Bulgarian

The paper delineates and examines the distortion and demolishment of classical literary concepts and approaches and their replacement in the postcolonial studies and some other similar-sounding paradigms with designations, which are their badly camouflaged and distorted replicas. As a consequence, these replicas are used in the service of various non-literary and non-scientific purposes. Three strategies of camouflaging and distortion are under scrutiny in the paper: “the strategy of political correctness“, “the strategy of conceptual vampirization“, “the strategy of deformed shell“.

Osip Mandelstam’s criticism has been studied much less than his poetry and life. This article sheds some light on three complex ideas in Mandelstam’s critical texts viewed as a whole: synchrony and diachrony, word and language, and dialogicity. Taken together, these three areas form what I term Mandelstam’s cultural and literary holism. One of my leading ideas is that this criticism is imbued with implicit phenomenology. This type of philosophizing also influences Mandelstam’s critical style — it does not define but describes and narrates. This explains why my effort to “translate” Mandelstam’s critical ideas into a stricter scholarly idiom by necessity uses long quotes. The study concludes that Mandelstam’s holism is utopian and idealistic because it thinks the cultural past can be reenacted in the cultural present. Today, in its totality, Mandelstam’s holism is somewhat archaic because it is an apparatus by which a subjective mind attempts to control all meanings. Yet, many aspects of this holism, such as dialogicity, reader’s activity, and the eclectic accumulation of various cultural strata, are still viable in our contemporary postmodern thinking and practices. Initially, the study was written in English in December 1996 and was reworked in Bulgarian in October 2022.

This article attempts to outline the contours of a critique of translation that does not focus on the “losses”, the inaccuracies of translations in relation to the original, but rather investigates the co-rrespondence between the originеl text (the so-called original) and the text continued through translation into another language (the translation), the way the translator – as a writing reader, i.e. the only reader who turns his reading into writing – responds to the call of the text.