Ukrainian Translation

Translating Dewey’s Experience and Nature into Ukrainian: A Short Interview

Interviewer: Matthew J. Brown (MB), Center for Dewey Studies (director), SIU
Interviewee: Andrii Leonov (AL), Center for Dewey Studies (graduate student), SIU

Please note: The views expressed below are those of the Interviewee, and do not represent an official position of the Center for Dewey Studies or SIU.

MB: Andrii, could you start by telling us a little about yourself and your background, and how you came to be interested in Dewey?

AL: Hello, my name is Andrii Leonov, and I am a PhD Candidate in philosophy here at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. My graduate experience at SIU started in 2017 when I came to pursue my master’s degree in philosophy as a recipient of the Fulbright Graduate Student Program from Ukraine.

My philosophical experience with Dewey’s life and work started taking shape in late 2017, when I bought my first copy of Dewey’s Experience and Nature. This was part of my preparation for my first class on Dewey’s philosophy that took place in spring 2018 here at SIU. As a part of that class’s requirements, I wrote my first course paper on Dewey’s philosophy of mind and metaphysics that was also published that very year and was about Dewey’s relation to the view called “neutral monism.” After that I wrote four more papers on Dewey’s theoretical philosophy among which three are published and one of them is forthcoming.

MB: Where did the idea to translate Experience & Nature into Ukrainian come from? Why Ukrainian? Why now?

AL: As a Ukrainian, when having started reading Dewey’s Experience and Nature for the first time in late 2017, I immediately thought that it would be great to have it translated into my native language especially since it has never been done.

On February 24, 2022, Russia started a wholescale invasion of my country, Ukraine. One of the main goals of Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine is to destroy Ukraine as a country and eliminate its sovereignty and independence as a state. A serious part of this invasion is Russia’s attempt to annihilate Ukrainian cultural identity. This takes shape through deliberately killing Ukrainian writers and poets, bombing historical and cultural landmarks, and denying Ukraine its history. A prominent feature of such Russian policy is burning of Ukrainian books on the occupied territories and claiming that Ukrainian language as such has simply never existed.

That said, any attempt to develop and popularize Ukrainian language I see as a way to say to the world that Ukraine and its language do exist. One way of such popularization is through translation of classical literature, including that of philosophy, into Ukrainian. Any such translation, despite how small, I see as a significant contribution to the preservation, popularization, and development of the Ukrainian language and culture.

MB: Why did you choose to translate Chapter 7 specifically?

AL: My doctoral dissertation project is dedicated to Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy of mind, and especially his take on the mind-body problem, with a major focus on Dewey’s magnum opus Experience and Nature. I think that the mind-body problem is the main problem that Dewey attempts to deal with in the book, and it is chapter 7, “Nature, Life and Body-Mind” is the one where Dewey directly articulates his solution. Thus, this chapter appears to me as the central chapter to the whole of Experience and Nature.

This translation is not only something that I wanted to do for quite some time as an attempt to further popularize Dewey’s philosophy in Ukrainian philosophical communities but is also a significant part of the Centennial celebration of Dewey’s magnum opus. At the same time, the content of the translated chapter is directly connected to the topic of my dissertation. The translation is also accompanied by the preface where I introduce to the Ukrainian readers the importance and philosophical significance of Dewey’s Experience and Nature. Both translation and preface are published in the Ukrainian philosophical journal Actual Problems of Mind which is a peer-reviewed philosophy journal, which although analytically leaning, is still pluralistically oriented. The translation and preface can also be found on the Center for Dewey Studies website.

MB: What were some of the biggest challenges in translating John Dewey’s writings, specifically? Do you think Dewey is harder to translate than some other anglophone philosophers?

AL: Probably, the biggest challenge while translating (or even just reading) Dewey is his own style of writing. Many times, I caught myself thinking that Dewey would do all of us much better of a job if he attempted at being somewhat more “analytic,” in a sense of being clearer and more precise in his writing. On the other hand, you get used to his style the more you work with it, and at times it might even appear as beautiful.

Although philosophical translation is not my main philosophical activity, I did have some experience with it before. For example, in 2013 I did the first Ukrainian translation of David Chalmers’s famous article “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” This translation was also published in Actual Problems of Mind. In 2015 I translated an excerpt from Chalmers’s magnum opus The Conscious Mind regarding the phenomenal-zombies thought experiment, which was published in one of the oldest Ukrainian philosophical journals, Filosofska Dumka (Philosophical Thought). From what I can tell, translating Chalmers was maybe somewhat easier given the analytic style of writing in the sense stated above. But overall translating Dewey is no doubt philosophically quite rewarding an experience.

MB: What did you learn about Dewey's ideas from the translation process that you might not have figured out otherwise?

AL: I want to emphasize that when one is doing a translation of philosophical texts, one is doing philosophy and not just philology. As such, philosophical translation is first and foremost a philosophical type of activity. This activity makes one pay attention to every word, comma or period in the text that is being translated. When working with the text so closely, you need to make sure that you know every detail (of course, it is impossible but as an ideal it’s a good one).

Last summer and fall, while working on the Ukrainian translation of chapter 7 from Dewey’s Experience and Nature, I realized that there were some crucial moments in the text that would otherwise not catch my attention. For example, it is interesting how Dewey uses words like “sense,” “sensa,” “sensibility,” “sensation,” “signification,” “significance,” among the others.  The philosophical consequence from working with this chapter and with such terminology was my uncovering of what one might think of as the epistemological dimension of Dewey’s naturalistic or emergentist metaphysics already in Experience and Nature, which, in my view, is expressed there as a theory of sense and signification. This has resulted in my working on the paper directly on that topic which continues up until now.

MB: Do you plan to translate any more Dewey in the future? What else would you be excited to translate?

AL: Yes, I would be happy to continue if I had an opportunity to do so. First and foremost, I think it would be great to finish the translation of the entire Experience and Nature into Ukrainian. This book is Dewey’s philosophical magnum opus, and, to my mind, its translation will be a significant event for the development of the pragmatist philosophical tradition in Ukraine and for the Ukrainian philosophical community and philosophy in general. In the meantime, I was thinking of translating at least two major papers by Dewey. First is his 1896 article “Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” which in 1943 was chosen as one of the most important articles published in the first fifty years of Psychological Review (Langfeld 1943) as well as is recognized as “the official manifesto of functional psychology.” Second is Dewey’s 1905 paper “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” which is one of the most influential articles in Dewey’s philosophical corpus in general and can overall be seen as a precursor to his Experience and Nature, in particular.

References

Langfeld, Herbert S. 1943. “Fifty Volumes of the Psychological Review.” Psychological Review 50:143–55