Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.
Interpretation
Translation involves a balance between maintaining the author's intent and making the text accessible to the reader.
Friedrich Schleiermacher's quote highlights the dual responsibility of a translator in literature. On one hand, the translator must strive to preserve the original author's voice and intent, ensuring that their message is conveyed as authentically as possible. On the other hand, the translator must also consider the reader's experience, adapting the text to be relatable and comprehensible without losing its essence. This duality underscores the complexity of translation as both an art and a craft.
In practice
In a discussion on how to approach literary translation, this quote can emphasize the balance required in the craft.
The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
Whenever I find a spark of that hidden fire that will sooner or later consume the old and create the new, I am drawn to it with love and hope, regarding it as a sign of my future home.
The essence of the religious emotions consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Now the relation which, in the sphere of nature, being and semblance or sensation bear to one another in this antithesis, is the same as that which in ethics exists between good and pleasure or feeling.
The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.
Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.
Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.
The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.
Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.
Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.
For what concerns diversity of rites in the sacred liturgy, the Apostolic See has always made its position clear: not only it does not condemn diversity, but it eagerly and willingly grants to each nation the right to keep and preserve the legitimate customs and traditions of its forbears.
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