venuti

Nation 103some explicit references to “we Germans,” remarking that “ournation,” “because of its respect for what is foreign and itsmediating nature” (88; “seiner vermittelnden Natur” (243)),uniquely satisfies the “two conditions” necessary for foreignizingtranslation to thrive, namely “that understanding foreign worksshould be a thing known and desired and that the nativelanguage should be allowed a certain flexibility” (81). This is theunderstanding of foreign works sought by educated “Germans”like Schleiermacher, a university professor and minister in theReformed church, who feels that the German language possessesthe “flexibility” to support foreignizing translation since it isundeveloped, lacking a definite “mode of expression,” not yet“bonded” to the “classical,” a “partial mother tongue”: “ourlanguage, because we exercise it less owing to our Nordicsluggishness, can thrive in all its freshness and completelydevelop its own power only through the most many-sidedcontacts with what is foreign” (88). Since the category “foreign”here is determined by the educated, Schleiermacher is usingtranslation to mark out a dominant space for a bourgeois minorityin early nineteenth-century German culture.As Albert Ward observes of this period,literature was […] a predominantly bourgeois art, but it was only asmall part of this section of the community that responded mostreadily to the classical writers of the great age of German literature.[…] Writers like Goethe and Schiller found their public in theHonoratioren of the large towns, in the university-trainedprofessional men, the ministers of religion, teachers, doctors, andlawyers, in what might be termed the elite of middle-class society.“High literature” was then even more than now a thing for a smallgroup of scholars.(Ward 1974:128) 2Ward demonstrates the cultural and economic marginality of German“literature,” both classical and romantic, by referring to sizes ofeditions and sales figures amid some striking testimonies fromcontemporaries in the publishing industry:Karl Preusker, who came to Leipzig as a bookseller’s apprentice in1805, names in his autobiography the authors most in demand atthat time; the most classical (as we understand the term today) of