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.
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, historicaclass="underline"
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.
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).
{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.
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.
[5]
For critiques of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics along these lines, see, for example, Palmer 1969:91–94 and Gadamer 1970:68–84. Two expositions of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics which make clear but do not critique its individualism are Forstman 1968 and Szondi 1986.