LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

israeli jewish nation buildingcircles) that combine together to form a cultural polysystem. Each of thesesystems, as well as the polysystem itself, has a centre, where more prestigiousactivity takes place and where cultural influence may be exerted, and aperiphery, from which people, institutions and powers active within the systemconstantly try to advance towards the centre. At the same time similar elementsare constantly pushed away from the centre. All of this incessant activity iseffected through the influence of cultural, political and financial powers thatmay act separately or jointly. Translation, according to Even Zohar, is oftenused to fill generic, stylistic and intellectual voids within the recipient system.Thus the recipient or target culture may use translation for its own ends,absorbing foreign literature or even feeding upon it where it cannot provide foritself out of its own resources. In the present chapter Hebrew culture serves asthe polysystem, Hebrew literature is one of its systems, literary translation is asub-system of Hebrew literature, while literary translation from Arabic intoHebrew is an independent segment of that sub-system, namely the smallestcircle of all.Even Zohar, then, draws a rather Darwinistic picture of survival of the fittestand, to use Theo Hermans’ term (1985), the manipulation of literature throughtranslation. Whereas polysystem theory draws a picture of the playground andthe rules of the game of literary translation, Toury’s norm theory (1980, 1995,1998) describes the way this game is played. He defines two kinds of translationnorms – preliminary norms and operational norms. The first kind, dealing withtranslation policy and directness of translation (Toury 1995: 58), will be appliedand elaborated in my discussion of why and how translated Arabic texts wereused to uphold both Jewish and Palestinian nation building. The second kind,operational norms (ibid.: 58–60), dealing with actual translation performancein terms of text segmentation, textlinguistic properties and source text–targettext equivalence, are beyond the scope of the present chapter that looks atliterary translations as agents acting within a system, describing the way theyhave acted within the target culture rather than how they were performed aslinguistic and textual entities. In order to make the final part of my discussionpossible, I suggest that I add a third new translation norm category which I call‘reaction norms’ to Toury’s first two. Reaction norms reflect the ways translationsare either accepted or rejected by the target culture and may be deducedout of the only overt expression of target culture reaction as reflected by writtenreviews of the translations published in the journalistic slots allotted to them bythe target culture.Any discussion of literature and nationalism in the context of translations ofArabic literature into Hebrew must take into consideration that Jews and Arabsin the Middle East each have their own national identity opposed to the other’s.Thus the national aspirations of the Jews in Palestine as represented by early— 101 —www.taq.ir