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, culture embodies most of the human beings’ modifiers such as language, nationality, race, etc. moreover, these modifiers domineer activities within a specific culture. thus, literature can be considered as one of the most known and extensive activities of human beings in each culture that is under the influence of every single aspect of that specific culture. as long as it is pleasant to deal with other cultures’ literature as well, translated pieces of literature become an extremely viable tool. there were times when the translation was considered as inferior, unprivileged, and inaccurate in comparison to the original literary texts. as a result, some scholars and theorists had to defend translation against the dominant perspectives toward it as a marginalized entity. evan-zohar was one of the scholars who attempted to oppose previous critical perspectives toward translation through generating his own hypothesis. this article aims to demonstrate that the role of translation is of importance in comparative literature as well as cultural interaction. moreover, it demonstrates how translated pieces of literature promote innovation in one specific culture. to this end, i have made use of evan-zohar’s polysystem theory in order to support my idea and reach a decent conclusion. the results show that translation plays an importance role in comparative literature. more importantly, the results show that translation enables cultures to make use of other cultures’ repertoires so that literary innovation would also be observed.