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structuralist linguistics
, working in areas from 
phonology to the study of poetic language, all potentially part of the general analysis of 
cultural signs. Although the development of phonemics was undoubtedly the great 
lasting success of the group (and indeed of structuralism in general, we shall argue), 
their interests extended to many aspects of culture, especially literature, and 
occasionally translation.
In the work of 
Jan Muka
ř
ovský
of the Prague Circle we find clear awareness of 
the historical role of translation. In his 1936 article “Francouzská poezie Karla 
Č
apka” 
(The French poetry of Karel 
Č
apek), Muka
ř
ovský argues that translation is one of the 
ways in which national literatures can be transformed, since they seek and develop 
equivalents for foreign texts (see Králová 2006). This insight might be gleaned from the 
work of Tynyanov within the frame of Russian Formalism as such (or indeed from work 
by Zhirmunskij on Pushkin, or Vinogradov on Gogol), but in Muka
ř
ovský it is now 
clearly stated as such.
In terms of literary studies, the 
transformational role of translation
became 
part and parcel of an approach that saw cultural systems (such as national literatures) as 
sets of structural relations developing not just in terms of their internal logic, as had 
mostly been the case mostly in Russian Formalism, nor exclusively from external 
influences, as might have been the case of traditional historical studies, but from the 
complex social context formed by dynamics on both sides at once. The interest of 
translation was that it necessarily cut across those two deceptively separate frames; it 
forced the literary historian to see the internal and the external in the one vision. We 
might argue that this was more likely to happen when dealing with a “minor system” 
like Czech literature than with a “major” and apparently more independent system like 
Russian literature. The Prague interest in translation was perhaps not entirely an 
accident.
Prague structuralism was properly a phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s. There 
was nevertheless a tradition, apparently discontinuous, that saw its influence filter down 
through the decades, especially in the study of literature. In the 1960s and 1970s we find 
the Czech scholar