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  • Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe
  • Marilyn Gaddis Rose (bio)
Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe. By Susan Bernofsky. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005. ix + 252 pp. $49.95.

Susan Bernofsky's four essays are related but discrete. Each is a model of twenty-first century, German oriented analysis in the speculative tradition of translation studies. As such, the essays will appeal to related, but potentially discrete, audiences: translation studies scholars who are sympathetic to the speculative tradition, and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germanists and comparatists. It is also possible that even these prospective readers may be initially misled by the principal title, which itself requires in group analysis by readers in the speculative tradition. (Bernofsky's essays will be of considerably less interest to readers who espouse the empirical tradition currently dominating translation studies. These readers typically point out that such theorizing affects chiefly literary and scholarly discourse, accounting for only a small portion of the translating required by society.)

Ever since Luther justified his approach to translating the Bible, German language scholars have produced some of the most thoughtful, and in many respects definitive, accounts of how and why translations should be realized. The practical results of the theorizing, always provocative as in the case of Hölderlin—or Luther himself—have often been stunning successes like the Schlegel Tieck Shakespeare. (Bernofsky gives Caroline Schlegel and Dorothea Tieck their centuries' overdue translator credits.)

Despite the terms in vogue, in the end it always comes down to whether translations should target the audience, hence be "free," domesticated, culturally assimilated; or whether translations should defer to the source, hence be "literal," foreignized (Lawrence Venuti), or culturally "thick" (Anthony Appiah). For the most part, readers have not only been forgiving of recognized authors like Robert Lowell or Seamus Heaney imposing their own style when they translate, but even expect and excuse such liberties. Some of us may even call Samuel Beckett's French text his first drafts.

What Bernofsky brings to bear to the general discussions in translation theory since George Steiner's After Babel of 1975 (whom and which she does not mention) is her concept "service translation." By this term, she means a translation that, like a foreignized translation, respects the source language [End Page 365] and its rhetorical tradition but is sufficiently within the target readers' repertory of expectations to be acceptable. She stresses that a "service translation" is a goal, not a product (42). She could have added that some of the most acclaimed translators of the past quarter-century (e.g., Breon Mitchell, Gregory Rabassa, Margaret Sayers Peden, William Weaver), seem to have done this with a combination of erudition, intuition, and talent.

The marked advantage of her term "service translation" is that it will accommodate translation to and from non Indo European languages. Her own experience translating the Japanese author Yoko Tawada via Yumi Selden must have assisted her. Although the first expression of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis can be credited to a Goethe contemporary, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was studying a Javanese language at the time of his death, the German author theorists whom Bernofsky examines (like Voss, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher) and her contemporary theorists (like Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti) make pronouncements which are not simply Western oriented. However, such foreignizing strategies could also result in exoticized texts which undermine the desired ethical objectives. (Sir Richard Burton and Edward Fitzgerald come to mind.)

When Bernofsky moves to Kleist as a translator of Molière, Hölderlin as a translator of Pindar and Sophocles, and Goethe as translator of Diderot, she moves from thought provoking controversy to demonstrated brilliance. She reveals by personal example that not only does translating provide an "intimate act" of reading, but also that line by line comparisons and concomitant speculating on the intervening interliminal semantics and phonetics enriches texts on both sides of the act of translation. Likewise, this approach provides feasible insights on the translators' own readings. For readers whose knowledge of German and French is token, Bernofsky provides meticulous translations of all her quotations. It goes without saying that her own "back" translations also enrich...

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