The Translator’s Invisibility

At the same time, however, Schleiermacher’s concept of “free idiosyncratic combinatory powers” signals a move toward an autonomous subject whose “thoughts and emotions” transcend linguistic determinations. “On the one hand,” Schleiermacher asserts, every man is in the power of the language he speaks, and all his thinking is a product thereof. […] Yet on the other hand every freely thinking, mentally self-employed human being shapes his own language. […] Therefore each free and higher speech needs to be understood twice, once out of the spirit of the language of whose elements it is composed, as a living representation bound and defined by that spirit and conceived out of it in the speaker, and once out of the speaker’s emotions, as his action, as produced and explicable only out of his own being. (ibid.:71) {112} The “spirit of the language” determines every speech act, is binding on every subject, but part of that action nevertheless answers only to an individual “being.” At one point, the priority of language over subject is tellingly reversed, with the author becoming the sole origin of the “spirit”: the readers of a foreignizing translation are said to “understand” when they “perceive the spirit of the language which was the author’s own and [are] able to see his peculiar way of thinking and feeling” (ibid.:72). As Berman points out, Schleiermacher’s lecture manifests the late eighteenth-century shift from representation to expression as the conceptual paradigm for language, and hence subject displaces object as the basis of interpretation (Berman 1984:233). Schleiermacher’s thinking about language is informed by romantic expressive theory, grounded in the concept of free, unified consciousness that characterizes bourgeois individualism.

As his exposition proceeds, it turns to metaphor and illustration, defining the “spirit of the language” in ethnic terms, yet without abandoning the transcendental subject:

We understand the spoken word as an act of the speaker only when we feel at the same time where and how the power of language has taken hold of him, where in its current the lightning of thought has uncoiled, snake-like, where and how the roving imagination has been held firm in its forms. We understand the spoken word as a product of language and as an expression of its spirit only when we feel that only a Greek, for instance, could think and speak in that way, that only this particular language could operate in a human mind this way, and when we feel at the same time that only this man could think and speak in the Greek fashion in this way, that only he could seize and shape the language in this manner, that only his living possession of the riches of language reveals itself like this, an alert sense for measure and euphony which belongs to him alone, a power of thinking and shaping which is peculiarly his.

(Lefevere 1977:72)

The metaphors—“lightning,” “snake-like,” “roving”—continue the individualistic strain by depicting the subject as a coherent essence, radically independent of language, given to serpentine, potentially subversive “thought,” possessing a free “imagination” that takes on various accidental “forms” (obviously, “lightning” and “snakelike” also resonate with mythological and theological allusions, {113} especially in a lecture by a classical scholar and Protestant minister—but these possibilities will not be pursued here). The most striking move in this passage may well be Schleiermacher’s example, which initiates a discontinuous series of specifications and revisions, putting the individual in command, first, of a national culture with a literary canon (“the riches of language”; cf. the international “treasures of foreign arts and scholarship” [ibid.:88]), then a specifically literary, even scholarly appreciation of the Greek language (“measure and euphony”), and finally a cognitive “power” that is “peculiarly his,” self-expressive and fundamentally self-determining.