LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

15Israeli Jewish Nation Building and HebrewTranslations of Arabic LiteratureHannah Amit-KochaviLiterature is a highly effective vehicle of expressing national energies, conflictsand aspirations. Literary translation may help to get them across to anothernation where they will be received and interpreted according to the state ofpolitical and inter-cultural contacts between source and target literatures at thetime when a particular translation is made and published. In fact, it is preciselythe nature of these contacts that rules two complementary elements critical toboth the creation and reception of literary translations. It is responsible foranswering, first the question of whether a particular text is to be translated at all,and if so – why, by whom, where it will be published – and next, the question ofhow it will be received by target readers – whether ignored, praised or rejected.The present chapter will try to answer these questions with regard to twoimportant segments of translation, of both classical and modern Arabic literatureinto Hebrew, representing two opposite poles from the advent of Zionism inPalestine to the present day (1868–2005). The first pole demonstrates the waytranslations from Arabic into Hebrew were used to help consolidate Jewishidentity during the earliest stage of Jewish nation building in Palestine (latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The second demonstrates the earlieststage of recognition of the Palestinian national identity by Israeli Jewish culture(1970). Thus the two politically opposed sides of the Jewish (later Israeli)-Arabconflict in Palestine found within the same literary system some support fortheir respective national claims of their right to exist, though separated byalmost a century and under completely different political circumstances. Mydata draw on a comprehensive bibliography (collected by me) comprising overseven thousand translated items, as well as book reviews of translations of Arabicliterature published in literary supplements of Hebrew dailies and weeklies, aswell as literary magazines.The theory applied here is a modified combination of the work of two Israelitranslation scholars, Itamar Even Zohar and Gideon Toury, both of Tel AvivUniversity. Even Zohar’s polysystem theory (Even Zohar 1990, 1997) may beused to describe the constant struggle of foreign literatures, among other culturalpowers, to enter recipient cultures through translation. The target literature isdescribed by Even Zohar as one of many systems (or, metaphorically speaking,— 100 —www.taq.ir