The Translator’s Invisibility

{109} Just as our soil itself has no doubt become richer and more fertile and our climate milder and more pleasant only after much transplantation of foreign flora, just so we sense that our language, because we exercise it less owing to our Nordic sluggishness, can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only through the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign.

(ibid.:88)

Schleiermacher’s nationalist theory of foreignizing translation aims to challenge French hegemony not only by enriching German culture, but by contributing to the formation of a liberal public sphere, an area of social life in which private individuals exchange rational discourse and exercise political influence:

If ever the time should come in which we have a public life out of which develops a sociability of greater merit and truer to language, and in which free space is gained for the talent of the orator, we shall be less in need of translation for the development of language.

(ibid.:89)

Yet Schleiermacher’s public sphere manifests the contradiction that characterized the concept from its emergence in eighteenth-century aesthetics. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl puts it, “although in principle the capacity to form an accurate opinion is considered present in everyone, in practice it is limited to the educated” (Hohendahl 1982:51). So in Schleiermacher: although the work of foreignizing translation on the German language is seen as creating a national culture free of French political domination, this public space is open explicitly for “the talent of the orator,” a literary elite.

Because this is a strongly nationalist elite, it employs foreignizing translation in a remarkable project of German cultural imperialism, through which the linguistic community “destined” for global domination achieves it. Here nationalism is equivalent to universalism:

An inner necessity, in which a peculiar calling of our people expresses itself clearly enough, has driven us to translating en masse; we cannot go back and we must go on. […] And coincidentally our nation may be destined, because of its respect for {110} what is foreign and its mediating nature, to carry all the treasures of foreign arts and scholarship, together with its own, in its language, to unite them into a great historical whole, so to speak, which would be preserved in the centre and heart of Europe, so that with the help of our language, whatever beauty the most different times have brought forth can be enjoyed by all people, as purely and perfectly as is possible for a foreigner. This appears indeed to be the real historical aim of translation in general, as we are used to it now.

(Lefevere 1977:88)

Thus, readers of the canon of world literature would experience the linguistic and cultural difference of foreign texts, but only as a difference that is Eurocentric, mediated by a German bourgeois elite. Ultimately, it would seem that foreignizing translation does not so much introduce the foreign into German culture as use the foreign to confirm and develop a sameness, a process of fashioning an ideal cultural self on the basis of an other, a cultural narcissism, which is endowed, moreover, with historical necessity. This method of translation “makes sense and is of value only to a nation that has the definite inclination to appropriate what is foreign” (ibid.:80).