THE IMPORTANCE OF POLYSYSTEM THEORY IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Culture is a cradle in which most of the assumptions, behaviors, and perspectives of human beings are shaped. As a multifaceted entity, any culture embodies many of the human beings’ modifiers, such as language, nationality, and race, which domineer the activities within that specific culture. Thus, literature, as one of the most extensively practiced activities of human beings in each culture, is undoubtedly influenced by every single aspect of it. In this respect, translated works of literature are also extremely viable. There were times when the translated text was considered inferior, unprivileged, and inaccurate in comparison to the original literary text. As a result, some scholars and theorists had to defend translation against the dominant attitudes toward it as a marginalized entity. Evan-Zohar was one of the scholars who attempted to oppose the biased critical views on translation through generating his own hypothesis. This article aims to demonstrate that translation plays a significant role in comparative literature as well as cultural interaction. Moreover, it intends to indicate how translated literary works can promote innovation in one specific culture. To this end, Evan-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory has been made use of in order to support the proposed ideas and reach a decent conclusion. The results reveal the important role of translation in comparative literature and more importantly, they show that translation enables cultures to make use of other cultures’ repertoires so that literary innovation can also be observed.

کلیدواژه ها:

polysystem ، translation ، literature ، comparative literature ، culture