "While Piaget's studies have created new
> directions..."
>
>
> Apparently those words of Vygotsky's in the
> middle have never appeared in English. But you can see
> there's a BIG hunk missing,and that the cut does not at
> all improve the text: in fact it makes the first part of the
> text much more pro-Piagetian than Vygotsky meant.
>  
> What's going on? Does anyone know why this was cut in
> the 1956 edition and the 1982 edition?
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education

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Received on Fri Sep 19 21:02 PDT 2008