Translation, Polysystem and the Order of Literature

                                                                             Antony George K

Introduction

Translation has been interpreted as an activity that gives another life to a literary work or an escape from death in “The Task of the Translator” by Walter Benjamin. The notion of languages as forming an interconnected universe with a working system of expressions similar in many respects can hold together the complex multiplicity of languages in movement.  1960s and 1970s witnessed a new direction in translation studies with contributions from J.C Catford, Anton Popovic, Jiri Levy, Katherine Reiss, George Steiner and Etamar Even Zohar. The most important concern of the theoretical inquiries was about the equivalence in translation. Georges Mounin’s idea of universals of language and culture foregrounded the scope of a dynamic activity of translation as exchange between cultures and nations. Eugene Nida’s emphasis upon “correspondence” also shared the same possibility of a universally shaped vocabulary of translation that can ease the difficult situation of untranslatability and isolation. Yet the path breaking After the Babel (1975) by George Steiner like the structuralists of the time claimed the agency of language in shaping human reality. In other words, the constitutive power of language in structuring the world has become the focus of studies in not only linguistics but also in all branches of humanities.

Itamar Even-Zohar, taking cues from this turn of structuralism developed a new approach to translation and opened up a totally different analytical frame work in comparative literature. His observations on the role of translation in the crystallization of national cultures, probably what he could understand from the experience of the Jewish state’s confrontation with diverse languages (and a Noh’s arc of communities?) enriched the field of translation theory and widened the scope of a comprehensive outlook of comparative literature in relation to translation. Born in Israel and educated in Tel Aviv, Zohar’s orientation toward languages in a comparative paradigm basically encompassed the Hebrew linguistics and translation of Russian texts into Hebrew. His beginning as a structuralist and later reform of structuralism into a dynamic one leaving behind the static terms of it are important to understand his theory of translation.

Polysystem and Translation

Literature can be seen as a system of systems or a Polysystem including many sub-systems within it. The dynamics within this system create a centre and periphery without any permanence of both. Unlike the earlier traditions of theories of translation, probably since the days of Horace, which relied on the mimetic doctrine of translation as reproduction of an original, Zohar located the space of translation in a mega system of literature. Instead of the transfer of meaning, a new set of authentic texts in the form of translation co-exist in this whole system. “ What kind of relations might there be among translated works, which are presented as completed facts, imported from other literatures, detached from their home contexts and consequently neutralized from the point of view of centre-and-periphery struggle?” (Zohar in Venuti 199). Zohar locates two ways that correlate the translated works: the selection by the target literature, and the way the translated literature adopt in the target system. In fact, the translated literature is not a peripheral system but a determining one that can make changes in the target system.

Over View

Zohar begins the essay by questioning the lower status assigned to the translated works in literary history and points out the major role of translation in the crystallization of national cultures. The absence of the accounts of translated literature in literary history negates the interconnection between translated literatures as complete systems. As one of the most active systems in the Polysystem of literature, translated literature occupies a primary position, at least occasionally. Translated texts correlate in the way their source texts are selected by the target literature, and in the way they adopt norms of the home co-systems.

The second part of the essay discusses the Polysystem theory in relation to the idea of a centre and periphery. This model of systems works in a transitory fashion accommodating each other. For instance, when a new literary model emerges translation is likely to occupy a central position. The rise of the novel is an example of this. Then he analyses the situations that give birth to translations. Three of them are: When a literature is young, or not yet crystalized, when a literature is peripheral or weak, and when there is a turning point, crisis or literary vacuum. Hence, translation can function as a source of reshuffling and supplying of models in a system. “At such moments, even in central literatures, translated literature may assume a central position”(201).

Translated literature becomes peripheral when it employs the secondary models. The target language’s norms are dominant here. In such a situation translation cannot maintain a positive correlation with original writing. In a highly paradoxical situation, translation becomes a means to preserve traditional taste. The third part of the essay deals with the sterile existence of translation lost contact with the original home system, at the same time lagging behind the innovations and ruptures in the target system.

The fourth part of the essay looks at the possible polysystemic analysis. “The hypothesis that translated literature may be either a central or a peripheral system does not imply that it is always wholly one or the other. Translated literature is itself stratified and not all polysystems are stratified alike. “When there is intense interference, it is the portion of translated literature which is likely to assume a central position”(202).

The fifth part of the essay deals with the function of the position of translated literature. At times the translated literature takes the position of a semi or quasi-translation as well or violates the home model’s situation. “Under such conditions the chances that the translation will be close to the original in terms of adequacy (in other words, a reproduction of the dominant textual relations of the original) are greater than otherwise”. Similarly great changes in a certain cultural system will result in great translation activities.

Critical Remarks

Gerald Gillespie says that the most important outcome of polysystem theory is that “It aspires to describe the dynamics of interactive factors whether these be mainly inter-cultural or cross-cultural. By observing the stabilities, tensions, and shiftings of boundaries within and among systems, polysystem theory accounts for interferences, transfers, and adjustments that appear in the life of cultures past and present”.

Zohar’s polysystem theory is inoperative in the political situations of translation, for instance the colonial project of translating the orient and exoticizing it. The issue of interpellation involved in the process of translation, the role of translation as interpretation forming a hermeneutics of the text, and the role of translation as conservatory of the original are some of the issues overlooked by the author. Similarly the structuralist methodology that attributes an independent existence to the entities of structures cannot reveal the underlying socio-political conflict in the context of the texts. Romila Thapar’s study about the different translations of Kalidasa’s Sakunthala and the deep political significance of each translation is the best example of such an approach involving the underlying ideological motives of translation. Similarly a whole system that excludes the distinct existence of difference misses the reality of mediation, extrapolation, interpolation, and the erasure involved in the process of translation at least on occasions of conlicting interests.

Conclusion

Zohar can give a whole set of structures illustrating the literary world as a vast and interconnected network to explain the correlation between texts in the constellation of literature, probably indicating the scope of a world system of literature that endores the concept of a world literature. The order of centre and periphery presupposing in a demarking way literary and non-literary fields may not work in the contemporary cultural discourses that repudiate every grand-narrative. As any totality, the Polysystem theory excludes the repertoire of the aberrant, particularly what the prison-house of language excludes like movement of texts without a translating situation, demanding complete subjugation from the devotees of the text as in the case of the Syrian Bible in Kerala that underwent no translation but the believers learnt Syrian!

Bibliography

Anderman, Gunilla and Margeret Rogers.ed. Translation Today.Delhi:Viva.2010.Print.

Gillespie, Gerald.Review: Polysystem Studies. Comparative Literature.Vol.45, No.4.Autumn. 1993. pp 373-374. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771601. 16-10-2015.

Venuti, Lawrence.Ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge.2000.Print.

Zohar, Itamar Even. Polysystem Studies .Poetics Today Vol.11.No.1.1990.Web.Pdf.