The Translator’s Invisibility

In the thirty years that separated Nott’s Catullus from Lamb’s, the Whiggish aristocratic milieu in which they lived and worked underwent a substantial change that influenced the fate of their translations and translation methods. Fluent, domesticating translation was valorized in accordance with bourgeois moral and literary values, and a notable effort of resistance through a foreignizing method was decisively displaced. Nott’s translation foreignized Catullus by assimilating the Latin text to cultural values that were residual in the 1790s and marginal by the 1820s: a mimetic concept of translation grounded in the paradigm of representation was yielding to a communicative concept of translation grounded in the paradigm of expression; and the casual sexual morality of the aristocracy was challenged by a movement toward moral reform that affected both aristocrat and bourgeois. Nott and Lamb exemplify the two options available to translators at a specific moment in the canonization of fluency. Perhaps most importantly, they show that in foreignizing translation, the difference of the foreign text can only ever be figured by domestic values that differ from those in dominance.

Chapter 3. Nation

The translator who attaches himself closely to his original more or less abandons the originality of his nation, and so a third comes into existence, and the taste of the multitude must first be shaped towards it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(trans. André Lefevere)

The search for alternatives to fluent translation leads to theories and practices that aim to signify the foreignness of the foreign text. At the turn of the nineteenth century, foreignizing translation lacked cultural capital in English, but it was very active in the formation of another national culture—German. In 1813, during the Napoleonic wars, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lecture Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (“On the Different Methods of Translating”) viewed translation as an important practice in the Prussian nationalist movement: it could enrich the German language by developing an elite literature and thus enable German culture to realize its historical destiny of global domination. And yet, surprisingly, Schleiermacher proposed this nationalist agenda by theorizing translation as the locus of cultural difference, not the homogeneity that his ideological configuration might imply, and that, in various, historically specific forms, has long prevailed in English-language translation, British and American. Schleiermacher’s translation theory rested on a chauvinistic condescension toward foreign cultures, a sense of their ultimate inferiority to German-language culture, but also on an antichauvinistic respect for their differences, a sense that Germanlanguage culture is inferior and therefore must attend to them if it is to develop.

These contradictory tendencies are peculiar to the vernacular nationalist movements that swept through Europe during the early {100} nineteenth century, and they indicate that Schleiermacher’s translation theory can be detached from the ideological purpose it was intended to serve and be put to other uses. The central contradiction of vernacular nationalist movements is that they are at once made possible and vulnerable by language. As Benedict Anderson has observed, “seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed” because “language is not an instrument of exclusion: in principle, anyone can learn any language” (Anderson 1991:134, 146). Language forms the particular solidarity that is the basis of the nation, but the openness of any language to new uses allows nationalist narratives to be rewritten—especially when this language is the target of translations that are foreignizing, most interested in the cultural difference of the foreign text.