. . . One of the central areas of Integral activities in Russia is concentrated around publishing. In my opinion, this kind of work is crucial in establishing any serious movement, even if one is aimed at “practice” rather than “theorizing“—especially when it relates to such really post-postconventional endeavors as Integral—because books and texts in general are among the leading ways our collective memories of these Integral resonances seem to be imprinted and inherited. I would argue, there is really no other way invented to convey complex thought and consciousness—and also directly transform it—other than book and pass it through generations. If we want to go beyond superficiality and shallow understandings, we have to build new integral cultures of reading. People get old and wither, but really good books live through many generations (we still read and seriously study books written in 19th century).
<…> Since the Russian language is still spoken by around 260 million people around the world (with very few of these people being able to read in English fluently enough so as to grasp Wilber’s works in the original language), the world evolution seems to require such efforts to translate these works and make them of uttermost importance.
What’s difficult is that translation of these works—not just Wilber’s but also even “simpler“ works on business, for instance—to Russian (and probably to any other language) literally requires inventing and reinventing terms to denote concepts and notions which were either forgotten/repressed (during the atheistic Soviet era, when the ideology strictly repressed heterodoxies, and especially “spiritualistic“ thinking) or never there, in the culture, in the first place. Any novice translator, given he or she is actually competent at least in his own language, would tend to fail in terms of delivering a proper translation because of simply not knowing the numerous contexts, backgrounds, histories of terminology that are enacted at a regular basis in Integral literature. This sort of literature is by definition, well, encompassing, comprehensive and transdisciplinary (some even say, postdisciplinary).
Integral Leadership Review. July 2020: http://integralleadershipreview.com/17531-7-31-the-current-state-of-integral-in-russia/
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