venuti

116 The Translator’s Invisibilitythe determinate nature of language emerges as the “shapingforce” of subjects. In the interval, the materiality of language issocialized: no longer “raw,” it contains “new forms” invented by“the individual,” but exceeding the function they were intendedto serve, the communication of “consciousness,” because theyhave been derived from pre-existing forms used by “others.” Thisindicates that subjectivity is neither self-originating nor the originof language and culture, that its cultural values (e.g. “scholarshipand art”) are pre-given and constantly reworked (“elaboration”),and that therefore the subject can be considered self-determiningonly insofar as it ranks these values—or revises them and altersan established ranking. The discursive innovations anddeviations introduced by foreignizing translation are thus apotential threat to target-language cultural values, but theyperform their revisionary work only from within, developingtranslation strategies from the diverse discourses that circulate inthe target language.Schleiermacher’s concept of foreignizing translation constitutes aresistance to dominant cultural values in German at the turn of thenineteenth century. The foreign in foreignizing translation then meanta specific selection of foreign texts (literary, philosophical, scholarly)and a development of discursive peculiarities that opposed bothFrench cultural hegemony, especially among the aristocracy, and theliterary discourses favored by the largest segment of readers, bothmiddle- and working-class. Schleiermacher’s translation projectdepends on an idealist concept of literature that is at once elitist andnationalist, individualistic yet socially determinate, defined inopposition to capitalist economic practices: “the interpreter plies histrade in the field of commerce; the translator proper operates mainly inthe fields of art and scholarship” (Lefevere 1977:68).It is this ideological ensemble that must be jettisoned in any revivalof foreignizing translation to intervene against the contemporaryascendancy of transparent discourse. Today, transparency is thedominant discourse in poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction,bestsellers and print journalism. Even if the electronic media haveweakened the economic, political, and cultural hegemony of print inthe post-World War II period, the idealist concept of literature thatunderwrites that discourse continues to enjoys considerableinstitutional power, housed not only in the academy and in the literarycultures of various educated elites, but in the publishing industry andthe mass-audience periodical press. The distinction that