The Translator’s Invisibility

{115} It is cultural difference, however, that guides Schleiermacher’s prescriptions for the foreignizing translator, for the invention of discursive peculiarities to signify the foreignness of the foreign text. The translator must reject the discourse that is used most widely in the target-language culture, what he calls the “colloquial” (78; “alltäglich” (227)), refusing “the most universally appealing beauty each genre is capable of” in the language and instead risking the compassionate smile of “the greatest experts and masters who could not understand his laborious and ill-considered German if they did not supplement it with their Greek and Latin” (79). Once again, the cultural difference marked by Schleiermacher’s foreignizing translator runs between an educated elite and the uneducated majority: when the translator bends his language to a foreign likeness, he is not doing it with “each genre,” “universally,” but with literary and scholarly texts in Greek and Latin, so that only “experts and masters” will be able to “understand” his deviant use of language. Schleiermacher’s translator avoids the “colloquial,” unlearned language use, popular literary forms.

And yet, despite the questionable ideological determinations of Schleiermacher’s lecture—its bourgeois individualism and cultural elitism, its Prussian nationalism and German universalism—it does contain the (inadvertent) suggestion that foreignizing translation can alter the social divisions figured in these ideologies, can promote cultural change through its work on the target language:

every freely thinking, mentally self-employed human being shapes his own language. For in what other way—except precisely by means of these influences—would it have developed and grown from its first raw state to its more perfect elaboration in scholarship and art? In this sense, therefore, it is the living power of the individual which creates new forms by means of the plastic material of language, at first only for the immediate purpose of communicating a passing consciousness; yet now more, now less of it remains behind in the language, is taken up by others, and reaches out, a shaping force.

(Lefevere 1977:71)

This passage reverses its logic. At first language is taken to exist in an unmediated “raw state,” worked by a transcendental subject who “shapes his own language,” who is the origin of linguistic and cultural innovation and development. By the end, however, {116} the determinate nature of language emerges as the “shaping force” of subjects. In the interval, the materiality of language is socialized: no longer “raw,” it contains “new forms” invented by “the individual,” but exceeding the function they were intended to serve, the communication of “consciousness,” because they have been derived from pre-existing forms used by “others.” This indicates that subjectivity is neither self-originating nor the origin of language and culture, that its cultural values (e.g. “scholarship and art”) are pre-given and constantly reworked (“elaboration”), and that therefore the subject can be considered self-determining only insofar as it ranks these values—or revises them and alters an established ranking. The discursive innovations and deviations introduced by foreignizing translation are thus a potential threat to target-language cultural values, but they perform their revisionary work only from within, developing translation strategies from the diverse discourses that circulate in the target language.