The Translator’s Invisibility

The ideological ensemble in Schleiermacher’s cultural politics precipitates contradictory permutations (elite literature/national culture, bourgeois minority/“Germany,” foreignizing/Germanizing), so we should not be surprised to find him speaking for and against foreign imports in German culture—in that same turbulent year, 1813. His bourgeois nationalism shapes both his advocacy of “many-sided contacts with the foreign” in the translation lecture and his xenophobic condescension in the patriotic sermon: “Every nation, my dear friends, which has developed a particular, or clearly defined height is degraded also by receiving into it a foreign element” (Schleiermacher 1890:73–74). This assumes, contrary to the lecture, that German culture has already attained a significant level of development, presumably in classical and romantic literature, which must be protected from foreign contamination and imposed universally, through a specifically German foreignization of world literature. Schleiermacher’s translation theory intervenes in “die gesammte Geistesentwikkelung,” a phrase that may seem restricted nationally in Lefevere’s English, “the whole evolution of a culture” (Lefevere 1977:81), but is shown to have worldwide application in Berman’s French: “le processus global de la formation de l’esprit” {111} (Berman 1985:333). And only Berman discloses the idealist metaphysics at work in the German text by choosing “esprit” for “Geist.”

Schleiermacher’s theory is shaky ground on which to build a translation ethics to combat ethnocentrism: his lecture does not recognize any contradiction in asserting that “our nation” is distinguished by “respect for what is foreign” while envisioning the geopolitical domination of a German bourgeois cultural elite. It also does not recognize antinomies in its thinking about language and human subjectivity which are likewise determined by a bourgeois nationalism. Schleiermacher evinces an extraordinarily clear sense of the constitutive properties of language, those that make representation always an appropriative activity, never transparent or merely adequate to its object, active in the construction of subjectivity by establishing forms for consciousness. The “proper field” of the translator, Schleiermacher states, consists of

those mental products of scholarship and art in which the free idiosyncratic combinatory powers of the author and the spirit of the language which is the repository of a system of observations and shades of moods are everything, in which the object no longer dominates in any way, but is dominated by thoughts and emotions, in which, indeed, the object has become object only through speech and is present only in conjunction with speech.

(Lefevere 1977:69–70)