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Chapter 3NationThe translator who attaches himself closely to his original more orless abandons the originality of his nation, and so a third comes intoexistence, and the taste of the multitude must first be shapedtowards it.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (trans. André Lefevere)The search for alternatives to fluent translation leads to theories andpractices that aim to signify the foreignness of the foreign text. At theturn of the nineteenth century, foreignizing translation lacked culturalcapital in English, but it was very active in the formation of anothernational culture—German. In 1813, during the Napoleonic wars,Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lecture Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden desUebersetzens (“On the Different Methods of Translating”) viewedtranslation as an important practice in the Prussian nationalistmovement: it could enrich the German language by developing anelite literature and thus enable German culture to realize its historicaldestiny of global domination. And yet, surprisingly, Schleiermacherproposed this nationalist agenda by theorizing translation as the locusof cultural difference, not the homogeneity that his ideologicalconfiguration might imply, and that, in various, historically specificforms, has long prevailed in English-language translation, British andAmerican. Schleiermacher’s translation theory rested on achauvinistic condescension toward foreign cultures, a sense of theirultimate inferiority to German-language culture, but also on anantichauvinistic respect for their differences, a sense that Germanlanguageculture is inferior and therefore must attend to them if it isto develop.These contradictory tendencies are peculiar to the vernacularnationalist movements that swept through Europe during the early