Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe

1. From Homer to Shakespeare: The Rise of Service Translation in the Late Eighteenth Century

1 From Homer to Shakespeare: The Rise of Service Translation in the Late Eighteenth Century The tradition of German authors who were active as translators dates back to well before the dawn of the Age of Goethe, but it was only near the end of the eighteenth century that the labors of authorship and translating came to be sufficiently differentiated for their combination in a single person to seem in any way remarkable. The translation norm in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been largely what is now referred to in German as Nachdichten, in English, retelling or paraphrase. The translator was at liberty to alter the tone, style, diction, or form of a work, even to delete certain passages or add new ones of his own if he thought it would improve the final product. In a very real sense, these early translators were themselves the authors of the texts they produced, and there were a number of prominent literary figures among them. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock translated Homer; Christoph Martin Wieland translated plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, and Shakespeare; Johann Christian Gottsched translated Racine’s Iphigenia, Leibniz’s Theodicee, and B. Le Bovier de Fontenelle; Luise Gottsched translated Addison, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, and Moliére’s Misanthrope; Johann Jacob Bodmer translated Milton ’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Dunciad, and Samuel Butler’s Hudibrast; and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing translated two plays by Diderot. 1 CHAPTER 1 2 The final decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a sea change in the dominant mode of translation, one that decisively shifted the relationship between authors and their translators. The intent of the original author began to determine the shape of the translated text, giving the author an unprecedented authority over the translator’s work. This change can be observed not only in individual translations but also in the critical and theoretical responses to them—reviews in which translators were criticized for their deviations from the original texts and, beginning in the early nineteenth century, theoretical essays arguing for the role to be played by faithful translations in the aesthetic education of a nation. The translator’s work acquired a new scholarly component previously reserved for translations from classical languages, a responsibility vis-à-vis both the language and the cultural context of the original text. The turn-of-the-nineteenth-century translator’s task, then, involved as much diligent study as poetic inspiration. These new translators were no longer authors in their own right for whom the foreign text was primarily a source of raw material and inspiration, but rather skilled craftsmen putting their talents at the service of a foreign author. They were, as I will be referring to them throughout this book, “service translators,” not because they did not themselves write original works of their own (many of them in fact did so) but because in the translation process they subordinated their talents to the authority, the perceived artistic intention, of another. The term service translation intersects with and complements Lawrence Venuti’s term foreignizing translation, without doubt one of the most powerful ideas about translation to emerge during the 1990s. Venuti’s foreignizing, described in his 1995 book The Translator’s Invisibility , was inspired both by the theories of Schleiermacher, which will be discussed at length later in this chapter, and by Antoine Berman’s notion of an “ethics of translation” that entails “bringing out, affirming , and defending the pure aim of translation as such,” “defining what ‘fidelity,’” and, above all, developing a “non-ethnocentric translation.” 1 “Foreignizing” translation stands in opposition to the “domesticating” sorts of translation whose aim is to “bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar,” and includes a range of strategies by means of which translators impact the development of literature in their own mother tongues. 2 Foreignizing most often involves the deliberate use of cultural references and linguistic structures specific to the work being translated and its original language, but the transla- THE RISE OF SERVICE TRANSLATION 3 tor can also develop different sorts of techniques for “disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language” so as to “signif[y] the difference of the foreign text.” 3 These techniques may consist of the use of unexpected vocabulary items or syntactical structures chosen to signal the translated text’s difference from its new literary and cultural context , or even simply a choice of...