Antoine berman pdf

Negative and positive will allow for a critique of translation. Negative analytic is concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hyper textual translations translation where deformation is freely exercised.

Translator cannot be freed by becoming aware of these unconscious forces, yet why not? Only languages that are cultivated can be translated, but they are the ones that put up the strongest resistance to translation. Deforming tendencies interfere on the domain of literary prose. Language-based cosmos is in some aspects shapeless, which has generally been described negatively. Often, prose is considered bad writing by a lack of control in their texture. Rationalization — concerned with syntactical structures of the original, starting with punctuation.

It rearranges sentence sequences in relation to a certain idea of discursive order. Free sentences run risks of rationalizing contraction. Rationalization destroys the element of drive towards concreteness in prose. It means abstraction. Clarification — corollary of rationalization, concerned with level of clarity in words and meanings. The translation should be clearer than the original. Explicitation can be a manifestation of something not openly visible, but instead concealed in the original.

Power of illumination of manifestation is a high power in translation. However, sometimes explicitation can explain something in the original that was never meant to be explained. Expansion — translations tend to be longer than original. Sometimes the unraveling can be considered empty in a translation.

Sometimes the addition truly does not add anything. But because of the lexical family to which it belongs, I it means much more and it is applied to many more registers: thus it is possible to speak of the Bildung of an artwork, the degree of its 'forrnauon.

It is no exaggeration to state that the concept summarizes the conception which the German culture of the time formed of itself, the UJa ' in u1bicb the culture interprets its mode ofunfolding. We shall attempt to show that translation as the mode of relation to the foreign is strucrurally inscribed in Bildung. And, in a subsequent chapter, we shall see that, though it is common to all writers and thinkers of the age, Bildung receives its canonical form with Goethe. Through Bildung an Individual, a people, a nation, but also a language.

In the speculative language of German Idealism, the beginning may be the particularity which lacks the determlnanon of the universal, the unity from which the moment of scission and opposition is absent, the panic indifference lacking allarticulanon, the thesis without its antithesis or synthesis, the unmediated immediate, the chaos which has not yet become world, the position deprived of the moment of reflection.

But at the same time, this process is an unfolding of freedom. Because Bildung is a temporal, and therefore historical, process, it is articulated in periods, stages, moments, ages.

Thus there are "epochs" of humanity, of culture, of history, of thought, of language, of an, and of individuals. These epochs are often dual, but most frequently triadic. At bottom, aU Bildung is triadic-which is to say that its structure is essentially homologous to what Heidegger defined as the prtnciple of unconditioned subjectivity of the German absolute metaphysics of Hegel and Schelling, according to whose teaching the bemg-wnh-nself of spirit requires a return to itself which.

In this sense, BiJdzlng is s process ofself-formation concerned with a "same" unfolding itself to attain its full dimension. And probably the highest concept German thinking of the age created to interpret this process is that of experience. For experience is the only notion capable of embracing all others, it is a broadening and an identification, a passage from the particular to the universal, the experience leprew e] of scission, of the finite, of the conditioned.

It is voyage ReiSe and migration Wanderung. Its essence is to throw the "same" into a dimension that will transform it. It is the movement of the "same" which, changing, flndsuself to be "other. Bildung and tbe Demand of Translation 45 But as voyage. For Idealism, the accomplished experience is the becoming-itself of the other and the becoming-other of the same: He lifted the veil of the Goddess at Sais.

But what did he see? Thus Navalis in The Disciples at Sais. But experience would only be. Which is why experience L4i always the "crossing of appearances, '0 in proportion as it discovers that appearances are not only other han they are, but that alterity is not as radical as it seem".

Ac, the experience ll! Every human being who is cultivated and who cultivates himself contains a novel within himself. Hence the polarities, in Goethe and the Romantics, which define the novel: the everyday and the miraculous one of the faces of strangeness , the near and the far. Which is why no stage em be omiued, the present one is necessarily connected to the previous as well as the following one.

Navalis: "passive nature of me novelistic her ";tJ "One does not do, one does what can be done. This pa.. And culturally it is not without consequences. The precedence of passivity in the movement of experience entails that the relation of the same 10 the othercannot be a relation of appropriauon. To be sure, Navalis, well before Hegel and Nietzsche, developed a theory of appropriation, of Zueignung. But this mode of oral approprla[ion, to the extent that it is a becoming-same of [he foreign as well.

Romantic agility and Goethean curiosity are not Will to Power. This brief and schematic characterization of Bildung shows immediately that ilis closely connected u'ilh the mocement of translation-sfor translation. In a movement governed by the 13'" of appropri ation , there could never be an expert- ence of the foreign, but simply an annexation or reduaion of the other to the same. Which is precisely how Nietzsche. And Roman antiquity itself: hCM' forcibly and at the same time how naively.

As poets. Here, the movement of the imperial expansion of culture is strictly equivalent with the movement which brings the meanings to itself as captives. But this conquering coming and going has nothing to do with the cyclical movement of experience as it was expressed by F. Schlegel: Which is why, since he is certain to always find himself again, man incessantly goes outside of htmself in order to fmd the complement of his Innermost being in that of another.

The play of communication and of bringing together is the occupation and the force of life. The essence of spirit is to determine itself and, In a perpetual alternation, [0 go outside of Itself and return to itself.

Setzung a positing of oneself beyond oneselfl? The Importance of translation for German culture at the end of the eighteenth century, then, is profoundly connected to the conception it has of itself, mat is to say of experience-a conception opposed in every respect to those of ancient Rome or classicist France. It may be seen as the incapacity to be one's own center to oneself.

Schlegel, and Schleiermacher. Holderlln, Schleiermacher, and A W Schlegel witnesses the rise of folklore. There are no limits to our intellectual progress, but we must posit for ourselves transitional limits ad bunc actum-to besimultaneously limited and unlimited.

II should have traveled through all three or four continents of humanity, not in order to round otT the edges of individuality. Nevertheless, it maintains an essential connection with what is called in German Urbild original, archetype and Vorhild. Thi4i also refers to its experiential nature: he who seeks himself in foreign pans is confronted with figures which function initially as models. Such are the people Wilhelm Meister encounters during the years of his apprenticeship: first he attempts to identify with them, but they eventually teach him to find himself.

TI1US A. Schlegel speaks of that genuine imitation which i'i not.. No other culture. Compared to antiquity. For German classicism. This means hat it must strive to attain a degree of culture equivalent to that of rhe ancients, notably by appropriating their poetic forms. His translations aim at translating the Greeks as faithfully as possible, hut also at submitting the still "unformed" German language to the "beneficial" yoke of Greek metrical forms.

Goethe: voss, who wilJ never be praised enough. But whoever can now see what has happened, what versanhty has come [0 the Germans, what' rhetorical. Accordingly, irs cultural precedence L4i total. But at the same time, Greece seems to conceal something that is profoundly foreign to modem culture, and which probably refers to its relation to m..

SChlegel and Nietzsche, both philologers by training, have felt this instinctively; F. SChlegel: 'Xe are closer 0 the Roman'i and can understand them better than the Greeks.

People are rather fond of listening to declamations abou; the Greeks. But if someone were to come and say. To Nietzsche as well as 0 the RomantiCS, it is clear that the mixing of genres, parody, satire, the recourse to masks, the indefinite play with matter and form that characterizes Alexandrian literature and Latin poetry are at bottom infinitely more attractive than the Greek purity.

Schlegel does not fail to mention this irresistible affinity of Romantidsm with Latin eclecticism: The fondness of Alexandrian and Roman poets for difficult and unpoetical themes is really a result of their grand thought that all should be poeticized: not as a conscious artistic intention. Hence, probably, the taste for syncretism and the profusion of "synacnviues" advocated by Novalis and F. Schlegel sympoetry symphilosophy; syncriucismjwhere the dialogic element is less Important than the plural practice of mix- ing.

But under these circumstances the beautiful unity of the concept of antiquity falls [0 pieces: an abyss opens between Greeks and Romans as well as between Greeks and Moderns.

So much so that a certain filiation appears: romanity-Romance cultures-novelistic roma'JeSllUeJ forms-c-romannclsm. Schlegel and Novalis were perfectly aware of this: Our ancient nationality was, it seems to me, authentically Roman Germany lsRome, as a country. The universal polnics and the instinctive tendency of the Romans are 0 be found as well in the German people. Conversely, me classics Goethe, Schiller and Holderlin principally translate me Greeks, the former because these are models for them, me latter because the Greeks.

In their cultural trajectory. Starting from this it would be possible to draw a map of the German translations of the time, a differential, selective, hierarchical and, as it were, disjunctive map. One needs only to think of Wagner.

Whereas the lives of the Romantics and Holderlin seem devoured by speculative and poetic fever. Goethe's life leaves a considerable pan [0 what might he called natural existence, which in his case included numerous love affairs, a family life. Schiller characterized him as "the most communicable of men. True, criticism and speculation are absent from this ample palet, even though he wrote numerous critical articles and texts of a theoretical appearance. Racine, Corneille, as well as numerous translations of Italian, English, Spanish.

To be sure. But they are witness to an almostconstant practice to which he was disposed by a knowledge oflanguages developed from early chlldhood , a practice accompanied by a mass of exceptionally rich reflections. Funhermore, Goethe inserted fragments of translations in two of his other works, Werther and Wilbeln, Meister, which is by no means a coincidence.

Nor is thts aU: He is a translator-poet who also, and very soon, became a translated poet. And in him, being translated nourished an absolutely fasdnating reflection. The faa that he devoted a poem-'"Ein Gleichnis"-to having been able to read himself in another language, and that, from ] on, he dreamed of publishing a comparative edition of the Danish, English.

Goethe's statements on translation. It is impossible 0 offer an exhaustive study of this lnterpretatlon here. In effect. Translarion is the action sui generis that incarnates, Illustrates, and also makes possible these exchanges. There is a rnultlplicity of acts of translation that assure the plenitude of vital and natural interactions among individuals, peoples, and nations, interactions in which they construct their own identity and their relations to the foreign.

Goethe's interest proceeds frorn this vital and originary phenomenon of exchange to its concrete manifestations. Generally speaking, his thinking tends to remain on the level of these concrete manifestations, even if he always uncovers "the Eternal One-ness, which manifests it'ielf in Goethe: Translation and World Literature 55 many ways:'l Goethe rests his view on the double principle of interac- tion and. Alsoveryearly, he copied the following text by Kant for his own use: Principle of simultaneity according to the law of reciprocal action or community.

All substances, to the extent that they can be perceived as simultaneous In space. Man is not a teaching, but a llvlng, acting, and working being. Only in effect and countereffect do we find pleasure. YSity must be added: In every particular. Translation and Welt! What, then, is world literature? Not the totality of past and present hteratures accessible to the encyclopedic gaze, nor the more limited totality of works-like those of Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare-that have attained universal status and have become the patrimony of "culuvated" humanity Goethe's notion of WellliteratllT is an historical concept concerning the modern situation of the relation among diverse national or regional literatures.

In that sense, it would be bener to speak of the age ofu10rid literature-which is the age in which literatures are no longer satisfied with interacting a phenomenon that has always more or less existed , but explicitly conceive their existence and their unfolding in the framework of an incessantly intensified lnteracuon. Ae, Strich observes. It Isan intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples.

To illustrate his idea Goethe himself was particularly fond of using such images taken from the world of trade and commerce.

It is rather a matter of living. Thls contemporanelry or simultaneity. Goethe writes further: If we go hack in history, we find personalities everywhere with whom we would agree and others with whom we could certamly be in contlia. But the most important element, after all, i.

Though it does not entail the effacement of differences, it requires their intensified Interaction. In the new space announced here, translations play a primordial role. In Goethe writes to Carlyle concerning the English translation of his Torquato Tasso: I should like to have your opinion on how this Tasso can be considered English. You would gre-atly oblige me by enlightening me on this matter: for it is just these connections between original and translation that express most clearly me relationship of nation 0 nation and that one must above all understand if one wishes to encourage a Goethe's thought here oscillates between two poles: to promote a generalized intertranslation, or to consider German language and culture as the privileged medium of world literature.

In both cases. And thus everytranslator should be considered a mediator striving to promote this universal spiritual exchange and laking it upon himself to make this generalizedtrade go forward. For whatever may be said of the inadequacy of translation. The Koran says: God has given to each people a prophet In their own language. In this way each translator is a prophet to his people. It may be said without exaggerating that the German lan- guage, for Goethe. Which is precisely what is expressed in one of his conversations with Eckermann.

Goethe's wordshere have a certain flatness, whichsuggests that he did not totally believe in what he said: It C"dnnot be denied. I am not speaking here of French-that is the languageof conversation. Goethe is aware of the primordial role of translation for German culture: In the same way France formed its language to be the "language of the world" of intellectual and diplomatic, even aristocratic.

And this is a process which, for Goethe. But this historical starement-swhich can be found in Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and Novalis-does not necessarily entail the idea that there should be a unique medium of WellliterahU, a kind of "chosen people" of world literature and translation. This implies above all that translation be everywhere considered an essential, dignified task, and, in fact, belonging to the luerature of a nation.

That Goethe considered it as such is attested by a fairly striking anecdote. If BiJdung is the pr cess in which the relation to the self becomes firmer through the relation to the foreign and produces a balance of both relations by the gradual passage from the infertile closure upon oneself to living interaction, translation, being an exemplification of this relation, is marked by stages, stages which may be regarded as historical periods or as moments and modes destlned to repeat themselves indefinitely in the history of a culture: There are three kinds of translation.

The first kind acquaints us with the foreign on our own terms; a simple prosaic translation is best in this respeCL Asecond epoch follows in which [the translator] only tries to appro. The French use thls method in their translations ofall poetic works. Just as the French adapt foreign words to their pronunciation, lust so do they treat feellngs, thoughts, even objects; for every foreign fruit they demand a counterfeit grown on their own soil, Since it is impossible to linger either in the perfect or the impertea and one change must of necessity follow, we experienced the Goethe: Transkuton and World Luerature 59 third epoch.

But since these three epochs are repeated and Inverted in every llterature: since. But it is about time now for someone to offer usa translation of the third type. It remains to explain in a few words why we called the third epoch me final one. A translation which anempts to identify itself with the original in the end comes close to an interlinear version and greatly enhances our understanding of the original; this in turn leads us, compels us as it were.

J':' This famous text provides the most advanced expression of the classtca! German thought on translation. Neither Schleiermacher nor Humboldt have been able to go beyond it.

Some comment is called for. From the outset Ooethe present'; the three modes of translation as historical modes, each connected With a cenain relation to the foreign.

Even though the third mode is called the "highest" and the "final," it does not therefore simply constitute a mode dialectically superior to the two others, particularly the second. It israther the "highest'! From mode one to mode three, the entire trans-lation of what is one's WJ1 to what is foreign has been completed, and for Goethe it is evident that no other modes are possible. Furthermore, depending on the different domains of translauon, these modes may coexist.

The translation of oriental texts, for instance, did not take place at [he same time as the translations of the Greeks or of Shakespeare. But what keeps Goethe from privileging the third mode, as we would rend to do in the twentieth century are rwo points not approached by the text of the Divan but mentioned else- Tbe Bxperience of the Foreigrl 60 where, The first is the relation of rranslation , he writes [0 Chancellor von MOller: [0 the untranslatable.

One must attain the untranslatable and respect it; for it is precisely there that the value and the character of each language lie. The third mode of translation of the Divan would well seem to engage in an immediate struggle with the foreign language and tend, precisely. Goethe intends to respect this difference which is the meaning of his humanism , but also to relativize it to the extent that, even though it constltues the value and the originality of the foreign language, it is not necessarily what is essential to it.

Along thls line he judged the contemporary attempts-notably by A. W Schlegel-of translations in verse. Schlegel's entire translator's gospel is based on this. I value both rhythm and rhyme, whereby poetry first becomes poetry, but the pan that is really.

But it is true that by putting forth the "pure and perfect content" as the "acting" and "formative" principle, he has amply justified mis type of translation. In another passage of Dicbtung und WabrbeiIin which Luther and the Bible are also under conslderatlon-c-he develops his view of the "content" of the work: Goetbe. Translation and World Lueraiure 61 What matters most" in all that is handed down 0 us, parncularly in writing, is the ground, the inner being, the meaning.

Thus, language, dialect, idiosynchracies, style, and finally writing, should be regarded as the body of any work of the spirit. From this the relative nature of a translation attached to the differences of the work may be deduced. Conversely, when form becomes' the absolutely privileged element, as it is with the Romamlcs, poetic. Goethe's triadic scheme is put in a different light when it is confronted with other texts, those devoted to Bildung.

There can be no doubt that the majority of the reflecnons Goethe devoted [0 translation are situated in this framework. A text written shortly before his death, in , entitled Epocben geselliger Bildung periods of social, or sociahie, formation , distinguishes four moments of Bildung. The first one corresponds more or less to the "virgln" stale mentioned by Herder. TIle three others correspond to [he modes of the Dioan. From a more or less crude mass, narrow circles of cultured people are formed.

These circles are closed to the outside, They therefore lend to keep to the mother tongue, which is why this stage may rightfully be called the idyllic. These narrow circles multiply I would call this stage the social or the cio«: In. Finally the circles continue to multiply and to expand in such a way that they touch and prepare to merge. They understand that their wishes and their intentions are the same, but they are still unable to dissolve the barriers that divide them. This stage might provisionally be called the more general.

In order 10 become unuersai, that goodwill and good fortune of which we may pride ourselves at present are needed. A higher influence W3S necessary to accomplishwhat we livetoday: the Wlificalion of all cultured circles which up to now merely touched.

Foreign literatures are all set on an equal footing with our own, and we do not lag behind in the course of the world. Everyartist, like every man, is only a single being and will therefore lean towardsone side. Which is why he must also absorb, as far as possible, in theory and in practice, what is opposite 0 his nature. TIle frivolous should seek out the serious and the earnest, the serious should have a light and comfortable being before his eyes.

But conversely German "versatility'! The relation, then, to the foreign is characterized by the fact that one looks in it for a difference that is nself determined. Which entails that the relation to the foreign is above all a relation of contemporaneity: there can be no commerce and interaction with the dead. Goetbe: Transtattor and World Literature Still, the contemporaneity of alter egos needs to be grounded in a third term, an almost absolute term to which all can refer.

This is the Greek culture. For Goethe, the Greeks represent the pinnacle of humanity and Bildung. In the same way one must always come back to Nature, in the cycle of Bildung one must always come back to the Greeks, The poet states this to Eckermann on 31 January But, while we thus value what is foreign.

J"I The reference to Calderon or the Nibelttngen is a barely disguIsed criticism to the romantic multiple overture towards foreign literatures. Greekness is that manifestation of the Eternally One, the originary Man, against which all cultures may be measured, whether they are Germanness, Frenchness, Italianness, or even Latinness.

All the rest is "historical," either in the meaning of past a depreciatory me-aning for Goethe or in the meaning of contemporary Here again. Which is why Goethe looked upon he mass of romantic translations with increasing ill humor, since, as Strich rightly emphasizes, they concerned neither the Greeks nor the contemporaries. Petrarch, Cervantes, Shakespeare. Calderon, the old Indian writers. Their contemporaries in other nalions remained almost excluded from the circle of interest of German Romanticism, It knew time only as a sequence, at bottom only as a past, not as sunuhanenyand co-slmultaneuyas a temporal community of people liVing together in the present.

The fact is all the more striking since. From his point of 64 Tbe Bxperience of tte foreign view. Once more, Goethe's reserve is all the more notable since the Dioan reflections propose a view of the modes of translation that is barely different from those of A.

Schlegel and Schleiermacher, But the OberselZungstalenl and the romantic will to translate everything are fundamentally foreign to Goethe. That there is an essential dilTerence between the translation of contemporanesand the translation of authors from the past is something Goethe could [each us to appreciate better.

From the past, only the works remain. From the present, we have the authors and all that is implted by it in terms of a possible hvmg interaction. But there is more. Contemporaneity means that the translated language may also translate, that tbe translator may also be translated, that the translated language, author.

In other words: If translating is considered an interaction between two languages. COl1ternporaneiry produces a double effect. The translating language is modified which is what is always observed in he first place , but so is the translated language. Goethe must be credited for having considered the whole of the play of translating and being translated in the space of contemporaneity for having measured itspsvchologlcal, literary, national. Noui translation is taken ltp in the tas: cycle of being translated.

This phenomenon is in turn reproduced on all levels of cultural trans- lation criticism, borrowings, influences," etc. Thus, Goethe offers us a global view of the mutual relations of what is one's own and what is foreign, in which equal consideration is given to the question of what one's own is for the foreign, and thus of it. With the arrival of world literature, the relation becomes proportionally more complex as the different cultures henceforth seek to contemplate themselves in the mirror of others and to look in it for something they cannot perceive by themselves, The captuauon of oneself no longer passes merely through UJe captioation of tJJe foreign, but Ibrough the captuauon 11 ' IIJe foreign of oneself It is Goethe's version of Hegel's mutual recognition.

Panicipation indicates a certain type of relation which is both active mtervention and engagemerit, the reverse of influence, Influenx, a passive relation always severely judged by Goethe, connecting it to the disease of the same name, Influenza. Thus he states that carlyle shows a peaceful. For to live and to aa is also to choose sides and to attack. And while this conflict often disturbs the horizon of an interior literature for many years.

Thus foreign literatures become the mediators in the internal confliers of national literatures and offer them an image of themselves they could not otherwise have. Goethe played this role, for example. When a Latin translation of Hermann and Dorothea was brought to Goethe, he made the following comment.

J I had not seen this poem, cherished by all. Here, in a much more formed language, I saw my feelings and my poetry ldenucal 3.

Ci well as changed; I WdS especially struck by the fact that Iatln is a language lhat rends towards the concept and that transforms what, in German, hides itself in an innocent way.. For it happens meire often than we think, that a nation draws vigor and strength rom a work and absorbs it fully into its own inner life, that it can take no funher pleasure in it and obtain no further nourishment from it.

This is particularly the case with the Germans. They are prone 0 excessive enthusiasm and, hy too frequent repetitions of something they like, destroy some of its qualities. It is therefore good for them to see one of their 0""'0 literary works reborn in translation. But this is not the case. In order to produce this impression of wondec, the translation must have effeclively placed the work in a mirror of itself that "regenerates" and "revives" it.

It is in this sense that being translated is fundamental tor a work and for its author in the second place -because it places the work in an other time, a more originary lime, a time in which it seems as new as it was at its debut.

In this sense, it becomes again highly readable for those who already know it authors or readers in its mother tongue. This essence of translation for theathers certainly remains mysterious, but it already indicates that the significance of translation does not consist in mediating foreign works only for the readers who do not know the language of the original.

These mysteries are signaled by these simultaneously spatial and temporal notions of mirror reflection, regeneration. Without this "parttdpanon" of the foreign. In this sense, it needs to he translated, to reappear rejuvenated in the mirror of a foreign language in order to be able to offer its face of wonder to the readers of its mother tongue, Le.

Deprived of their maternal soil, they begin to wnher, He then puts them in fresh water. The one who picks the flowers is the translator. Rernoved from its soil, the poem runs the risk of fading. But the translator puts it in the fresh cup of his own language, and it blossoms once again, as if it were still on its maternal soil. TIlls is an awe-inspiring marvel, since neither the poem nor the flowers are stilt on their native soil. Even though the blossoming of flowers symbolizes what happens to the poem in translation, it is the poem in its entirety that is a symbol, Or again: Translauon is a symbol, A symbol of what?

Of the marvel. To be sure, the "mirroring" he so marvelously finds here also exists elsewhere. And first of all in the domain of human relationships-amorous, friendly, social. Goethe does not take this step; on the contrary, he maintains, though implicitly-and despite his unitary perception of reality-the different separated domains.

The Romantics, for their pan, do not have these reservations. Transforming Goethe's mirroring into a reflection raised to the level of an ontological principle, they edify a theory of generalized translation, of which the clearest illustration, as we shall see, is Navalis's Encyclopedia. The poetologlcal radicality of the Romantics has perennially been opposed to the allegedly "Phlltsune" prudence of Goethe.

We would, on the contrary like to reread the Romantics from a point of view much closer to Goethe's than to their own, and to underscore all that is negative in their speculative fever.

The humanism of a Goethe will not be surpassed by symbiotically repeating the poetic absolutism of the AJbenilum, but by radicahztng the intuitions of the man from Weimar, all of which underscore the social and historical character of translation. Winckelmann laugh, Goethe's universality gently reflected the poetry of almost all nations and ages Philosophy arrived in a few daring steps [0 the point where it could comprehend itself and the spirit of man, in whose depths it was bound to discover the primordial source ofthe imaginalion and the ideal of beauty, and thus was compelled to recognize poetry, whose essence and existence it had not even suspected.

Philosophy and poetry the two most sublime powers in man, which even in Athens in the period of their highest fruition were effective only in isolation, now intermingle in perpetual tnteraction in order to stimulate and develop each other, Translation of poets and imitation of their rhythms have become an art, and crulcism 3 discipline which annihilated old errors and opened new vistas in the knowledge of annquitf..

NOlhlng funher is required but that the Germans continue using these methods, that they follow the example set by Goethe, explore 70 the fonns of an hack to their sources in order to be able to revive or combine them Schlegel contains 50 to speak in nucleo the entire view the Romantics of the AJhe,liium have of their age and its disruptions: The return to antiquity, the appearance of a national poetic genius of a protean stature, the self-unfolding of philosophy the mingling of thinking and poetry, the emergence of an an of translation and of a science of criticism-these are the cultural novelties of the present.

Schlegel here alludes not only to perfectly defined historical events, bur also to those elements which are rather part of a romantic program, to unite philosophy and poetry to make criticism into a science and translation into an an.

It is also. An understanding of this text, then, demands a short but close examination of the whole of [he reflections of the AJheniitlm members. The journey must begin with an examination of the critical reoolu1;0" that emerges with R Romantic Ret. Atstake for it, as for all post-Kannan thinking, is the accomplishment of that which was al- legedly only outlined by Kant, that is. The jena Romantics actively take pan in this radicalization of Kant's thought in the wake of Fichte and Schelling.

The fecundity of this project, which takes the explicit form of a project articulated in rnuriple Lebre, surpasses by far the contemporary enterprises of the magnification of an-those of a Schelling or, later, of a Solger-s-because it appears in a space which is not, properly speaking, philosophical in the academic sense nor simply the space of poeuc creation.

Ac; for F. Schlegel, his literary works like Lucinde barely go beyond the stage of experimentation, How hen characterize this space? Probably by saying that it is not tbe space ofa uore, but one ofintense reflection on the absent, desired uork, or the uJOrk 10 C01Ile. The only flnlshed texts left. Which could be formulated as follows: The original work 72 The Experience of tbe Foreigll needs and does not need translation; the work needs and does not need criticism; the fragments represent he whole and are not the whole; the letters and the dialogues are works and are not works.

Evef rthing dealing with books is philological. Notes, uue, epigraphs. Purely philological is that which treats only of books, which relates to books and not at all to nature as original. Schlegel's FragmetJls: "not a fragment," "not a genuine fragment. The bulk of Novallssand F.. Schlegel's notebooks, as they are revealed graphically by the latest German editions, hear witness to incompleteness as weU as intentional fragmentation. Which entails that the riches of romantic thinking us ability LO reflect itself infinitely, [0 urn itself to all Sides, thereby apprehending the totality, is also its absolute poverty its profound inability if such it has to think at all-in the sense of the patient endurance near a theine or an object.

The works written by the Romantics of the second generation like Clemens Brentano's novels offer an often talented caricature ofthis thinking without pause and without rest. II is Hegel's "bad infinite," which Hegel could easily criticize in Romanticism, even though his Critique was not entirely to the point, since wealth and poverty, power and impotence, are connected absolutely here.

The critical Revolution, men, is chiefly the establishment of a certain way of thinking about the work as a medium of the infinity of the subject.

This thinking borrows its arms from philosoph ', but is not itself philosophy. When we speak here of work, we mean exclusively the umuen or literQl ' uork. With the exception of music. In reallry, their passion is exclusively the "phime written, Thus F, Schlegel writes in his "letter on Philosophy:" lological," Bu. Writing, for me. I admit lo you that I marvel about the secret power hidden in these dead traits; I wonder how the simplest expression The silent trans [of writlngJ seem to me to be a more appropriate hull for these deepest.

SChlegel, makes it possible to consider aU works of literature as a Single work in the process of becoming, is precisely what must be thought and developed. These stories include details about cross-dressing, secrecy, fetishes, sexual acts, and writing cures alongside revelations through vocabulary as well as experiences leading to self-understanding and, sometimes, acceptance.

Questions of gender and gender identity traverse all these texts, which the editors annotate and contextualize, but without imposing a twenty- first-century framework onto their observations. The reader thus enjoys the characteristics of linguistic authenticity whether in the original or through the excellent translations. In this way, the door is open to witnessing a journey of self-discovery as well as the possible medical and juridical conclusions that codified and shaped the understanding of homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Both volumes are valuable sources of information and bibliography and the beginnings of analyses that will cer- tainly advance queer studies of the significant period in the middle of the nineteenth century in France, when the articulation of notions of homosex- uality were beginning to be studied, codified, and made publically known.

David A. Kent: Kent State University Press, Publishers and translators, however, seem to get away with some- thing of that sort. The Tel Aviv method presents itself as functionalist, sociological, and non-prescriptive, concerned with the definition of certain socio-historical norms that determine the process of translation.

In describing his new method for translation criticism, Berman focuses on the very basic, practical concerns of the critical process, with- out sacrificing any degree of theoretical sophistication. Criticism, like translation itself, is not something imma- nently determined by the work: rather, it results from a specific process, a praxis that demands careful attention.

For Berman, the confrontation of the original with the translation can occur only after this rigorous analysis of the translation has been completed.

By identifying an ethical aspect of a transla- tion—in addition to its poetic qualities—Berman makes a decisive step, which proves extremely helpful in delineating certain issues of translation criticism.