The Translator’s Invisibility

literature was […] a predominantly bourgeois art, but it was only a small part of this section of the community that responded most readily to the classical writers of the great age of German literature. […] Writers like Goethe and Schiller found their public in the Honoratioren of the large towns, in the university-trained professional men, the ministers of religion, teachers, doctors, and lawyers, in what might be termed the elite of middle-class society. “High literature” was then even more than now a thing for a small group of scholars.

(Ward 1974:128)[2]

Ward demonstrates the cultural and economic marginality of German “literature,” both classical and romantic, by referring to sizes of editions and sales figures amid some striking testimonies from contemporaries in the publishing industry:

Karl Preusker, who came to Leipzig as a bookseller’s apprentice in 1805, names in his autobiography the authors most in demand at that time; the most classical (as we understand the term today) of {104} the authors on his list is Zschokke, “whereas the works of Schiller and Goethe were sold in only meagre quantities.”

(ibid.:132)

Schleiermacher, who associated with the leading German romantics, briefly shared a Berlin apartment with Friedrich Schlegel, and contributed to the Schlegel brothers’ small-circulation journal, the Athenaeum, was entirely in agreement with Goethe when developing his theory of foreignizing translation. In an essay on “Wieland’s brotherly memory” published in February of 1813, four months before Schleiermacher’s lecture, Goethe wrote:

there are two maxims in translation: one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought across to us in such a way that we can look on him as ours; the other requires that we should go across to what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its use of language, its peculiarities. The advantages of both are sufficiently known to educated people through perfect examples. Our friend, who looked for the middle way in this, too, tried to reconcile both, but as a man of feeling and taste he preferred the first maxim when in doubt.

(Lefevere 1977:39)