Writing the foreign: Studies in German romantic translation

This dissertation examines the rise of "foreignizing" translation in Germany around the turn of the nineteenth century. This mode of translation, as envisioned by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, offers an alternative to the "domesticizing" translations prevalent throughout the eighteenth century. In their attempts to make translated works read naturally in German, earlier translators tended to erase the cultural, historical and linguistic otherness of original texts. In contrast, foreignizing translation sought to preserve the sense of unfamiliarity that made these foreign works so appealing to romantic writers. This trend in translation theory and practice constitutes, I argue, the principle component of "romantic" literary translation and the beginning of translation in the modern sense.;I discuss three of the outstanding works of translation produced in Germany during this period. August Wilhelm Schlegel's translations of seventeen of Shakespeare's plays display a previously unprecedented fidelity to the meter, sense and tone of individual lines in a German informed by the language of the original while still fulfilling the aesthetic expectations of the period. Friedrich Holderlin's translations of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antiagone are instances of foreignizing translation taken to such an extreme as to produce a literary language that seems a hybrid of German and Greek. And Heinrich von Kleist's translation of Moliere's play Amphitryon combines the most meticulous reconstruction of the original in all its linguistic details with the boldest subversion of its underlying world-view.;Romantic translation acknowledges that translation is by no means a neutral form of mediation but rather one which alters the original in various ways affecting not only grammatical structures but also the cultural assumptions underlying the language of a text. Translation that calls attention to these markers of national difference is thus an important vehicle of aesthetic education, a project at once literary and political. My dissertation highlights the importance of these features for twentieth century ideas about the inseparability of literary works from their linguistic and cultural contexts.