The Translator’s Invisibility

This vision of Germany as a union of relatively autonomous principalities was partly a compensation for the then prevailing international conflict, and it is somewhat backward-looking, traced with a nostalgia for the domestic political organization that prevailed before the French occupation. Napoleon had introduced social innovations achieved by the revolution, abolishing feudalism in Prussia and promoting “enlightened” despotism. Schleiermacher himself was a member of a bourgeois cultural elite, but his nationalist ideology is such that it admits aristocracy, monarchy, even an imperialist tendency—but only when they constitute a national unity resistant to foreign domination.

Presented to the Prussian academic establishment on 24 June 1813, at the height of the conflict with France, Schleiermacher’s lecture constructs a role for translation in a nationalist cultural politics. His theory of foreignizing translation should be seen as anti-French because it opposes the translation method that dominated France since neoclassicism, viz. domestication, making the foreign author travel abroad to the target-language reader. When surveying the limited acceptance of foreignizing translation in Western culture, Schleiermacher reserves his most withering sarcasm for France:

{108} The ancients obviously translated little in that most real sense and most moderns, deterred by the difficulties of true translation, also seem to be satisfied with imitation and paraphrase. Who would want to contend that nothing has ever been translated into French from the classical languages or from the Germanic languages! But even though we Germans are perfectly willing to listen to this advice, we should not follow it.

(Lefevere 1977:88)

French exemplifies those languages that are “captives of too strict a bond of classical expression outside of which all is reprehensible,” especially the innovations and deviations introduced by foreignizing translation. In a satiric dialogue from 1798, A.W.Schlegel had already made explicit the nationalist ideology at work in identifying French culture with a domesticating translation method:

Frenchman: The Germans translate every literary Tom, Dick, and Harry. We either do not translate at all, or else we translate according to our own taste.

German: Which is to say, you paraphrase and you disguise.

Frenchman: We look on a foreign author as a stranger in our company, who has to dress and behave according to our customs, if he desires to please.

German: How narrow-minded of you to be pleased only by what is native.

Frenchman: Such is our nature and our education. Did the Greeks not hellenize everything as well?

German: In your case it goes back to a narrow-minded nature and a conventional education. In ours education is our nature.

(ibid.:50)[4]

Schlegel’s dialogue indicates the metaphysical underpinnings of German nationalism, its assumption of a biological or racial essence from which the national culture issues: “education is our nature.” This agrees both with Schleiermacher’s view that “our nation” possesses a “mediating nature” and with the organic metaphor he uses to describe the effect of foreignizing translation on German: