Anne Cluysenaar, in her book on literary stylistics, makes some important points about translation. The translator, she believes, should not work with general precepts when determining what to preserve or parallel from the SL text, but should work with an eye 'on each individual structure, whether it be prose or verse', since 'each structure will lay stress on certain linguistic features or levels and not on others'. She goes on to analyse C.Day Lewis' translation of Valéry's poem, Les pas and comes to the conclusion that the translation does not work because the translator 'was working without an adequate theory of literary translation'. What Day Lewis has done, she feels, is to have ignored the relation of parts to each other and to the whole and that his translation is, in short, 'a case ofperceptual "bad form"'. The remedy for such inadequacies is also proposed: what is needed, says Cluysenaar, 'is a description of the dominant structure of every individual work to be translated.'

Cluysenaar's assertive statements about literary translation derive plainly from a structuralist approach to literary texts that conceives of a text as a set of related systems, operating within a set of other systems. As Robert Scholes puts it:

Every literary unit from the individual sentence to the whole order of words can be seen in relation to the concept of system. In particular, we can look at individual works, literary genres, and the whole of literature as related systems, and at literature as a system within the larger system of human culture.

The failure of many translators to understand that a literary text is made up of a complex set of systems existing in a dialectical relationship with other sets outside its boundaries has often led them to focus on particular aspects of a text at the expense of others. Studying the average reader, Lotman determines four essential positions of the addressee:

(1) Where the reader focuses on the content as matter, i.e. picks out the prose argument or poetic paraphrase.

(2) Where the reader grasps the complexity of the structure of a work and the way in which the various levels interact.

(3) Where the reader deliberately extrapolates one level of the work for a specific purpose.

(4) Where the reader discovers elements not basic to the genesis of the text and uses the text for his own purposes.

Clearly, for the purposes of translation, position (1) would be completely inadequate (although many translators of novels in particular have focused on content at the expense of the formal structuring of the text), position (2) would seem an ideal starting point, whilst positions (3) and (4) might be tenable in certain circumstances. The translator is, after all, first a reader and then a writer and in the process of reading he or she must take a position.

So, for example, Ben Belitt's translation of Neruda's Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta contains a statement in the Preface about the rights of the reader to expect 'an American sound not present in the inflection of Neruda', and one of the results of the translation is that the political line of the play is completely changed. By stressing the 'action', the 'cowboys and Indians myth' element, the dialectic of the play is destroyed, and hence Belitt's translation could be described as an extreme example of Lotman's third reader position.

The fourth position, in which the reader discovers elements in the text that have evolved since its genesis, is almost unavoidable when the text belongs to a cultural system distanced in time and space. The twentieth-century reader's dislike of the Patient Griselda motif is an example of just such a shift in perception, whilst the disappearance of the epic poem in western European literatures has inevitably led to a change in reading such works. On the semantic level alone, as the meaning of words alters, so the reader/translator will be unable to avoid finding himself in Lotman's fourth position without detailed etymological research. So when Gloucester, in King Lear, Act III sc.vii, bound, tormented and about to have his eyes gouged out, attacks Regan with the phrase 'Naughty lady', it ought to be clear that there has been considerable shift in the weight of the adjective, now used to admonish children or to describe some slightly comic (often sexual) peccadillo.