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110 The Translator’s Invisibilitywhat is foreign and its mediating nature, to carry all the treasures offoreign arts and scholarship, together with its own, in its language,to unite them into a great historical whole, so to speak, which wouldbe preserved in the centre and heart of Europe, so that with the helpof our language, whatever beauty the most different times havebrought forth can be enjoyed by all people, as purely and perfectlyas is possible for a foreigner. This appears indeed to be the realhistorical aim of translation in general, as we are used to it now.(Lefevere 1977:88)Thus, readers of the canon of world literature would experience thelinguistic and cultural difference of foreign texts, but only as adifference that is Eurocentric, mediated by a German bourgeoiselite. Ultimately, it would seem that foreignizing translation doesnot so much introduce the foreign into German culture as use theforeign to confirm and develop a sameness, a process of fashioningan ideal cultural self on the basis of an other, a cultural narcissism,which is endowed, moreover, with historical necessity. Thismethod of translation “makes sense and is of value only to a nationthat has the definite inclination to appropriate what is foreign”(ibid.:80).The ideological ensemble in Schleiermacher’s cultural politicsprecipitates contradictory permutations (elite literature/nationalculture, bourgeois minority/“Germany,” foreignizing/Germanizing),so we should not be surprised to find him speaking for and againstforeign imports in German culture—in that same turbulent year, 1813.His bourgeois nationalism shapes both his advocacy of “many-sidedcontacts with the foreign” in the translation lecture and hisxenophobic condescension in the patriotic sermon: “Every nation, mydear friends, which has developed a particular, or clearly definedheight is degraded also by receiving into it a foreign element”(Schleiermacher 1890:73–74). This assumes, contrary to the lecture,that German culture has already attained a significant level ofdevelopment, presumably in classical and romantic literature, whichmust be protected from foreign contamination and imposeduniversally, through a specifically German foreignization of worldliterature. Schleiermacher’s translation theory intervenes in “diegesammte Geistesentwikkelung,” a phrase that may seem restrictednationally in Lefevere’s English, “the whole evolution of a culture”(Lefevere 1977:81), but is shown to have worldwide application inBerman’s French: “le processus global de la formation de I’esprit”