Susan Bernofsky. Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. xii + 239 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8143-3222-1.

Reviewed by Derrick Miller (German Department, Grinnell College)
Published on H-German (April, 2006)

To Say the Same Thing with Different Words

In her introductory chapter, Susan Bernofsky locates the emergence of modern translation practice and theory in Germany around 1800. She examines the shift from the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century practice of Nachdichten, or paraphrasing, to what she names "service-translation." In order to produce a faithful (treu) translation, the paraphraser "helps" the original author convey his or her meaning with "useful" revisions: deleting and adding words or even entire passages and otherwise making any changes imaginable. Faithful here refers not to the translator's accuracy but to the translator's friendly intent. With service-translation, faithful comes to mean fidelity to the original text and its style, its tone, and (especially in the case of verse) its syntax. Whereas paraphrasers felt free to improvise their translations however they saw fit, service-translators valorized the identical reproduction of the original text to whatever extent the target language allowed. (Of course, an utterly faithful translation is impossible. Service-translators believed that the complete coincidence of original text and translation is an ideal that can be approached but not obtained.) Under the paradigm of paraphrase, language is a transparent medium. Content is not contingent upon form. The paraphraser says the same thing as the original author, despite wildly different words and other textual intrusions. It is all the same idea. With service-translation, the site of transparency shifts. Translators are now transparent as they submit their pens to the authority of the original text, replicating its form as precisely as possible in order to replicate its meaning accurately. Content and form are now inseparable. In order to say almost the same thing with different words, service-translators must labor under the multiple constraints imposed by the original author's language (in the sense of both native tongue and wording).

Once service-translation is posited as an ideal--once fidelity to an original text defined by set criteria becomes the norm--deviation from that ideal can be read as an intentional artistic choice, one that creates a new meaning. Translations in which such choices are made are not faithful renderings of original texts by transparent translators. They are translations imprinted with the translators' intentions. Translators thus become authors in their own right; they say different things and create new works from old. Bernofsky names these translators author-translators and their mode of translation authorial-translation. Formally, the paraphraser and the author-translator differ from one another in their relation to the service-translator. The one exists before the service-translator and the other alongside. And unlike service-translation, authorial-translation does not represent a theory of translation in and of itself; it is only a body of singularities as Bernofsky presents it.

These developments in translation theory and practice serve as the framework against which Bernofsky reads specific translations in the remaining chapters of her book. She presents literary analyses of the following authorial-translations: Kleist's Amphitryon (translated from Molière), Hölderlin's translations of Pindar's odes and of Ödipus der Tyrann and Antigonä (translated from Sophocles) and Goethe's Rameaus Neffe and "Versuch über die Malerei" (translated from Diderot). In each case, these authors produce translations clearly aligned with the principles of service-translation. Yet, they also deviate from the originals at strategic moments, so that they can foreground particular thematic concerns. Kleist transforms the masquerading gods of Molière's comedy of manners into doppelgangers who plunge themselves and those whose disguises they wear into aporias of identity and epistemological crises. Hölderlin casts Oedipus and Antigone not only as tragic heroes but also as allegories of himself, the modern poet who attempts to translate ancient poetry for modern audiences. And through his manipulations of texts concerned with mimesis, Goethe theorizes translation itself as a mimetic activity. In other words, each of these authors turn works of other literary giants into works that are typical of their own oeuvres.

The preface of Bernofsky's book opens with the sentence: "This is a book about translation history and practice" (p. ix). This statement suggests the means of both measuring the book's accomplishments and indicating what it does not attempt. Bernofsky successfully translates her own account of the developments in translation theory and practice at the turn of the nineteenth century into contemporary theoretical language. She demonstrates how current theoretical concepts of translation overlap with those which preoccupied the translators she studies and she also explains how these concepts diverge. She thus shows that translation is not a timeless practice, but is rather grounded in an evolution of carefully nuanced theoretical and practical articulations over time. But as to how translation is historically determined--this matter she leaves out. The history of translation she writes has little grounding in phenomena outside the literary and theoretical texts she examines so closely. She identifies crucial texts whose publications prompted these discussions, such as Johann Heinrich Voß's Homer translations and August Wilhelm Schlegel's Shakespeare translations. And she alludes to some of the conditions under which translators worked that influenced their output. (They were paid by the signature, not according to the perceived quality of their translations. She mentions the effects of territorial privileges and rampant literary piracy. And she provides tantalizing hints about the fate of translations on the book market, such as what percentage of the book market translations composed.) Readers interested in literary analyses of the works mentioned above or in translation theory in general will find rich material in these pages. Readers looking for detailed accounts of the history of translations and the German book market; translations, privileges and copyright law or for biographies of prominent translators will appreciate this book, but will need to continue their searches elsewhere.

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Citation: Derrick Miller. Review of Bernofsky, Susan, Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11700

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