Such bonds might be lexical: Goddard & Wierzbicka (1994), for example, identify "semantic primitives" such as "big", "small", "think", "live",
"now" and "like" (cf. Wierzbicka 1997:26). They might also be stylistic. For van Peer (1993:73), foregrounding is an example of a universal stylistic characteristic of literature. He finds support for this view in Miner's study Comparative Poetics; Miner (1990:38-40) argues that what he calls estrangement (foregrounding) is central to all literature, echoing the Russian Formalists. Other writers such as McCully (1998:23) and Goldsworthy (1998:40) have argued for the universality of linguistic patterns such as rhyme, rhythm and parallelism in literature, and in an earlier book (Boase-Beier 1987) I suggested that figures such as metaphor, iconicity or ambiguity have the nature of stylistic principles, implying that they are in fact universal. Besides lexical or stylistic universals, there could be semantic ones, that is, what Catford (1965:50) calls common "features of situation substance", suggesting universality of experience. Such universality, which Assman calls "the regulative ideal of the One" (1996:85) has often been considered an essential prerequisite for translation. For Assman, this view of translation has been a hindrance; postmodernism has allowed the "fundamentalization of plurality" (1996:99), a view which he sees as deriving from Hofmannsthal. Plurality, for writers such as Assman, is the only way to respect otherness in translation, and here he voices a suspicion of universalism common to many recent writers on translation, especially of a poststructuralistor postmodernist persuasion.
But there is nothing wrong with universalism per se, as long as it is combined with an awareness of its possible shortcomings (cf. Miner 1990).
And indeed, it could be argued that Venuti, though he disparages universal views for ignoring cultural relativity, is himself universalizing about the nature of literature. If his notion of foreignizing (1995:20) is more about preserving what constitutes the literary rather than merely mimicking the foreignness of the original text, then it is based on a universalizing notion of the literary, such as Jakobson held. Furthermore, if some types of universals can be shown to have a biological basis, there would be little point in denying them. Malmkjœr (2005:51), for example, points to work done in the late 1960s by researchers such as Berlin & Kay (1969) on colour, which suggests a universal set of concepts that vary in each particular language. Such work emphasizes the "commonality"(Malmkjar 2005:50) of languages. Or, as Crane & Richardson put it, though "the link between the word red and the colour is .. arbitrary .. the experience of redness is not". And Goldsworthy's reasons for positing the universality of literary features is that they arise from the biology of literature(1998:39).
A view of universality based on biology was simply not available to Jakobson; his sense of common cognitive values was empirical, intuitive
and perhaps ideological, just as a postmodernist emphasis on difference is all these things.
Jakobson's concern with the universal underlying the specific was not just a view of language and style, but also affected how he saw the similarity of literature to other genres, and the connections between different types of translation. If Jakobson's quest was for "The Magic of a Common Language" (Toman 1999), then that common language underlies also what he describes as different types of translation in his 1959 article. Here he famously distinguished intralingual translation (rewording in the same language), intersemiotic translation (such as a film based on a novel) and "translation proper", or interlingual translation, whereby an entire message" is transposed into another language (Jakobson 2000:114). Just as everything can be translated, so too different types of transposition, rewording or adaptation are forms of translation.
The strong universalizing tendency of structuralism, combined with its attention to linguistic detail, has been linked to close-reading criticism (Bradford 1994:4). But it would be simplistic, as I have suggested, to equate structuralism (or close-reading) with universalizing and poststructuralism and postmodernism with difference. All these approaches are concerned, to a greater or lesser extent, with both universalism and difference.
At the time Jakobson wrote his early work, structuralist linguistics found regularities behind the detail of individual languages which appeared to point to common characteristics, but could not be given any explanation. Once linguistics began to focus on the mind, and to explain linguistic data as the result of the structure of the mind, what Jakobson saw as the two defining factors of languages – their individual spirit and their unifying aspects – could be formulated as characteristics of the mind. In particular, the notion of context as a cognitive entity in recent theories of style such as Semino (1997) allows for both Jakobson's factors, and thus for the main concerns of translation.
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