A missing link in Itamar Even-Zohars theoretical thinking

Nam Fung Chang

Lingnan University, Hong Kong

According to Itamar Even-Zohar, for a large social entity to be maintained, a culture repertoire must be invented to create internal cohesion and external differentiation, and from this repertoire certain items are chosen to build a collective identity. In contrast, imported items, if regarded as threats to this identity, may meet with resistance. This theory may shed light on Even-Zohars hypotheses that the normal position assumed by translated literature in the literary polysystem tends to be a peripheral one, and that translation tends towards acceptability when it is at the periphery. Keywords: culture repertoire, cohesion, resistance, polysystem, translated literature, centre, periphery, adequacy, acceptability

Introduction In his seminal paper The position of translated literature within the literary polysystem, first published in 1978 (Even-Zohar 1990a), Itamar Even-Zohar puts forward two interrelated hypotheses: first, that the position assumed by translated literature tends to be a peripheral one except in three special situations when the literary polysystem is young, weak, or in a crisis; and second, that translation tends towards acceptability when it is at the periphery, and towards adequacy when it is at the centre. He has not explained in detail the basis of these hypotheses, and has turned to culture research since the 1990s. In a seminar held in August 2005 at the Centre for Translation, Hong Kong Baptist University, Even-Zohar explained why his research interest had shifted from translation to culture. One question led to another and then to another, he said. I asked him when he would look back and supply answers to the first question, and he replied that he would rather leave that to other scholars.

Target 20:1 (2008), 135148. doi 10.1075/target.20.1.08cha issn 09241884 / e-issn 15699986 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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So, this paper is an initial attempt to make Even-Zohars latest questions go back to his first one, so that his chain of questions may form a loop. It will try to elaborate on the two hypotheses in light of his culture research, with examples drawn mainly from Chinese culture. 1.

Culture repertoire, cohesion and cultural identity

According to Even-Zohar, large social entities, such as peoples or nations, are not natural objects, but have to be formed by the acts of individuals. Since the benefits of establishing an organization larger than ones own immediate province are not self-evident, willingness to cooperate with such attempts may be lacking on the part of the people, and coercion is sometimes resorted to in the first instance. However, for such entities to be maintained in the long run, it is necessary to create cohesion, i.e. a widespread sense of solidarity in the community. For this purpose a culture repertoire must be invented and/or imported to organize life both on the collective and on the individual levels (Even-Zohar 1997: 355; 2000: 392396; 2004: 94). It seems logical to assume that cohesion is easier to achieve if the culture repertoire is generally regarded as possessing two qualities: beneficialness and uniqueness. First, it must be believed to be able to bring benefits (in whatever sense of the word) to the users in order to be accepted by the majority of the entity concerned. Secondly, it must be seen to be different from the repertoires of other entities, because there can be no internal cohesion without external differentiation. In other words, the culture repertoire needs to be or become a source of pride for members of the entity, so as to build a collective identity (cf. Even-Zohar 2000: 395), which can be said to be the pre-condition for cohesion. However, the success of a culture repertoire, first in gaining acceptance and then in shaping a collective identity, sometimes seems to hinge more on marketing skills than on any inherent quality of the thing itself. To claim superiority over alternative options is a good strategy, in that both beneficialness and uniqueness are included. Many culture planners rely heavily on emotional appeal when recommending their culture repertoire to the people. Certain items would be selected from the culture repertoire as selling points. Some of these items may look insignificant or meaningless or even ridiculous to members of other entities, such as a linguistic or bodily feature, as cited by Even-Zohar (1997a: 27). Two lines of the lyrics of a popular Chinese patriotic song, The dragons descendants, read: (With) black eyes, black hair, yellow skin, / (We are) forever and ever the dragons descendants.1 Most of the Chinese people are no doubt aware that black and yellow cannot be

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proved to look any better (or worse) than other colours and that the dragon exists only in myths, but this awareness does not seem to prevent them from being filled with national pride when singing that song. Some other claims for superiority may be based on facts, but one may legitimately ask whether these facts are relevant in a world where military might still speak loudest. Examples are our country has the largest population, we are one of the oldest civilizations, or we won the World Cup (cf. Even-Zohar 2002a: 79). Excelling in sports is apparently a sure win; otherwise we would not have seen countries spend a bigger portion of their GNP on training professional athletes than on education. Indeed, sometimes one cannot help suspecting that there may be something from which the governments of these countries want to distract the attention of their people. There are criteria based on things that really matter in a competitive world, such as technological advancement, material wealth, and military power. Superiority in these areas can be objectively proved or disproved, but facts may sometimes be ignored, forgotten, or arbitrarily interpreted. For example, an astronaut sent into space in the twenty-first century five decades later than the first one in the world has been made, and generally accepted as, a national hero. So we can see that many claims for superiority are in fact questionable. It seems that uniqueness of the culture repertoire is actually the decisive factor for cohesion, and it might simply become a synonym of beneficialness in the eyes of the entity concerned. That is the reason why, in the words of Immanuel Wallerstein (1991: 99), the states have played opposite roles in two parallel contradictions: in the contradiction between the tendency to one world vs. the tendency to distinctive nation-states, the states have used their force to create cultural diversity, whereas in the contradiction between the tendency to one nation vs. the tendency to distinctive ethnic groups within each state, they have used their force to create uniformity. However, uniqueness can sometimes be as illusory as beneficialness. Take the Chinese patriotic song again for example. On the one hand, some ethnic groups in China, such as the 800-million-strong Uyghur, do not have black eyes, black hair and yellow skin. On the other hand, all peoples in the Mongolian race, notably the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese and the Mongolian, share these features. 2. Cultural resistance to imported repertoires After a culture repertoire is established and relatively stable, the introduction of new repertoires or repertoremes (i.e. items in a repertoire) may meet with resistance. Even-Zohar has identified two causes: that acquiring a different repertoire

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is painful and risky, and that a different repertoire may not equally benefit all members (Even-Zohar 2002: 49). These seem to me to be typical Even-Zoharian understatements. Sometimes a different repertoire, such as communism, may benefit some members at the expense of others, leading to a large-scale redistribution of economic resources and political power, and some others, such as Nazism, may even stipulate the extermination of a substantial part of an entity. One may also add a third possible cause: incompatibility with the value system behind the accepted repertoire. For example, when the Manchurians conquered the Hans and established the Qing Dynasty about four centuries ago, all men were ordered to cut their hair above the forehead and wear a long pigtail at the back of the head as a symbol of allegiance to the conqueror, and the order met with great resistance not only because of the inconvenience caused but mainly because of the double humiliation in being subjugated to a minority ethnic group and in taking on a feminine look; however, after a certain period of time the pigtail became a symbol of allegiance to the Chinese nation, and therefore it took nearly as much force to compel men to cut their pigtails in the late Qing Period at the turn of the twentieth century, although it is very easy to get rid of such an inconvenience (see Xiaolin 2006). Repertoires imported from other entities may be regarded as a double threat to cultural cohesion because, in addition to causing instability in the established repertoire just as any indigenously invented repertoires do, they may hurt national pride, thus posing a direct threat to the collective identity. They may therefore meet with greater resistance, and their very foreignness, rather than their lack of beneficialness, is often the main and sometimes the only argument against them. Indeed the very word foreign in Chinese (yang) sometimes carries a derogatory connotation. Examples of resistance to imported repertoires are many in Chinese history. In the seventeenth century, the introduction of Western learning (mostly science subjects, such as astronomy, geography and mathematics) into China, initiated by Christian missionaries, was so humiliating to a nation who had thought for thousands of years that they were at the centre of the earth and were the only civilization in the world, that a myth had to be created that Western learning originates from China (xi xue Zhong yuan) that the kinds of learning being imported at that time were Chinese in origin, only that they had been lost to later generations and were stolen by Westerners. For example, Christian missionaries gave algebra the Chinese name the method from the East (dong lai fa) or the Chinese method (Zhongguo fa), in order to smooth the ruffled feathers of the ruling class (see Wang Xiaoyuan 2006: 4547). When the myth apparently lost credibility in the late nineteenth century, the proposition Chinese learning as the body, Western learning for practical application (Zhong ti xi yong) was put forward and it

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gradually gained currency, while Western repertoires kept coming in (see Wang Xiaoyuan 2006: 4749). The proposition was refuted as wrong by Mao Zedong in 1956 (Mao 1956), who replaced it with another slogan make foreign things serve China (yang wei Zhong yong) (Nangfangwang 2003), but the very need for such a slogan reflected that there was still resistance in the culture to foreign repertoires. In fact, one may say that Chinese learning as the body, Western learning for practical application is still being practised even after Deng Xiaopings policy of opening to the outside world, and even today, in the sense that while Western technology is welcomed, the core of the Western value system is carefully warded off. Resistance to Western ideas exists even in Translation Studies itself, in various and sometimes contradictory ways. When the introduction of foreign translation theories began in the early 1980s mostly linguistic theories at first, such as those of Eugene Nida and Peter Newmark, a leading translation scholar, without demonstrating much knowledge of foreign theories, opined that the body of Chinese discourses on translation had formed a system of its own, which is unique in the world, and therefore there was no need to be unduly humble (Luo 1984: 588, 603). From the mid 1980s to the late 1990s there were repeated calls for the establishment of Chinese translatology, or a translatology with Chinese characteristics, with the argument that foreign theories are bound to be inapplicable to translation into or from the Chinese language (see Chang 2004: 4351). In the past decade a few theorists have asserted that translation could never hope to become an academic discipline (Lao 1996; Zhang 1999), a status which a growing number of academics had been endeavouring to establish with the help of Western theories. And in recent years a renowned professor cum translator declares that the literary translation theories of Chinese school [sic] are the most advanced in the world of the 20th century, on the ground that only the Chinese school can solve the difficult problems in translating between the two major languages of the world Chinese and English (Xu 2003: 52, 54). By the theories of the Chinese school Xu actually means his own theory, which he claims to have guided him to produce the largest quantity of literary translations with the highest quality in the world (Xu 2003: 54). Cultural resistance seems to have been strongest in the fields of ideology and politics. The introduction of foreign religions and ideologies, such as Buddhism, Christianity and Marxism, has led to bloody conflicts and even civil wars. The present ruling party in China gained power by introducing a foreign ideology in the first place, but after it succeeded in doing so, it has gradually played down the foreignness of its ideological and political origin and built up an indigenous image, carefully warding off the interference of other foreign ideologies and political forces. Thus, some politicians fighting for democracy in Hong Kong have been

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called traitors to the Chinese People (Hanjian) by the pro-government camp (Wen Wei Po 2004), and their appearing at a hearing of a Senate subcommittee of the United States on the democratization process in Hong Kong was described by a senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong affairs as worshipping at a foreign temple and seeking help from a foreign Bodhisattva (Ta Kung Pao 2004). 3. Imported items as cultural goods and cultural tools Here it may be useful to introduce Even-Zohars concepts of culture as goods and culture as tools. In the former conception, culture is considered as a set and stock of evaluable goods, the possession of which signifies wealth, high status, and prestige (Even-Zohar 2000: 389), whereas in the latter it is considered as a set of operating tools for the organization of life, both on the collective and individual levels (Even-Zohar 2000: 392). Some cultural goods may be converted into tools, and the conversion entails the making of models from symbolical values (Even-Zohar 2000: 393). Since the nineteenth century, the most highly valued cultural goods, particularly those labelled works of art, have been propagated as the common property of nations, to become their cultural heritage. This accepted canon of precious goods functions as assets that distinguish social groups from others and consequently also as a tool for validating the effectiveness of an established repertoire , and for securing its perpetuation (Even-Zohar 2000: 391, 394). It may be said that cultural goods may function on different levels according to their perceived value. Generally they signify wealth and prestige for individual owners, but the most precious ones so precious that they are invaluable rather than evaluable, that is, those that have come to be regarded as the cultural heritage, function also at a higher level, signifying prestige for the whole social entity. Similarly, cultural tools may function on different levels. All cultural goods may be converted to tools that serve as models within and beyond the boundaries of their own system. For instance, a literary work may serve as a model for writers to produce other literary works, and/or as one for members of the general public to make sense of the world and to take action in it. In the latter case it is an ideological or moral tool rather than a literary one. However, only the most precious cultural goods may be converted into tools that function at the highest level, to validate a repertoire. As to repertoires imported from other entities, Even-Zohar observes that they may more likely be transferred as goods before these goods are converted into tools (Even-Zohar 2000: 393394). To this observation I would venture to add that, at least in long-established and strong cultures, imported repertoires can hardly hope to be accepted into the canon of precious cultural goods, and subsequently to be

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converted into high-level tools, unless they undergo a process of naturalization, because their very foreignness automatically disqualifies them from functioning to distinguish social groups from others. The proposition Chinese learning as the body, Western learning for practical application was intended exactly to prevent foreign repertoires from becoming precious cultural goods while allowing them to function as lower-level tools. According to a critic, the body-application dichotomy is one between values and tools the body means the system of cultural values, whereas political science and economics, which were being imported at that time, were seen as applied branches of learning that belong to the level of technical operation (Wang Yan 1998). Buddhism and Marxism have become parts of the Chinese cultural heritage because they have come to be regarded by the persons-in-the-culture as indigenous repertoires to different extents. Apart from the natural cause, that the repertoires have declined in their respective birthplace, the efforts of the culture planners are an important factor in the naturalization process. In both cases the repertoires have been adapted to norms of the target culture. In some Chinese translations of Buddhist texts, the relatively high position that Buddhism gives to women and mothers has been changed in conformity to the Confucian concept of men as the superior sex (see Wright 1959: 37). For example, in the source text a mother exhorts her daughter not to marry a prince in this way: We, however, my daughter, are prostitutes, we give pleasure to all people, we do not make our living by serving one man only; but in the translation this has become: We of a humble position are not fit to marry princes, as the receiving culture could not accept that prostitution was not necessarily a lowly occupation; and laymen who practise the five precepts of morality take wives has been translated as they take wives and concubines, because while keeping concubines was not sanctioned by the Buddhist law, in Chinese society the practice was permitted as a matter of course (Nakamura 1957: 160163). Moreover, husband supports wife has been rendered as the husband controls his wife, and the wife comforts the husband, as the wife reveres her husband (Wright 1959: 37; Gao 1989). In the case of Marxism, certain ideas of Marx that are not compatible with Chinas agricultural civilization have been either ignored or adapted. For Chinas pioneering communists, Marxism was a weapon to subvert the patriarchal clan system and its ideological buttress Confucianism. In the view of Li Dazhao (18891926), one of the earliest Marxist theorists in China, such a system is maintained by sacrificing the personality of the ruled in the service of the ruler, and therefore what Confucius calls the cultivation of moral character is in fact designed for the suppression rather than development of the individual personality (Li Dazhao 1959: 296; Siu 2001: 6566). However, under Communist

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rule the collective entity is maintained in the same way, albeit with a new name. As Gao Chang Fan observes,
Marxs idea of personal fulfilment has been completely ignored by the Chinese Communist establishment, so much so that everybody from childhood is urged to suppress ones personal desire and to contribute to the good of the whole community. The denial of self-interest is interpreted as communist virtue and any satisfaction of personal desire is considered to be bourgeois and capitalist. (Gao 1989: 6)

Another point worth noting is that Marxism, being a product of an industrial society, cannot be applied to an agricultural society without adaptation. Thus, the landlord and the peasant have become the Chinese equivalents to the capitalist and the proletarian respectively, in spite of the fact that in Marxs theory they are not referred to as classes, and the relations of production they represent are seen as a hindrance to the development of productivity (Siu 2001: 73, 79, 84, 95). Besides, there have been manoeuvres to build an indigenous image, such as the substitution of Marxism-Leninism by Mao Zedong Thought as the ideological buttress since the 1960s, the invention of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the 1980s, and the quiet removal of the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from Tiananmen Square in Beijing. In other words, to a certain extent the agents of transfer of a foreign repertoire have been re-presented as inventors of a domestic one. 4. Even-Zohars two hypotheses again Now we are ready to go back to Even-Zohars first hypothesis: that the position assumed by translated literature in the literary polysystem tends to be a peripheral one under normal circumstances. To explain this hypothesis we first need to see how the authorship of translation in general and of literary translation in particular is conceived in the world of our experience. According to Bassnett and Trivedi (1999: 2), the idea of an author as owner of his or her text, and the concept of the translation being a mere copy of the high-status original, emerged only after the Middle Ages, coinciding with the period of early colonial expansion. It may be very interesting to research into the social conditions for the changes in these norms, such as the degree of cohesion in the entity concerned, its state of contact with other entities, and the concept of copyright and intellectual properties, but that will go beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say for the moment that in modern Europe, social norms and laws dictate that the writer of the source text is regarded as the author of the target text too, the translator being just the translator.

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The situation in China has been very much the same at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first wave of massive translation of Western social sciences and literature began. In 1919, a critic lambasted Yan Fu, the most famous translator of the time, for his use of strategies such as deletion, expansion and paraphrase in translating Thomas H. Huxleys Evolution and ethics, saying that Huxley would have sued Yan if he had learned what Yan had done to his work because Yan had sacrificed the author in pursuit of his own fame (Fu 1984: 60). In recent years there have been protests against the marginalization of translators and translations, especially from post-colonial theorists such as Venuti (1995), and Bassnett and Trivedi (1999). And in China there has been a call for the recognition of the literary translator, instead of the source text author, as the author of the translated work, and for the classification of translated literature as national rather than foreign literature, on the ground that literary translation is a process of re-creation, resulting in a product with a relatively independent artistic value (Xie 1999: 208237). As a literary translator I applaud their efforts. However, polysystemists believe that it is no concern of a scientific discipline to effect changes in the world of our experience (Toury 1995: 17) or to pass value judgement on the object of its study. So, we should simply state the fact that these efforts seem to have made hardly any impact on the prevailing social norms so far. Being regarded as originating from a foreign entity, under normal conditions translated literature is naturally resisted by the institution of the literary polysystem due to the perceived threat to the collective identity. That is to say, it is not allowed to be converted into a cultural tool that exerts influence on major processes (Even-Zohar 1990a: 48). On the other hand, when a literary polysystem is young, peripheral or in a crisis, the collective identity may be very weak or even thrown into confusion. Then, foreign items may be brought in to quickly fill the vacuum, before similar items can be locally produced. In such situations, translated literature may indeed assume a central position, taking part in the process of creating new, primary models (Even-Zohar 1990a: 50) models not only for literary production, but also for the persons-in-the-culture to make sense of the world and to take action in it (cf. Even-Zohar 2000: 392393). In other words, it may be converted into a cultural tool at a relatively high level. At this point I would like to add an observation: although translated literature may become a powerful tool and translators may gain literary fame sometimes, literary translations and translators have an even slimmer chance than other foreign items and their agents of transfer to become part of the cultural heritage and subsequently to function as cultural tools at the highest level. The reason may be that processes of naturalization and canonization take time, whereas translated literature may assume a central position only for a relatively short while. This is

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because no system can remain in a constant state of weakness, turning point, or crisis, as Even-Zohar (1990a: 50) points out. In fact, one may see that, compared with items in ideological and religious polysystems, literary works may be more quickly replaceable, especially as cultural tools. So, an entity may say, we have Shakespeare, or we have Mozart, but no entity seems to have taken as much pride in having a certain eminent translator. In the preceding paragraphs the term translated literature is used for conciseness. It may be more accurate to say target texts presented and/or regarded as literary translations (cf. Toury 1995: 38), because texts that are not presented as translations or no longer regarded as such for some reason may become canonized even though a source text may still be traceable. Take for example A madmans diary (kuangren riji), a short story by the Chinese writer Lu Xun. It is largely modelled on the Russian writer Nikolai Gogols work of the same title (Cai 2001: 5556), and has been regarded as an imitation (fangzuo) by some (Li Oufan 1991: 54; Zhongguo Qingnian Bao 2001). We can therefore say that it has the features of a semi- or quasi-translation (see Even-Zohar 1990a: 50), although it was presented by its author not as a translation but as an original work. However, a number of works entitled History of modern Chinese literature published after the founding of the Peoples Republic of China laud it as the first modern Chinese novel (Zhu 1996: 20), or the first successful novel written in the vernacular in the history of modern Chinese literature (Cheng et al. 2000: 59). They put emphasis on its originality, saying for example that it breaks away from the traditional structure of story-telling and combines realism with symbolism in a daring manner, so that a unique artistic effect is produced (Jiang 2002: 26). They either avoid mentioning the source of the work (such as Zhu 1996: 9), as if everything including symbolism was invented by Lu Xun; or just mention in passing that Gogol has a work of the same title (Cheng et al. 2000: 59), as if it was a mere coincidence. Interestingly enough, Lus work is included in The Norwegian book clubs association list of The 100 greatest literary works (Norwegian Book Clubs Association 2001), whereas its source text is not. Even-Zohars culture theory may also shed light on his second hypothesis: that translation tends towards acceptability when it is at the periphery, and towards adequacy when it is at the centre. Translation is usually undertaken for the purpose of bringing in new items so as to change, replace or add to the existing repertoire. But when a culture is stable and self-sufficient, that is, when translated literature is in a peripheral position, imported items may have to be presented as, or at least made compatible with, indigenous ones so as not to be seen as threats to the collective identity of the target culture; otherwise they may not be accepted or tolerated due to strong resistance. That is why acceptability-oriented translation strategies are most likely to be used.

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Thus, Even-Zohar sees a paradox in this case: what could have been an innovatory force has actually become a major factor of conservatism (Even-Zohar 1990a: 4849). On the other hand, when a culture is in one of the three situations that Even-Zohar mentions, foreign items are needed and welcomed, and their foreignness may be exactly what makes them fashionable. 5. Concluding remarks It is my opinion that Even-Zohars concepts of cohesion, repertoire, resistance, culture as goods vs. culture as tools, etc., may provide researchers with tools to probe deeper and wider into the context of the total culture, searching for more comprehensive and detailed explanations for translational phenomena. These concepts have helped polysystem theory maintain its vitality as a translation theory.

Note
1. Ironically, the song was written by a Taiwanese song-writer in the 1970s in protest against the United Statess change of policy in recognizing Beijing instead of Taipei as the only legitimate government of China. The song can thus be regarded as originally a hijacking of the Chinese national identity for an anti-communist cause, with the blessing of the authorities in Taipei, but later it was accepted and thus hijacked by people all over China as their patriotic song, this time with the blessing of the Beijing government (Minshi Xinwenwang 1983), and then in 1989, it was hijacked again by people in Hong Kong, to be sung in rallies and demonstrations in support of the students in Tiananmen Square.

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Rsum
Selon Itamar Even-Zohar, le maintien dune large entit sociale rclame linvention dun rpertoire culturel apte crer de la cohsion interne et de la diffrenciation externe ; dans ce rpertoire, certaines composantes seraient choisies en vue de la construction dune identit collective. Par contraste, des composantes importes particulires pourraient se heurter des rsistances lorsquelles sont perues comme une menace pour cette identit. Une telle thorie pourrait clairer lhypothse selon laquelle la position normale de la littrature traduite dans le polysystme littraire tend priphrique, ainsi que lhypothse selon laquelle la traduction en position priphrique se rapproche du ple de lacceptabilit.

148 Nam Fung Chang

Authors address
Nam Fung CHANG Department of Translation Lingnan University Tuen Mun, HONG KONG e-mail: changnf@ln.edu.hk