The Translator’s Invisibility

In siding with this “feeling and taste” for “what is foreign,” Schleiermacher was valorizing an elite bourgeois cultural discourse of literary refinement against the larger, more heterogeneous culture of the middle and working classes. “The average middle-class reader,” Ward points out, “wanted works which were within his own experience and range of emotion, reflecting his own interests and not conflicting with the demands of his morality” (Ward 1974:133). Whereas Schleiermacher’s lecture on translation is quite scholarly in citing only Greek and Latin writing (Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, Grotius, and Leibniz), the wider middle-class readership favored Gothic tales, chivalric romances, realistic novels both sentimental and didactic, biographies of exemplary men, travel literature. This audience was reading translations as well, but the greatest percentage consisted of translations from French and English novels, including the work of Choderlos de Laclos and Richardson. Schleiermacher himself had translated Plato, while other romantics—Voss, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hölderlin—translated Homer, Sophocles, Dante, and Shakespeare. They were very much aware that they were translating {105} for a relatively narrow audience, even a coterie, and like Schleiermacher, they saw this social fact as a value that improved their “literature” and endowed it with cultural authority. Friedrich Schlegel boasted that “[readers] are forever complaining that German authors write for such a small circle, often in fact for themselves as a group. I find this a good thing. German literature gains more and more in spirit and character because of it” (Ward 1974:191 n.46).

Schlegel’s comment shows that this is not only a bourgeois, but a nationalist concept of literature—“German.” And Schleiermacher’s theory of foreignizing translation reveals a similar ideological configuration: it is also pitched against a German nobility that was not literary and had long lain under French cultural domination. Aristocratic culture eschewed scholarly research and wide reading in past and contemporary literature; “the few courts which did take an active interest in literary affairs,” Ward notes, “were characterized by a predominantly bourgeois atmosphere” (Ward 1974:128). In aristocratic education, “the accent was on languages, particularly French, and often to such an extent that many noblemen could express themselves better in that language than in their mother tongue” (ibid.:123). In a letter from 1757, the aesthetician and dramatist Johann Christoph Gottsched described an audience with Frederick II, during which he informed the Prussian king of the serious threat to literary culture posed by the Gallicized nobility:

When I said that German writers did not receive sufficient encouragement, as the aristocracy and the courts spoke too much French and understood too little German to be able to grasp and appreciate fully anything written in German, he said: that is true, for I haven’t read no German book since my youth, and je parle comme un cocher, but I am an old fellow of forty-six and have no time for such things.

(ibid.:190n.)

Some fifty years later, Schleiermacher’s lecture on translation engages in the cultural struggle for a German literature with an equally bold criticism of Frederick II. Schleiermacher represents the king, however, not as Gottsched’s anti-intellectual oaf, but as a German intellect limited by his utter dependence on French: