[xmca] More Problems With Chapter Two

Dear Everybody:
 
I feel a bit guilty cluttering up the list with what are actually some very small problems with the Minick translation of Thinking and Speech, when I imagine everybody is anxious to discuss ISCAR.
 
But Paula did suggest that other people might be interested in joining our little group. Here are some of the problems we're discussing tonight over wine and kimchi.
 
a) On p. 57, just after the first long Piaget quote, Minick's got "Rational or directed thinking is social." But Mecacci's got "La prima forma du pensiero e sociale". I interpret this to mean "The first form of thought is social", very different.
 
b) On p. 58,  bottom of the page, Minick's got "Following K.D. Larson". But the ref in Piaget is clearly to Hans Larsson, a Swedish poet, who Piaget calls "M. Larsson", author of "La logique de la poesie". The Kozulin version of Hanfmann and Vakar has Hans Larsson. Who is K.D.Larson?
 
c) On p. 59, second Piaget quote. Minick's got "All the writers who have concerned themselves with the play, the testimony and the lives of children have realized this." Mecacci says that the Russian ed has mistranslated "mensonges" as "mysl". And Minick's got "lives" for "lies"!
 
d) On p. 62, end of the second para,  Minick's got this: "It is of particular interest that biologically oriented theories in particular that of Bleuler who developed the theory of autistic thinking, have reached the same conclusion," i.e. that autistic thinking precedes the reality principle. But the WHOLE of the next section contradicts this sentence: Bleuler states that SOME forms of the reality principle MUST come first, both phylogenetically and onteogenetically. After this, Bleuler says, the reality function and the autistic function must develop side by side, something Vygotsky denies in a footnote on p. 64.
 
The Italian is no help here; it's just about word for word what Minick's got. "E cio che e notevole e il fatto che a questa conclusione arrivino gli psicologi di orientamento biologico e in particolare l'autore di uno studio sul pensiero autistico, E. Bleuler." 
 
The only way I can really make sense out of this is if "questa" means something like "the following" rather than "this". So what it really says is "And what is particularly noteworthy is the following conclusion arrived at by psychologists of a biological orientation, particularly the author of a study on autistic thought, E. Bleuler." I know that "questa" does work like that sometimes, like in the opera "Turandot":
 
Poppula di Pekino!
La leggio e questa!
(And then Puccini talks about cutting off the heads of people who make passes at Princess Turandot!)
 
But then the paragraphing is weird; Bleuler should have his own paragraph, no?
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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Received on Sun Sep 21 21:20 PDT 2008