Speech by Volodymyr Yermolenko at the presentation of the 5th volume of European Dictionary of Philosophies: The Ukrainian Context. Lexicon of Untranslatables
Text of Volodymyr Yermolenko’s address to the participants of the presentation of the 5th volume of the Dictionary :
Greetings, friends! I apologise for not being able to be with you in person, and I apologise for speaking to you through poor video quality. I hope the sound is not as bad as the picture.
Translation is, in general, the key problem of culture, because culture is translation. Yet this is not the translation of texts, but the translation of experiences. Culture emerges when there arises an understanding that another person’s experience is inaccessible to us, that the experience of another person or another human community is a black box through which we cannot break.
In different eras, people, philosophers, and writers have harboured the illusion that we are transparent to one another, like little glass figures. One of my favourite philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thought roughly that, in principle, from the very beginning we are glass figures to one another. And somewhere — in society, in institutions, in history, or in our own egoism — these glass figures become covered with a layer of paint through which we cannot see. I think this is a beautiful and perhaps useful idea, but it is mistaken. I believe that we are black boxes to one another — as individuals, as communities, as languages. We are black boxes; the basic reality of our existence is darkness, not light. Light appears only occasionally, according to some schedule or outside it. And this light — the light of understanding, divine light, human light, the light of culture — is precisely what slightly opens these black boxes.
I constantly reflect on the meanings of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis. It seems to me that the metaphor of purification associated with catharsis is secondary, derivative, while the primary metaphor is that we gain, we obtain access to emotions, to other people’s emotions, to other feelings. And we obtain these emotions, these feelings, this experience thanks to a work of art, thanks to culture, which serves as a kind of translation of this black box for other black boxes. Leibniz wrote that monads have no windows, yet they communicate with one another through certain waves on the surface. In order for these surface waves to be seen, felt, touched, or at least guessed at, culture exists. Therefore, culture is translation; it is a complex translation; it is the translation of the untranslatable, because what is truly untranslatable is our experience. And this idea of Barbara Cassin’s — to take key words from different cultures and examine what kind of experience is hidden there, buried deep in the earth like an icon or a treasure — seems to me an excellent one. It also stimulates us to reflect on the fact that we are so opaque to one another and so distant from one another that the process of drawing closer is a long but extremely necessary labour.
I increasingly realise that the grand history, the European intellectual history that I deeply love, is incomplete without us, incomplete without Ukraine, incomplete without Ukrainian experience. Not only the experience of suffering, not only the experience of the Holodomor, not only the experience of the current war or previous wars, but also simply our own, somehow different experience. The way Taras Shevchenko took the Cossack warrior myth and applied it to peasants — that is, to people engaged in germination and nature — constitutes an enormous intellectual revolution that we still have to explain together. The fact that in Ukrainian and Polish culture the first word of the national anthem engages with death — with a death that seems to have already arrived, yet has not quite arrived, and which we will still try to overcome — is also a great and immense experience that is probably lacking in others.
My wife Tanya and I have just recorded a podcast about Sartre, and during that podcast we realised how profoundly different the experience of imprisonment, captivity, or occupation can be. Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness while actually being in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He read Heidegger while in German captivity. He left that captivity as people leave a hospital — simply, without any return, and no one particularly looked for him. Of course, it is absolutely incomparable to compare this in any way with the fate of Vasyl Stus, with the fate of the prisoners of Sandarmokh and the victims of Sandarmokh, with the fate of Oleksa Tykhy, with the fate of Viktoriia Roshchyna, with the fate of our prisoners who are currently in captivity, with the fate of Ihor Kozlovsky, or with the fate of those prisoners who are no longer with us. Or with the fate of those prisoners who, like Maksym Butkevych, thank God, have returned, and many others. And our task with you is to explain and translate this experience, because it remains a vast grave into which all these images and all these lived experiences have been thrown. It is a great grave covered over by history, covered over by other narratives, and we are only now beginning to excavate it. As you know, Shevchenko again had this grim image of the desecrated grave, because it seemed to him that it concerned imperial attempts to deprive us of our past. At the same time, however, he also presents the image that it is precisely from this grave — and he was thinking of the grave of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the church in Subotiv — that a new Ukraine will be born. This may be a rather macabre image, but it seems to me an important one: that these enormous layers of our experience are buried deep underground. And, in essence, our task as translators of experience is to excavate and explain this experience. Not only because we want to be heard, but also because without us and without others like us, without other such cultures that have been laid in a grave or simply relegated to museum basements, sent underground — without such cultures, world culture is impossible; it is incomplete. Because without this experience, the concept of “nothingness” in Jean-Paul Sartre himself sounds like some kind of children’s game, a kind of childish naivety… Forgive me for mentioning Sartre again: our podcast about him is coming out soon, so this may be of interest to everyone.
Thus, culture is translation. And this is not the translation of texts, nor even the translation of meanings, but the translation of the experience that, in fact, lies at the foundation of both meanings and the cultural events that surround them.
Well, the anxiety signal is starting — I must say goodbye to you. Thank you for your attention!