Reading Translational Semiotics Hermeneutically: Juri Lotman’s Культура и взрыв and Wilma Clark’s Culture and Explosion Imagined Icotically as a Single Translingual Text

Abstract

Juri Lotman offers an intriguing “two-language” principle for the study of signs, which effectively requires translation as a disruption of the unificatory regimes of individual semiospheres; and yet, problematically, he doesn’t channel his own theorizing of the semiosphere through translation, with the result that his theorizing tends to gravitate toward truth-telling, and so toward unification and stabilization. This article both argues for a stereoscopic reading of Lotman’s Культура и взрыв (‘Kul’tura i zryv’) and Wilma Clark’s English translation Culture and Explosion, as a second-best application of the two-language principle to Lotman’s cultural semeiotic, and illustrates some of the consequences for the semiotic study of such a reading.