Blurb on forthcoming book on Wittgenstein in translation

My Dutch colleague Dinda Gorlée (cf. previous posts), who is among other things Associate Editor of American Book Review, has written a book entitled Wittgenstein in translation: Exploring semiotic signatures. It is to be published this spring by De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin). Translation theory is her specialty, and she has for years been affiliated with the Wittgenstein archives in Bergen (see her profile page), Norway, so this should be a valuable publication.

Here's a blurb that I got from Dinda:

Apart from the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not write whole manuscripts for books, but composed short fragments. The current volume reveals the depths of Wittgenstein's soul-searching writings - his "new" philosophy - by concentrating on ordinary language and using few technical terms. Wittgenstein followed St. Augustine (as translator) and Plato (as teacher). Wittgenstein is finally given the accolade of a neglected figure in the history of semiotics, when he moved from Saussure to Peirce and Jakobson. This volume provides an application of Wittgenstein's methodological tools to study the multilingual dialogue in philosophy, linguistics, theology, anthropology, and literature. Translation shows how the translator's signatures in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish can be in conflict with personal or stylistic choices in linguistic form, but also in cultural content. This book undertakes the "impossible task" of uncovering the reasoning of Wittgenstein's original and translated texts in order to construct, instead of a paraphrase, the ideal of a terminological coherence of Wittgenstein's fragmentariness in philosophy.

See also Dinda Gorlée's homepage, and her earlier book chapter on the theme of "Wittgenstein, translation and semiotics" (also available in part through Google Books). She can be contacted directly via gorlee@xs4all.nl.

Participation at conference to honour Peeter Torop

November 26-27 I was present at the international conference Culture in Mediation: Total Translation, Complementary Perspectives, which was arranged here in Tartu at the occasion of professor Peeter Torop's 60-year birthday. Present were also a number of outstanding semiotic names. For my own part it was not least an opportunity to meet Dinda Gorlée for the very first time, and Winfried Nöth for the second time (first time in Europe).

Bibliographical reference for Lotman piece

Here's the bibliographical reference for 'Da Lotman og semiotikken kom til Norge' [When Lotman and semiotics came to Norway], which I got to see in print for the first time last Monday:

Dinda L. Gorlée and Morten Tønnessen 2010. "Da Lotman og semiotikken kom til Norge". Pp 258-259 in Turid Farbregd and Øyvind Rangøy (Eds.): Estland og Norge i fortid og nåtid - Norsk-estisk forening 25 år. Oslo: Norsk-estisk forening.

The article includes a picture (in Dinda Gorlée's ownership) from Sebeok and Lotman's encounter in Bergen in 1986.

Estonian-Norwegian Festschrift to appear September 16th

Norsk-estisk forening (= Norra-Eesti Ühing), the Norwegian-Estonian association, has announced that its Festschrift will be launched September 16th, at an event in Oslo. It has been named "Estland og Norge i fortid og nåtid - Norsk-estisk forening 25 år" [Estonia and Norway in the past and today - Norsk-estisk forening 25 years].

Cf. previous posts about my joint article "Da Lotman og semiotikken kom til Norge", co-written with Dinda Gorlée.

Festschrift to be published in June

The Festschrift wherein will appear my piece on Juri Lotman (and his encounter with Sebeok in Bergen), co-written with Dinda Gorlée, will appear in print not in February, as originally planned, but only in June.

Lotman piece to be co-written by Dinda L. Gorlée

I have agreed with Dinda L. Gorlée (the Netherlands) that we will cowrite my (now our) aforementioned 2 pp contribution to a Norwegian-Estonian Festschrift, due for next spring. She was a central figure in Norwegian semiotics in the mid-1980s - the only time (so far) semiotics has flourished much in Norway.