Schleiermacher’s concept of foreignizing translation constitutes a resistance to dominant cultural values in German at the turn of the nineteenth century. The foreign in foreignizing translation then meant a specific selection of foreign texts (literary, philosophical, scholarly) and a development of discursive peculiarities that opposed both French cultural hegemony, especially among the aristocracy, and the literary discourses favored by the largest segment of readers, both middle- and working-class. Schleiermacher’s translation project depends on an idealist concept of literature that is at once elitist and nationalist, individualistic yet socially determinate, defined in opposition to capitalist economic practices: “the interpreter plies his trade in the field of commerce; the translator proper operates mainly in the fields of art and scholarship” (Lefevere 1977:68).
It is this ideological ensemble that must be jettisoned in any revival of foreignizing translation to intervene against the contemporary ascendancy of transparent discourse. Today, transparency is the dominant discourse in poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, bestsellers and print journalism. Even if the electronic media have weakened the economic, political, and cultural hegemony of print in the post-World War II period, the idealist concept of literature that underwrites that discourse continues to enjoys considerable institutional power, housed not only in the academy and in the literary cultures of various educated elites, but in the publishing industry and the mass-audience periodical press. The distinction that {117} Schleiermacher perceived between the field of commerce and the fields of art and scholarship has been eroded—if it ever existed as more than a fiction designed to consolidate literature as a transcendental cultural concept. Transparent discourse is eminently consumable in the contemporary cultural marketplace, which in turn influences publishing decisions to exclude foreign texts that preempt transparency.
Schleiermacher shows that the first opportunity to foreignize translation occurs in the choice of foreign text, wherein the translator can resist the dominant discourse in Anglo-American culture by restoring excluded texts and possibly reforming the canon of foreign literatures in English. Schleiermacher also suggests that foreignizing translation puts to work a specific discursive strategy. He opposes the foregrounding of the signified by which fluent translation produces the effect of transparency; for him a translation can be foreignized only by approximating the play of signifiers in the foreign text: “the more closely the translation follows the turns taken by the original, the more foreign it will seem to the reader” (Lefevere 1977:78).
Schleiermacher’s lecture provides the tools for conceptualizing a revolt against the dominance of transparent discourse in current English-language translation. Yet the effects of this dominance have included, not only the widespread implementation of fluent strategies, but the marginalization of texts in the history of translation that can yield alternative theories and practices—like Schleiermacher’s lecture. With rare exceptions, English-language theorists and practitioners of English-language translation have neglected Schleiermacher. His lecture has been recognized as a key “modern” statement in translation theory only recently, and it was not translated into English until 1977.[6] And even its translator, André Lefevere, felt compelled to question Schleiermacher’s value: “his requirement that the translation should ‘give the feel’ of the source language must […] strike us increasingly as odd” (Lefevere 1977:67). Lefevere argued that translation should be domesticating, as “most theoreticians” recommended, and he specifically referred to Eugene Nida’s version of this theory, quoting Nida to criticize Schleiermacher:
In effect, we are faced here with a not-illogical and very spirited defence of what we know now as “translationese” or, with another phrase: “static equivalence,” and which is still very {118} much with us, in spite of the fact that most theoreticians would now subscribe to the concept of dynamic equivalence, which “aims at complete naturalness of expression and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture.”
Schleiermacher’s concept of foreignizing translation seems odd to Lefevere only because the latter prefers to submit to the contemporary regime of fluency—in Nida’s words, “complete naturalness of expression.” The canonicity of fluent translation during the post-World War II period coincides with the emergence of the term “translationese” to designate unidiomatic language in a translated text (OED). Lefevere approves of Nida’s “dynamic equivalence,” a concept that now, with the increasing recognition of Schleiermacher’s contemporary importance, must be viewed as an egregious euphemism for the domesticating translation method and the cultural political agendas it conceals. Because this method is so entrenched in English-language translation, Lefevere is unable to see that the detection of unidiomatic language, especially in literary texts, is culturally specific: what is unidiomatic in one cultural formation can be aesthetically effective in another. Any dismissive treatment of Schleiermacher maintains the forms of domestication in English-language translation today, hindering reflection on how different methods of translating can resist the questionable values that dominate Anglo-American culture. Schleiermacher can indeed offer a way out.
With Schleiermacher’s lecture untranslated, however, this way was open to few English-language translators during the nineteenth century. A translator could of course formulate a theory of foreignizing translation, whether or not inspired by the German tradition, but the theory would be a response to a peculiarly English situation, motivated by different cultural and political interests. Such was the case with Francis Newman (1805–1897), the accomplished brother of the Cardinal. In the 1850s, Newman challenged the main line of English-language translation, arguing that “Cowper’s attempt to translate Homer had proved as great a failure as Pope’s” and suggesting that “a sensible change is taking place, from our recent acquaintance with the {119} extent to which the Germans have carried poetical translation” (Newman 1851:371).[8] This “acquaintance” with the German tradition apparently made Newman the first in a small group of Victorian translators who developed foreignizing strategies and opposed the English regime of fluent domestication.
A classical scholar who taught for many years, first at Manchester New College, then University College, London, Newman was a prolific writer on a variety of topics, some scholarly, others religious, many of urgent social concern. He produced commentaries on classical texts (Aeschylus, Euripides) and dictionaries and vocabularies for oriental languages and dialects (Arabic, Libyan). He wrote a spiritual autobiography and many religious treatises that reflected his own wavering belief in Christianity and the heterodox nature of that belief (e.g. Hebrew Theism: The Common Basic of Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism). And he issued a steady stream of lectures, essays, and pamphlets that demonstrated his intense involvement in a wide range of political issues. Newman argued for decentralized government, land nationalization, women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery. He criticized English colonialism, recommending government reforms that would allow the colonized to enter the political process. His Essays on Diet advocated vegetarianism, and on several occasions he supported state enforcement of sobriety, partly as a means of curbing prostitution.
[6]
Steiner 1974:234
[7]
In this passage Lefevere is quoting Nida 1964:159. Lefevere later reaffirmed his view of Schleiermacher’s theory by asserting that “the second part of his famous maxim, ‘move the author towards the reader,’ [is] the only viable one” (1990:19). Lefevere’s latest work shows a much greater concern for the cultural and social determinants of translation (Lefevere 1992a), although he feels that a foreignizing method like Schleiermacher’s is obsolete
because the audience for it has almost ceased to exist[,] the educated reader who was able to read original and translation side by side and, in doing so, to appreciate the difference in linguistic expression as expressing the difference between two language games.
My argument, however, is that foreignizing translation can appeal to diverse cultural constituencies, monolingual as well as educated, but also that foreignizing translation discourses can be perceived without recourse to a comparison with the foreign text (even if such a comparison is certainly illuminating).
[8]
The account of Newman’s career and opinions presented in the following pararaphs draws on the DNB, Sieveking 1909, and Newman’s threevolume selection of his many lectures, pamphlets, and articles (Newman 1869, 1887, and 1889).