Nationalist translation agendas have been devised to intervene into specific social situations, but they do possess a number of common features. While taking into account significant historical differences, I want now to present a critical taxonomy of these features, considering how translation theories and practices have been used to shape a concept of nation and what cultural and social effects have resulted from this use. I will focus on two especially revealing cases: Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars and China under the late Qing dynasty.
In both of these cases, translation was enlisted in a defensive nationalist movement that was designed to build a national culture so as to counter foreign aggression. During the eighteenth century, the Prussian aristocracy had fallen under French cultural domination so that, as the theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher complained, even King Frederick II “was incapable of producing in German the literature and philosophy he produced in French”
(Lefevere 1977, 83). After 1806, when Napoleon defeated Prussia, Schleiermacher’s sermons not only called on congregations to resist the French occupation, but articulated a concept of the German nation. With a victory, he told them, “we shall be able to preserve for ourselves our own distinctive character, our laws, our constitution and our culture” (Schleiermacher 73). A key factor in this nationalist agenda was the German language, which Schleiermacher felt might be best improved through translation: “Our language,” he argued in a lecture delivered in 1813, “can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only by means of the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign”(Lefevere 1977, 88).
Later in the nineteenth century China faced a somewhat different adversarial situation, characterized by foreign commercial and military invasion. Defeated in the war against Britain over the opium trade (1839–42), China was forced to grant economic and political concessions to several Western nations who established colonies in various ports and, after the Chinese lost the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), divided the country into spheres of interest. Just as the Boxer
uprising against the foreign presence was repressed by an international force (1898–1900), translators such as Lin Shu and Yan Fu began introducing Western ideas to reform the Chinese nation and enable it to struggle against the invaders.
Lin Shu’s preface to his version of Rider Haggard’s novel The Spirit of Bambatse suggests that such Western literary texts are valuable because “they encourage the white man’s spirit of exploration” and can instill a similar “spirit” in his Chinese readers: “The blueprint has already been drawn by Columbus and Robinson Crusoe. In order to seek almost unobtainable material interests in the barbarian regions, white men are willing to brave a hundred deaths. But our nation, on the contrary, disregards its own interests and yields them to foreigners” (Lee 54). Similarly Yan Fu, who had studied in England during the 1870s, chose to render works on evolutionary theory by T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer precisely because he believed them to be useful to the “self-strengthening and the preservation of the race” (Schwartz 100).
As the translators’ comments indicate, they intended their translations to form national identities by soliciting their readers’ identification with a particular national discourse that was articulated in relation to the hegemonic foreign nations. This relational identity, always fundamentally differential, shaped through a distinction from the other on which the identity is nonethless based, might be either exclusionary or receptive. German translators defined the German nation
as incorporating a respect for the foreign that led them to reject French cultural practices that did not show this respect. They valued a foreignizing method of translation, described by Schleiermacher as one in which “the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him,” a literalism imprinted with the foreignness of the foreign text, whereas the French were seen as advocating a domesticating method, in which the translator “leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him,” a much freer rewriting of the foreign text according to the intelligibilities and interests of the receiving culture (Lefevere 1977, 74). French translation, from the German point of view, even went to the extremes of paraphrase and adaptation, both of which were to be lamented. In a satiric dialogue from 1798, August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose own versions of Shakespeare’s plays exemplified the foreignizing method, demonstrated how different translation practices might be taken as representative of opposed national identities:
Frenchman: The Germans translate every literary Tom, Dick, and Harry. We either do not translate at all, or else we translate according to our own taste.
German: Which is to say, you paraphrase and you disguise.
Frenchman: We look on a foreign author as a stranger in our company, who has to dress and behave according to our customs, if he desires to please.
German: How narrow-minded of you to be pleased only by what is native.
Frenchman: Such is our nature and our education. Did the Greeks not hellenize everything?
German: In your case it goes back to a narrow-minded nature and a conventional education. In ours education is our nature. (Lefevere 1977, 50)
Chinese translators, in contrast, sought to form a national identity by accepting Western values. They particularly prized the individualism and aggressiveness that seemed to them so important in motivating Western imperialism in China.
For Lin Shu, the emulation of these values required that they be assimilated to Chinese cultural traditions that were consequently revised or in certain instances abandoned. Hence, his criticism of the Confucian virtue of “yielding” or deference:
The Westerners’ consciousness of shame and advocacy of force do not stem entirely from their own nature but are also an accumulated custom. . . . In China, this is not so. Suffering humiliation is regarded as yielding; saving one’s own life is called wisdom. Thus after thousands of years of encroachments by foreign races, we still do not feel ashamed. Could it also be called our national character? (Lee 54)
Chinese notions of deference and self-preservation ran counter to the collective“consciousness of shame” that might accompany the recognition of one’s self as belonging to a nation under seige. Lin Shu’s reference to a Chinese “national character” was itself a cultural import from the West.
In using translation to form national identities, the translators expose the contradictory conditions of their nationalist agendas. Terms such as “nature”and“race” point to a concept of nation as an unchanging biological essence that preexists the translation process and so reveals the circular logic of nationalism: the translating can only return to the identity that it is said to create. Yet terms such as “education” and “custom,” along with the very use of a cultural practice like translation, implies that identity is constructed in a discursive formation and therefore can be changed and developed, precisely to intervene against the embattled social situations where the German and Chinese translators were working. The essentialistic strain in their thinking, furthermore, coincides with a universalism. The national identity that translation is summoned to form in each case embodies universalistic traits. For Schleiermacher, what distinguishes the German nation is its capacity to mediate all other national cultures, making it the historical culmination of “translation in general”:
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