venuti

102 The Translator’s Invisibilityevery move in the translation and every target-language reader’sresponse to it, including the perception of what is domestic or foreign:André Lefevere’s English version—“bent toward a foreign likeness”—domesticates Schleiermacher’s German by submitting its syntax to thedominant fluent strategy, whereas “toward a foreign likeness bent,” adiscursive peculiarity that resists fluency by marking the Englishtranslation as archaic for the contemporary Anglo-American reader,foreignizes English by bending it toward the German syntax.Interestingly, to imitate the German this closely is not to be morefaithful to it, but to be more English, that is, consistent with an Englishsyntactical inversion that is now archaic.Schleiermacher’s theory anticipates these observations. He waskeenly aware that translation strategies are situated in specificcultural formations where discourses are canonized ormarginalized, circulating in relations of domination and exclusion.Thus, the translation method that cultivates discursive peculiaritiesto imitate the foreignness of the foreign text “cannot thrive equallywell in all languages, but only in those which are not the captives oftoo strict a bond of classical expression outside of which all isreprehensible”; the ideal site for this method is “languages whichare freer, in which innovations and deviations are tolerated to agreater extent, in such a way that their accumulation may, undercertain circumstances, generate a certain characteristic mode ofexpression” (79–80). This linguistic and cultural freedom iscomplexly determined: not only is it defined against the “bondedlanguages” of other national cultures, but the “innovations anddeviations” of foreignizing translation are defined against the normset by other translation discourses in the target-language culture.And since Schleiermacher’s advocacy of the foreignizing methodwas also an advocacy of discourses specific to an educated elite, hewas investing this limited social group with considerable culturalauthority, going so far as to assign it a precise social function—to“generate a certain characteristic mode of expression,” developing anational language, “influencing the whole evolution of a culture”(80–81; “die gesammte Geistesentwikkelung” (231)). Here itbecomes clear that Schleiermacher was enlisting his privilegedtranslation method in a cultural political agenda: an educated elitecontrols the formation of a national culture by refining its languagethrough foreignizing translations.Schleiermacher’s lecture permits a much more detailed socialand historical specification of this agenda. He concludes with