The Translator’s Invisibility

If, as Schleiermacher believed, a foreignizing translation method can be useful in building a national culture, forging a foreign-based cultural identity for a linguistic community about to achieve political autonomy, it can also undermine any concept of nation by challenging cultural canons, disciplinary boundaries, and national values in the target language. This is borne out by the English translation controversy that pitted Francis Newman’s foreignized Iliad (Newman 1856) against Matthew Arnold’s Oxford lectures On Translating Homer (1860): Newman’s theory of foreignization requires the development of translation strategies that deviate from Victorian standards of transparent discourse, but also from an Arnoldian concept of the national culture that favors an academic elite. The following genealogy reconstructs a foreignizing translation tradition, partly German, partly English, examines the specific cultural situations in which this tradition took shape, and evaluates its usefulness in combating domesticating translation in the present.

I

For Schleiermacher, “the genuine translator” is a writer

who wants to bring those two completely separated persons, his author and his reader, truly together, and who would like to bring the latter to an understanding and enjoyment of the former as correct and complete as possible without inviting him to leave the sphere of his mother tongue.

(Lefevere 1977:74)[1]

{101} Antoine Berman has called attention to the hermeneutical paradigm introduced here, the emphasis on translation as an object of textual interpretation and a means of interpersonal communication, “a method of intersubjective encounter” (“un processus de rencontre intersubjectif”) (Berman 1984:235). And this makes communication the criterion by which methodological choices are validated and authentic translation distinguished from inauthentic.

Schleiermacher in fact finds only two methods of effecting the domestic reader’s understanding of the foreign author: “Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him” (74).

Schleiermacher privileges the first method, making the target-language reader travel abroad, and he describes the authentic translator’s “aim” in social terms, with translation offering an understanding of the foreign text that is not merely ethnocentric, but relative to a specific social group:

the translator must therefore take as his aim to give his reader the same image and the same delight which the reading of the work in the original language would afford any reader educated in such a way that we call him, in the better sense of the word, the lover and the expert (“Leibhaber und Kenner/amateur et connaisseur”), the type of reader who is familiar with the foreign language while it yet always remains foreign to him: he no longer has to think every single part in his mother tongue, as schoolboys do, before he can grasp the whole, but he is still conscious of the difference between that language and his mother tongue, even where he enjoys the beauty of the foreign work in total peace.

(Lefevere 1977:76)