Mamardashvili did not always use words in a conventional way, and his written and spoken language often sounds unusual even to Russian-speaking readers. This is not so much due to his Georgian origins, as Russian was the language spoken at home, and he was educated in the Russian-speaking Soviet school system, and he wrote and lectured in Russian.1 However, his multilingual fluency gave him the flexibility to detach words from their immediate meanings, and to “borrow” foreign expressions whenever he felt that Russian alone could not fully convey the sense of what he wanted to say. This originary linguistic displacement, in which Mamardashvili combined Russian with multiple languages, each with distinct expressive capacities and syntaxes, made his choice of words very peculiar. It was as if he were drawing from a reservoir of meaning far broader than the ordinary, however technical, sense of any single word.
This requires special attention when translating terms with specific meanings in Mamardashvili’s discourse. In some cases, I created neologisms (e.g., coining “transversion” for “prevrashchenie” – which is usually translated as “transformation” or “metamorphosis,” and “patternness” for “zakonomernost’” – often translated as “regularity” or “lawlikeness”), or provided explanations when ordinary or technical terms carried particular nuances (e.g., “normativnost’” or “ob”ekt”). To support consistent understanding, I have included a glossary in the back matter that defines terms with specific meanings in Mamardashvili’s work. The glossary also defines the expressions I used to describe Mamardashvili’s theoretical framework, such as “topological space” and “predicational space.”
Where appropriate, I have included transliterated original terms in parentheses, except when doing so would sound redundant. I have also added the original wording in parentheses when offering free translations of full expressions or sentences to better convey their meaning in English. When translating texts or quoting passages in which the masculine form is used for gender-neutral concepts such as “individual” or “human being,” I retained the masculine form for adjectives and pronouns. However, in my own text, I opted for the feminine for these same terms.
For transliterations, I followed the American Library Association & Library of Congress Romanization system, omitting diacritical marks (i.e., writing “kratkii” instead of “kratkiĭ”), except when names and terms appear with different transliterations in the quoted original (e.g., Lektorsky instead of Lektorskii). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
I sincerely thank Alena Mamardashvili for providing clarifications and anecdotal references in support of these statements.