Translation Research in the Framework of the Tel Aviv School of Poetics and Semiotics*

Israel has made an important contribution to translation studies. Since the late 1960s, its contribution in this field is mainly identified with the Tel Aviv school of poetics and semiotics. This paper sets out to introduce the basic ideas of the Tel Aviv school and show how they developed. It surveys the school's achievements in the various branches of translation studies — theory, descriptive research and the applied branches, and examines its impact on translation research in the world. Taking into account some shortcomings which in the author's view might interfere with the school's development, the paper points out the school's future directions of research and the challenges still to be met. 1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Israel has made an important contribution to translation studies. Since the late 1960s, its contribution in this field is mainly identified with the Tel Aviv school of poetics and semiotics. The research group and approach thus titled emerged in the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, and for a long time was largely identified with it.1 The founders of the department are Benjamin Hrushovski (later Harshav) — poet, literary researcher and semiotician, now at Yale University — and several of his students and colleagues. In 1966, they left the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in order to establish a new literature department, based on a new conception, at Tel Aviv University, which had been founded in the previous decade. Their objective was to deal neither with one specific national literature nor with comparative literature, but rather with poetics — the study of literature as literature.2 Their main goal was the development of a theory of literature. Descriptive research was to be conducted in the framework of a set of theoretical assumptions and was not to be confined a priori to any specific object.3 This approach, which guided the founders of the department, also found expression in its institute of research, the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, founded in 1975, and in its periodicals, Ha-Sifrut (Literature), which appeared in Hebrew in 1968-1986, PTL (Poetics 2 Meta, XLIII, 1, 1998 and Theory of Literature), which appeared in English in 1976-1978, and its successor, Poetics Today, which has been appearing since 1979. The general approach of Hrushovski and his followers, and the theories which they have developed in its framework, were largely influenced by research conducted in Eastern Europe. They relied to a great extent on the Russian formalists of the 1920s — Viktor Shklovskij, Jurij Tynjanov, Boris Ejxenbaum, Roman Jakobson and others, and their successors in the following decade, mainly the structuralists of Prague, including Jan Mukaëovský and Peter Bogatyrëv.4 However, from the start, some members of the department were more interested in Anglo-American literary criticism. With the growing Westernization of Israeli culture, the emphasis of research among the faculty of the department shifted to Western theories: at first, theories of text structure, and later, post-modernist theories, theories of intertextuality and more. The following discussion will focus on the work of a group which currently operates under the name "culture research group" and is no longer part of the department. The study of translation, in the broader context of the study of literature and semiotics of the culture, which is identified with the Tel Aviv school, is principally the achievement of the members of this group, mainly Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury. The latter is at present head of the culture research group.