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112 The Translator’s InvisibilityThe “spirit of the language” determines every speech act, is binding onevery subject, but part of that action nevertheless answers only to anindividual “being.” At one point, the priority of language over subjectis tellingly reversed, with the author becoming the sole origin of the“spirit”: the readers of a foreignizing translation are said to“understand” when they “perceive the spirit of the language whichwas the author’s own and [are] able to see his peculiar way of thinkingand feeling” (ibid.:72). As Berman points out, Schleiermacher’s lecturemanifests the late eighteenth-century shift from representation toexpression as the conceptual paradigm for language, and hence subjectdisplaces object as the basis of interpretation (Berman 1984:233).Schleiermacher’s thinking about language is informed by romanticexpressive theory, grounded in the concept of free, unifiedconsciousness that characterizes bourgeois individualism.As his exposition proceeds, it turns to metaphor and illustration,defining the “spirit of the language” in ethnic terms, yet withoutabandoning the transcendental subject:We understand the spoken word as an act of the speaker onlywhen we feel at the same time where and how the power oflanguage has taken hold of him, where in its current the lightningof thought has uncoiled, snake-like, where and how the rovingimagination has been held firm in its forms. We understand thespoken word as a product of language and as an expression of itsspirit only when we feel that only a Greek, for instance, couldthink and speak in that way, that only this particular languagecould operate in a human mind this way, and when we feel at thesame time that only this man could think and speak in the Greekfashion in this way, that only he could seize and shape thelanguage in this manner, that only his living possession of theriches of language reveals itself like this, an alert sense formeasure and euphony which belongs to him alone, a power ofthinking and shaping which is peculiarly his.(Lefevere 1977:72)The metaphors—“lightning,” “snake-like,” “roving”—continue theindividualistic strain by depicting the subject as a coherent essence,radically independent of language, given to serpentine, potentiallysubversive “thought,” possessing a free “imagination” that takeson various accidental “forms” (obviously, “lightning” and “snakelike”also resonate with mythological and theological allusions,