Translating Lotman and Bakhtin from Russian into Spanish in Cuba: Desiderio Navarro’s work on critical thinking development

ABSTRACT

In post-1959 Cuba, Desiderio Navarro became an autodidact translator and actively participated in the process of social transformation. Capable of performing quality translations into Spanish from more than 15 languages, mostly from Eastern Europe, he has often been the first to translate and publish a solid corpus of East European texts in different fields of theory, from ‘orthodox and heterodox Marxism; Structuralism; Reception Theory; to the Postmodern Poststructuralism.’ Applying complexity thinking as main frame of reference, particularly the principle of organizational recursion, provides a context to explore the downward causative power of semiosis on reality. I intend to show in this article how the translation of Lotman and Bakhtin into Spanish by Navarro contributed and continue to develop the critical-thinking capabilities of several generations of Cuban intellectuals and artists. If development is a controversial concept, one even ‘doomed to extinction’, it is time to further problematize it.

KEYWORDS:

• Activist translation
• Desiderio Navarro
• Russian-Spanish translation
• critical thinking
• Cuba

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sen (2000, 4) emphasises the lack of political and civil liberties: ‘the violation of freedom results directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by authoritarian regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom to participate in the social, political and economic life of the community’.

2. Oxford English Dictionary (2018).

3. See CNRTL’s (2012) definition of critique. All English translations from Navarro’s quotes or another source in Spanish or French are mine – RECR.

4. Horowitz (2017, 3–4) establishes five specific forms of social and political behaviour and institutions concerned by Stalinization. These are (1) the bureaucratization of the Communist Party machinery, which implies the subordination of society to the party state; (2) the emergence of a leader and his small coterie as exclusive spokesman for the Communist Party; (3) the promotion of inner political struggle as a substitute for class struggle; (4) the elimination or abandonment of all roads to socialism, except for the leader’s choice; (5) a nearly exclusive concentration of energies on national rather than international problems. The Cuban government strictly followed the first four forms of Stalinization, differentiating itself by keeping to the present a strong international orientation and intervention (sometimes even militarily), particularly in Latin American and African affairs.

5. The general policy of ‘aggravation of class struggle under socialism’ and the need to fight without mercy the ‘people’s enemies’ was the main Stalin’s ‘contribution’ to Marxist theory, in his opposition to Bukharin’s less drastic ideas (Stalin [1929] 1979). The communist movement’s heritage was resumed in Cuba by the Castros in the context of the Cuban revolution’s geopolitical reorientation and military, economic and ideological alliance with the Soviet Union.

6. The Cuban Communist Party was created in 1965 as the unification of the three main political movements that came to power with the Cuban Revolution: the ‘July 26^th Movement’(with Fidel Castro as leader), the ‘March 13^th Movement’ (the urban student’s resistance against Batista’s dictatorship) and the local Communist party, named Popular Socialist Party.

7. This is the nickname given to the 1971–1976 period of cultural life in Cuba, following the first family name of Luis Pavón Tamayo, President of the National Council of Culture at the time. The appellation plays with the meaning of ‘pavo’, peacock in English. One could thus say that the term ‘pavonato’ can be translated in English as ‘peacockness’, alluding to the learned ignorance of the official theorists of that period.

8. See FAPESP (2005).

9. See also the description of the same concept on the Wiki page of The Center for Media and Democracy (2012).

10. Between 2006 and 2007, during the first months of Fidel Castro’s sickness and Raul Castro’s factual taking over power with the militaristic view of society that accompanied it, a collective and virulent email exchange in Cuban intellectual circles gave birth to what will be later called ‘polémica de los intelectuales’ [debate of the intellectuals] and ‘guerrita de los emails’ [‘little e-mail war’] (Colón Rodríguez 2011, 2017).

11. The group ‘Socialismo Participativo y Democrático’, led by the former Cuban diplomat Pedro Campos, was the most active dissident formation following this position. See Campos (2015).

12. One can see that this model is, of all described above, the shorter in argumentation, perhaps because it never historically materialized, pointing to its strong utopian nature. The three others have indeed historical manifestations that help their description and critical analysis.

13. Morin (2008, 1480) explains that ‘is recursive any process in blur mode whose products and / or effects are necessary for its own production or its own causation’.

14. The rather timid celebrations of Stalin’s 130th birthday in 2009 (Solovyov 2009) was followed by a genuine official demand today where it is the Kremlin who rewrites history (see Luhn 2016).

15. Since 2009, when Raúl Castro officially became the new Cuban president, he has already visited Russia three times, following several commercial, military and financial agreements. Under the new Cuban president, Díaz-Canel (since 19 April 2018), this continues. See The Conversation (2016) Marsh and Acosta (2017), and TASS (2018).

16. In his anthology’s preface, Navarro (2009, xi), quoting Galin Tihanov, underlines the importance of the Russian and Eastern European intellectual diaspora for the development of Modern Literary Theory.

17. According to the Bourdieu (1989, 375), ‘[t]he field of power is a field of forces defined in its structure by the state of the forces’ balance between the forms of power, or different kinds of capital. It is also inseparably a field of power struggles between holders of different kinds of powers.’

18. For example, the concept ‘subject of semiotics’ inspired by the works of Zara Mints, Dmitri Segal and Yuri Lotman, all of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, helped Navarro to write a book on José Martí’s semiotics whose second chapter, ‘De la fosa al sol: Martí y una semiótica del más allá del poema’ was first published in Spain and later in Cuba, in a compendium of theoretical works (Navarro [2001] 2006).

19. The original text was published in Russian under the title ‘Ojota za ved’mami. Semiotika straja, Semeiotiké. Trudy po znakovym sistemam’ (1998, 61–80). It was originally translated and published by Navarro under the title ‘La caza de brujas: Semiótica del miedo’ (Navarro 2006, 35).

20. ‘… la primera idea básica sobre las brujas puede ser formulada así: las brujas son una peligrosa minoría organizada’ (Lotman in Navarro 2009, 24).

21. The original text was published in Russian under the title ‘K filosofii postupka’ (Filosofia i sotsiologuiia nauki i tejniki, Ezhegodnik 1984–1985 (Bakhtin 1986, 138–160). It was translated and published by Navarro under the title ‘El autor y el héroe en la actividad estética’ (Navarro 1994, 31).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez

Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez, is a PhD in Translation Studies, and Part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. He had published chapters, articles, translations and book reviews in American, Canadian, Spanish, Colombian, Polish and Brazilian publications. His PhD Thesis (2018) with Complexity Theory as theoretical approach, was about Collaborative Activist Translation 2.0 in Canada.