The search for alternatives to fluent translation leads to theories and practices that aim to signify the foreignness of the foreign text. At the turn of the nineteenth century, foreignizing translation lacked cultural capital in English, but it was very active in the formation of another national culture—German. In 1813, during the Napoleonic wars, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lecture Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (“On the Different Methods of Translating”) viewed translation as an important practice in the Prussian nationalist movement: it could enrich the German language by developing an elite literature and thus enable German culture to realize its historical destiny of global domination. And yet, surprisingly, Schleiermacher proposed this nationalist agenda by theorizing translation as the locus of cultural difference, not the homogeneity that his ideological configuration might imply, and that, in various, historically specific forms, has long prevailed in English-language translation, British and American. Schleiermacher’s translation theory rested on a chauvinistic condescension toward foreign cultures, a sense of their ultimate inferiority to German-language culture, but also on an antichauvinistic respect for their differences, a sense that Germanlanguage culture is inferior and therefore must attend to them if it is to develop.
These contradictory tendencies are peculiar to the vernacular nationalist movements that swept through Europe during the early {100} nineteenth century, and they indicate that Schleiermacher’s translation theory can be detached from the ideological purpose it was intended to serve and be put to other uses. The central contradiction of vernacular nationalist movements is that they are at once made possible and vulnerable by language. As Benedict Anderson has observed, “seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed” because “language is not an instrument of exclusion: in principle, anyone can learn any language” (Anderson 1991:134, 146). Language forms the particular solidarity that is the basis of the nation, but the openness of any language to new uses allows nationalist narratives to be rewritten—especially when this language is the target of translations that are foreignizing, most interested in the cultural difference of the foreign text.
If, as Schleiermacher believed, a foreignizing translation method can be useful in building a national culture, forging a foreign-based cultural identity for a linguistic community about to achieve political autonomy, it can also undermine any concept of nation by challenging cultural canons, disciplinary boundaries, and national values in the target language. This is borne out by the English translation controversy that pitted Francis Newman’s foreignized Iliad (Newman 1856) against Matthew Arnold’s Oxford lectures On Translating Homer (1860): Newman’s theory of foreignization requires the development of translation strategies that deviate from Victorian standards of transparent discourse, but also from an Arnoldian concept of the national culture that favors an academic elite. The following genealogy reconstructs a foreignizing translation tradition, partly German, partly English, examines the specific cultural situations in which this tradition took shape, and evaluates its usefulness in combating domesticating translation in the present.
For Schleiermacher, “the genuine translator” is a writer
who wants to bring those two completely separated persons, his author and his reader, truly together, and who would like to bring the latter to an understanding and enjoyment of the former as correct and complete as possible without inviting him to leave the sphere of his mother tongue.
{101} Antoine Berman has called attention to the hermeneutical paradigm introduced here, the emphasis on translation as an object of textual interpretation and a means of interpersonal communication, “a method of intersubjective encounter” (“un processus de rencontre intersubjectif”) (Berman 1984:235). And this makes communication the criterion by which methodological choices are validated and authentic translation distinguished from inauthentic.
Schleiermacher in fact finds only two methods of effecting the domestic reader’s understanding of the foreign author: “Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him” (74).
Schleiermacher privileges the first method, making the target-language reader travel abroad, and he describes the authentic translator’s “aim” in social terms, with translation offering an understanding of the foreign text that is not merely ethnocentric, but relative to a specific social group:
the translator must therefore take as his aim to give his reader the same image and the same delight which the reading of the work in the original language would afford any reader educated in such a way that we call him, in the better sense of the word, the lover and the expert (“Leibhaber und Kenner/amateur et connaisseur”), the type of reader who is familiar with the foreign language while it yet always remains foreign to him: he no longer has to think every single part in his mother tongue, as schoolboys do, before he can grasp the whole, but he is still conscious of the difference between that language and his mother tongue, even where he enjoys the beauty of the foreign work in total peace.
The translator aims to preserve the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, but only as it is perceived in the translation by a limited readership, an educated elite. This means, first, that translation is always ethnocentric: even when a translated text contains discursive peculiarities designed to imitate a foreign text, even when the translation seems, in Schleiermacher’s (English translator’s) words, “bent towards a foreign likeness” (78–79; “zu einer fremden Aehnlichkeit hinübergebogen” (227)), it never escapes the hierarchy of cultural values inscribed in the target language. These values mediate {102} every move in the translation and every target-language reader’s response to it, including the perception of what is domestic or foreign: André Lefevere’s English version—“bent toward a foreign likeness”— domesticates Schleiermacher’s German by submitting its syntax to the dominant fluent strategy, whereas “toward a foreign likeness bent,” a discursive peculiarity that resists fluency by marking the English translation as archaic for the contemporary Anglo-American reader, foreignizes English by bending it toward the German syntax.
Interestingly, to imitate the German this closely is not to be more faithful to it, but to be more English, that is, consistent with an English syntactical inversion that is now archaic.
Schleiermacher’s theory anticipates these observations. He was keenly aware that translation strategies are situated in specific cultural formations where discourses are canonized or marginalized, circulating in relations of domination and exclusion. Thus, the translation method that cultivates discursive peculiarities to imitate the foreignness of the foreign text “cannot thrive equally well in all languages, but only in those which are not the captives of too strict a bond of classical expression outside of which all is reprehensible”; the ideal site for this method is “languages which are freer, in which innovations and deviations are tolerated to a greater extent, in such a way that their accumulation may, under certain circumstances, generate a certain characteristic mode of expression” (79–80). This linguistic and cultural freedom is complexly determined: not only is it defined against the “bonded languages” of other national cultures, but the “innovations and deviations” of foreignizing translation are defined against the norm set by other translation discourses in the target-language culture. And since Schleiermacher’s advocacy of the foreignizing method was also an advocacy of discourses specific to an educated elite, he was investing this limited social group with considerable cultural authority, going so far as to assign it a precise social function—to “generate a certain characteristic mode of expression,” developing a national language, “influencing the whole evolution of a culture” (80–81; “die gesammte Geistesentwikkelung” (231)). Here it becomes clear that Schleiermacher was enlisting his privileged translation method in a cultural political agenda: an educated elite controls the formation of a national culture by refining its language through foreignizing translations.
[1]
English renderings of Schleiermacher’s lecture are taken from Lefevere 1977:67–89, French renderings from “Des différentes méthodes du traduire,” trans. Berman 1985:279–347. Quotations of the German follow Schleiermacher 1838:207–245.