The Translator’s Invisibility

The passage is a reminder that Schleiermacher is setting up the understanding of language associated with a particular national cultural elite as the standard by which language use is made intelligible and judged. Hence, in the case of foreignizing translation, “the reader of the translation will become the equal of the better reader of the original only when he is able first to acquire an impression of the particular spirit of the author as well as that of the language in the work” (Lefevere 1977:80). Yet the author-orientation in Schleiermacher’s theory, his anthropomorphosis of translation from an intertextual to an intersubjective relationship, psychologizes the translated text and thus masks its cultural and social determinations. This is the much criticized move in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics: he tends to evaporate the determinate nature of the text by articulating a two-fold interpretive process, both “grammatical” and “technical or psychological.”[5] A grammatical explanation of the objective “connection between the work and the language” combines with a psychological explanation of the subjective “connection between the work and the thought involved in it” (Szondi 1986:103).

Schleiermacher, however, sometimes collapses this distinction, as in his aphorisms on hermeneutics from 1809–1810, which refer to “combining the objective and subjective so that the interpreter can put himself ‘inside’ the author” (Schleiermacher 1977:64). In the case of German foreignizing translation, then, the translator enables the German-language reader to understand the individuality of the foreign author so as to identify with him, thereby concealing the transindividual, German-language ideologies—cultural (literary elitism), class (bourgeois minority), national (“German”)—that mediate the foreignized representation of the foreign author. Such thinking about language and subjectivity is clearly more consistent with domesticating translation, oriented toward conformity with {114} target-language cultural values, and so can do little to question the dominance of transparent discourse in translation today. On the contrary, Schleiermacher’s psychologization of the text assumes transparency, the illusory presence of the foreign author in the translation.

There is another kind of thinking in his lecture that runs counter to this idealist strain, even if impossibly caught in its tangles: a recognition of the cultural and social conditions of language and a projection of a translation practice that takes them into account instead of working to conceal them. Schleiermacher sees translation as an everyday fact of life, not merely an activity performed on literary and philosophical texts, but necessary for intersubjective understanding, active in the very process of communication, because language is determined by various differences—cultural, social, historical:

For not only are the dialects spoken by different tribes belonging to the same nation, and the different stages of the same language or dialect in different centuries, different languages in the strict sense of the word; moreover even contemporaries who are not separated by dialects, but merely belong to different classes, which are not often linked through social intercourse and are far apart in education, often can understand each other only by means of a similar mediation.

(Lefevere 1977:68)

This observation clearly requires Schleiermacher to revise his nationalist concept of “the spirit of the language”: he understands it as “the repository of a system of observations and shades of mood,” but this is too monolithic and too psychologistic to admit the concept of “different classes,” a social hierarchy of cultural discourses, each so distinctively class-coded as to impede communication.

Schleiermacher even finds it “inevitable that different opinions should develop as to” foreignizing translation strategies, “different schools, so to speak, will arise among the masters, and different parties among the audience as followers of those schools,” but he ultimately individualizes the “different points of view,” reducing them to the translator’s consciousness, transforming cultural practices with social implications into self-centered eccentricities: “each one in itself will always be of relative and subjective value only” (ibid.:81).