bearing on the dialectic of the foreign and the domestic, Schleiermacher argues that the ideal translator is not one who has mastered the foreign language so fully that that he is completely at home in it. Such a translator, he suggests, can produce in the reader an impression of the text that resembles that a native speaker of the language would have—that is, one in which the text seems natural and familiar. But the best translator, Schleiermacher maintains, is one who is never fully at home in the foreign language, and seeks to evoke in the reader an experience like his own, that is, the experience of someone for whom the foreign language is simultaneously legible and alien. Schleiermacher’s ideal translator operates in the space between languages and cultures, between the domestic and the foreign—for only by contrast with the domestic can the foreignness of the foreign be maintained. Like the reader/writer in Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, he commutes between the secure pleasures of the familiar and the seductive bliss of its destruction…
…Schleiermacher claimed that there are only two methods of translation: “Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.”
~ Steven Rendall, “Changing Translation” (review of Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility in Comparative Literature)
I done gone and stuck my nose in other people’s blogs, then opened my big mouth, briefly entertaining a discussion on related themes with fantastical writer Ekaterina Sedia in the comments section to one of her recent posts.
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