venuti

100 The Translator’s Invisibilitynineteenth century, and they indicate that Schleiermacher’s translationtheory can be detached from the ideological purpose it was intended toserve and be put to other uses. The central contradiction of vernacularnationalist movements is that they are at once made possible andvulnerable by language. As Benedict Anderson has observed, “seen asboth a historical fatality and as a community imagined throughlanguage, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open andclosed” because “language is not an instrument of exclusion: inprinciple, anyone can learn any language” (Anderson 1991:134, 146).Language forms the particular solidarity that is the basis of the nation,but the openness of any language to new uses allows nationalistnarratives to be rewritten—especially when this language is the targetof translations that are foreignizing, most interested in the culturaldifference of the foreign text.If, as Schleiermacher believed, a foreignizing translation method canbe useful in building a national culture, forging a foreign-basedcultural identity for a linguistic community about to achieve politicalautonomy, it can also undermine any concept of nation by challengingcultural canons, disciplinary boundaries, and national values in thetarget language. This is borne out by the English translationcontroversy that pitted Francis Newman’s foreignized Iliad (Newman1856) against Matthew Arnold’s Oxford lectures On Translating Homer(1860): Newman’s theory of foreignization requires the development oftranslation strategies that deviate from Victorian standards oftransparent discourse, but also from an Arnoldian concept of thenational culture that favors an academic elite. The following genealogyreconstructs a foreignizing translation tradition, partly German, partlyEnglish, examines the specific cultural situations in which thistradition took shape, and evaluates its usefulness in combatingdomesticating translation in the present.IFor Schleiermacher, “the genuine translator” is a writerwho wants to bring those two completely separated persons, hisauthor and his reader, truly together, and who would like to bringthe latter to an understanding and enjoyment of the former ascorrect and complete as possible without inviting him to leave thesphere of his mother tongue.(Lefevere 1977:74) 1