Our great king received all his finer and higher thoughts in a foreign language, which he had most intimately appropriated for this field.
{106} He was incapable of producing in German the literature and philosophy he produced in French. It is to be deplored that the great preference for England which dominated a part of the family could not have taken the direction of familiarizing him from childhood on with the English language, whose last golden age was then in bloom, and which is so much closer to German. But we may hope that he would have preferred to produce literature and philosophy in Latin, rather than in French, if he had enjoyed a strict scholarly education.
Here the vernacular nationalism in Schleiermacher’s cultural politics becomes more evident: the king is taken to task not so much because he is not “scholarly” (he is in fact portrayed as being genuinely interested in “literature and philosophy”), but because he doesn’t write in German, or in a language “closer to German” than French. Whereas Gottsched seems to be lamenting the dearth of literary patronage (“sufficient encouragement”) because the Prussian aristocracy is Francophone, Schleiermacher is more concerned about the unequal cultural production in German and French: “He was incapable of producing in German.”
Schleiermacher’s criticism of the king is a nationalist protest against French domination in Germany, and it is consistent with his intense activity in the Prussian movement for German unification during the Napoleonic wars. As Jerry Dawson makes clear,
the war between France and Prussia in 1806, with the resulting collapse of the Prussian armies and the humiliating peace terms dictated to Prussia by Napoleon, proved to be the final factor needed to turn [Schleiermacher] to nationalism with a complete and almost reckless abandon.
“Germany” did not actually exist at this time: West of the Rhine were several petty principalities, which, after 1806, Napoleon organized into a “confederation”; east was the dominant German-speaking monarchy, Prussia, now dominated by the French. The Prussian defeat caused Schleiermacher to lose his appointment at the University of Halle, and he fled to Berlin, the Prussian capital, where he lectured at the university and preached at various churches. His sermons urged political and military resistance against the French armies, developing {107} a cultural concept of nationality based on the German language and legitimized with Protestant theology. In 1813, three months before his lecture on translation at the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften and eight months before Napoleon was finally defeated at the Battle of Leipzig, Schleiermacher delivered a sermon entitled “A Nation’s Duty in a War for Freedom,” in which he represented the war with France as a struggle against cultural and political domination. If victorious, he exhorted the congregation, “we shall be able to preserve for ourselves our own distinctive character, our laws, our constitution and our culture” (Schleiermacher 1890:73).
In June, the month of his lecture, Schleiermacher wrote a letter to Friedrich Schlegel in which his nationalism turned utopian:
My greatest wish after liberation, is for one true German Empire, powerfully representing the entire German folk and territory to the outside world, while internally allowing the various Länder and their princes a great deal of freedom to develop and rule according to their own particular needs.
This vision of Germany as a union of relatively autonomous principalities was partly a compensation for the then prevailing international conflict, and it is somewhat backward-looking, traced with a nostalgia for the domestic political organization that prevailed before the French occupation. Napoleon had introduced social innovations achieved by the revolution, abolishing feudalism in Prussia and promoting “enlightened” despotism. Schleiermacher himself was a member of a bourgeois cultural elite, but his nationalist ideology is such that it admits aristocracy, monarchy, even an imperialist tendency—but only when they constitute a national unity resistant to foreign domination.
Presented to the Prussian academic establishment on 24 June 1813, at the height of the conflict with France, Schleiermacher’s lecture constructs a role for translation in a nationalist cultural politics. His theory of foreignizing translation should be seen as anti-French because it opposes the translation method that dominated France since neoclassicism, viz. domestication, making the foreign author travel abroad to the target-language reader. When surveying the limited acceptance of foreignizing translation in Western culture, Schleiermacher reserves his most withering sarcasm for France:
{108} The ancients obviously translated little in that most real sense and most moderns, deterred by the difficulties of true translation, also seem to be satisfied with imitation and paraphrase. Who would want to contend that nothing has ever been translated into French from the classical languages or from the Germanic languages! But even though we Germans are perfectly willing to listen to this advice, we should not follow it.
French exemplifies those languages that are “captives of too strict a bond of classical expression outside of which all is reprehensible,” especially the innovations and deviations introduced by foreignizing translation. In a satiric dialogue from 1798, A.W.Schlegel had already made explicit the nationalist ideology at work in identifying French culture with a domesticating translation method:
Frenchman: The Germans translate every literary Tom, Dick, and Harry. We either do not translate at all, or else we translate according to our own taste.
German: Which is to say, you paraphrase and you disguise.
Frenchman: We look on a foreign author as a stranger in our company, who has to dress and behave according to our customs, if he desires to please.
German: How narrow-minded of you to be pleased only by what is native.
Frenchman: Such is our nature and our education. Did the Greeks not hellenize everything as well?
German: In your case it goes back to a narrow-minded nature and a conventional education. In ours education is our nature.
Schlegel’s dialogue indicates the metaphysical underpinnings of German nationalism, its assumption of a biological or racial essence from which the national culture issues: “education is our nature.” This agrees both with Schleiermacher’s view that “our nation” possesses a “mediating nature” and with the organic metaphor he uses to describe the effect of foreignizing translation on German:
{109} Just as our soil itself has no doubt become richer and more fertile and our climate milder and more pleasant only after much transplantation of foreign flora, just so we sense that our language, because we exercise it less owing to our Nordic sluggishness, can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only through the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign.
Schleiermacher’s nationalist theory of foreignizing translation aims to challenge French hegemony not only by enriching German culture, but by contributing to the formation of a liberal public sphere, an area of social life in which private individuals exchange rational discourse and exercise political influence:
If ever the time should come in which we have a public life out of which develops a sociability of greater merit and truer to language, and in which free space is gained for the talent of the orator, we shall be less in need of translation for the development of language.
[3]
For surveys of German nationalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see Sheehan 1989:371–388 and Johnston 1989:103–113.
[4]
Lefevere’s choice of “the Germans translate every literary Tom, Dick, and Harry” to render Schlegel’s “die Deutschen sind ja Allerwelts-übersetzer” is typical of his strong reliance on fluent strategies that draw on contemporary English idioms.