Re: [xmca] Was Tool and Sign Retranslated From English?

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Many thanks, Professor Glick! I wonder where the idea that the Russian version was retranslated from the English got started? Van der Veer and Valsiner say the same thing in more than one place. 
 
I have just finished Bronckart and Boca's book "Bakhtin Unmasked". It's a warning, I think, to Vygotskyans to get their own canon in order quickly. The entire Bakhtinian enterprise (which has been very lucrative for a whole generation of academics) is now on the verge of collapse simply because the people who promoted it went by Bakhtin's say so and were not careful about who wrote what (and had an interest in promoting a complete fabrication). 
 
We're in a very different situation, of course. But in some ways that makes it even more confusing. Bakhtin really didn't have a circle at all, but LSV certainly did. Bakhtin took credit for books that he had nothing to do with (and was able to do this successfully partly because he plagiarized from precisely these books later). But LSV really did have the habit of promoting his students by co-authoring (e.g. Sakharov, Schif and Luria) and I think he really may have put his friends and ex-students' names to material that he had almost entirely written (e.g. Tool and Sign). 
 
Makes you realize the fierce urgency of van der Veer and Yasnitsky's suggestion that we get together an authoritative canon soon.
 
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

--- On Fri, 11/18/11, JAG <joe.glick@gmail.com> wrote:


From: JAG <joe.glick@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Was Tool and Sign Retranslated From English?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, November 18, 2011, 5:21 AM


And here - lurking!

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:09 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> His contact info is at
> http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Psychology/subprogs/devpsy/joe.htmL
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 7:53 AM
> To: xmca
> Subject: [xmca] Was Tool and Sign Retranslated From English?
>
> In the prologue to Volume Four of the English language Collected Works of
> L.S. Vygotsky (Plenum 1997, p. vi), Joseph Glick says that Tool and Sign in
> Child Devleopment was translated from the English manuscript. This claim is
> also made in van der Veer and Valsiner's Understanding Vygotsy (Blackwell,
> 1991, p. 188).
>
> But on p. 174 of the Vygotsky Reader, footnote 60 refers to a handwritten
> note on the English manuscript that refers the reader to a
> "Russian original". This MIGHT suggest that the Russian original was lost
> and the the Russian version printed in the Russian Collected Works
> (and also translated into English in the volume introduced by Professor
> Glick) really was translated from the English.
>
> But that version is clearly in a less heaviliy edited state (with far more
> repetitions and redundancies). This has been explained by "editorial
> manipulations". But the problem is that the repetitions and redundancies
> are not word for word; it's not the sort of thing a manipulating editor
> would do.
>
> But it is the sort of thing that an author who had large amounts of text
> virtually memorized (for the purpose of classes) might do in the days
> before cutting and pasting on a computer. That is, Vygotsky and/or Luria
> would have a huge amount of argument almost word for word in several places
> in the manuscript and then cut one or the other before translation for
> publication (when they noticed the redundancy).
>
> Does anyone know Professor Glick?  I would like to know about the claim
> that the Russian manuscript was retranslated from English.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
> mbol
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