Preface Jede Nothwendigkeit auch innerhalb der eignen Sprache und Mundart zu übersetzen, mehr oder minder ein augenblickliches Bedürfniss des Gemüthes, ist eben auch in ihrer Wirkung zu sehr auf den Augenblick beschränkt, um anderer Leitung als der des Gefühls zu bedürfen; und wenn Regeln darüber sollten gegeben werden, könnten es nur jene seyn, durch deren Befolgung der Mensch sich eine rein sittliche Stimmung erhält, damit der Sinn auch für das minder verwandte geöff net bleibe. (Schleiermacher 1813/2002: 68: 7-14) Th e need to translate within one's language or dialect, a more or less fl eeting emotional need, is too much restricted in its impact to the passing moment to require other guidance than that of gut feelings; if it were submitted to rule, it could only be the kind of rule that impels people to that moral state in which the mind is kept open to that which is more alien, less akin to oneself. (Schleiermacher 1997/2002: 226) Two centuries on, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher's 1813 Academy address on the diff erent methods of translating continues to stimulate and nudge translation scholars past easy answers to diffi cult questions-even past the easy answers that have been developed out of the address itself, such as pop versions of the opposition between domestication and foreignization; and even past (or more deeply into) Schleiermacher's own famous analogues for that opposition, bringing the author to the reader and bringing the reader to the author. For what does that mean, exactly? Is bidirectional travel across cultural and linguistic SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES10 boundaries just a geographical metaphor for translation as rewriting, or is there an experiential (hermeneutic or phenomenological) element of real-world truth to it? Th at is one of the questions I want to try to answer here-specifi cally in terms of social ecologies, or icoses, a term I've coined from Aristotle's eikos "plausible," ta eikota "the things that seem plausible to us." What I mean by an icosis is roughly adumbrated in my epigraph, from early in the address: there is [a] a need, a Notwendigkeit, which is also [b] a Bedürfniss des Gemütes, literally a need of the temper or disposition, which I've translated as an emotional need, which lasts only a moment, a blink of the eye, einen Augenblick; but [c] it has the force of a rule (Regel) or set of rules, and [d] requires a Befolgung or compliance to [e] a sittliche Stimmung, which I've translated "moral state" (while a Stimmung can also be a temper, it is more commonly a mood or other aff ective state). While one might conceivably get away with biologizing the need in (a-b)-after all, even though it's specifi cally a need to translate, and thus a social need, it's a need that Schleiermacher associates with one's Gemüt, which can also be one's nature- there's really no way to sustain that impulse to biologize as he adduces (c-e) compliance to a "rule" that is actually something as vague as a moral impulse. At work here, in other words, is no biological impulse but rather some kind of social order that is felt inwardly (aff ectively) as a guiding (leitend) impulse; not quite a rule, but with the regulatory force of a rule to impel compliance; nothing so extrinsic as coercion, or even conative pressure, as it is felt as one's own need to act in accordance with one's own temper or disposition. I want to argue that something like this socio-aff ective force-this icosis, which I will defi ne as I proceed, in connection with specifi c claims Schleiermacher makes in the address-is the regulatory impulse that drives, organizes, and "plausibilizes" all of the behavior that Schleiermacher is working to defi ne. Preface 11 I tease these icoses out of the Academy address on the diff erent methods of translating specifi cally as a speculative clarifi cation of Schleiermacher's feeling-based hermeneutics.1 Just what his hermeneutics consisted in, I take it, is still a matter of some dispute. According to Heinz Kimmerle (1959, 1977), he developed a language-based hermeneutics between 1805 and 1809, and over the period between 1810 and 1819, the period during which he gave the address on translating, he gradually shifted to a psychological (intersubjective) hermeneutics, apparently because he began to lose faith in the doctrine (still present in the address, in §10) of the unity of thought and language. Th ere are those, including Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960, 1989) and the Lawrence Venuti of the 1991 "Genealogies of Translation Th eory," who, apparently based on a generalization of what Kimmerle calls the later position, attack his hermeneutics as purely subjective, intuitive, and thus a mystifi cation.2 And there are those, including Manfred Frank (1977) and the Lawrence Venuti of the 2012 "Genealogies of Translation Th eory," who assimilate his hermeneutics to the Gadamerian model (especially as appropriated by Jacques Derrida) according to which "original meaning" is continuously being (re-) constituted by the ever-shifting horizons of interpretation. Th ere are also those who point out that the emphasis on psychology is present in the early Schleiermacher and the emphasis on language is present in the late Schleiermacher, and that no radical shift ever occurred (see Palmer ch. 7 for discussion). 1 For the historical and thematic background, see Cercel's (2013) comprehensive study of Übersetzungshermeneutik (translation hermeneutics). Her history runs from Schleiermacher on hermeneutics and translation through Steiner's "hermeneutical motion" model of translation to Fritz Paepke and Radegundis Stolze; her thematic coverage ranges through understanding, interpretation, creativity, intuition, and subjectivity. 2 It is in fact quite common for students of twentieth-century hermeneutics simply to take over the "subjectivizing" view of Schleiermacher's late hermeneutics-or even, by extension, of his hermeneutics tout court-from Kimmerle (1959, 1977) and/or Gadamer (1960, 1989) and present it as the truth about Schleiermacher; see e.g. DiCenso (1990: 83-85). SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES12 But, early or late, there should be no doubt about the basis on which his hermeneutics rests: the situated phenomenology (Gefühl or feeling) of an actual living, breathing, embodied human being in a spoken dialogical encounter with another living, breathing, embodied human being. Th e importance of Gefühl/ feeling for Schleiermacher's hermeneutics has long been known, and contested-especially, as Louis Roy (1997: 217-20) points out, because of the purely subjective connotations of the word, leading Paul Tillich (1967: 96) and others to argue that using that particular term was a tactical mistake on Schleiermacher's part. What makes dialogical understanding possible is both, as the early Schleiermacher put it, "objective" or "universal" (shared by all speakers of a language at a given historical moment) and "subjective" (felt inwardly by each individual); his conception of Gefühl/feeling adds to this early formulation the blurring of subjectivity and objectivity. Gefühl/feeling for Schleiermacher is at once the individual self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) and a situated participation in the collective, the communal, communion with other humans and God. Gefühl/feeling is communal, but is felt by each individual as his or her own self-consciousness (see also Crouter 2005: ch. 8). In an important sense dialogical understanding is also only possible if it precedes the dialogue-if it is already in place as an enabling ground for the dialogue. „Man muss den Menschen schon kennen um die Rede zu verstehen und doch soll man ihn erst aus der Rede kennen lernen" (Schleiermacher 1959 [henceforward HD] 44)/"One must already know a man in order to understand what he says, and yet one fi rst becomes acquainted with him by what he says" (Schleiermacher 1977 [henceforward HE] 56, #99). Th is is the famous hermeneutic circle, one implication of which is that one only understands what one already understands; what lifts that notion out of logical fallacy and into human social reality is precisely what I call icosis, the communal shaping of individual understanding. Th e individual enters Preface 13 a dialogue already understanding it because the community has shaped both or all of the participants in that dialogue in accordance with its own collective norms, which from a scholarly "God's-eye" perspective give it the look and feel of "objectivity" and "universality." As Schleiermacher wrote in 1809-1810: Der erste Kanon ist[:] Man construire aus dem gesammten Vorwerth der Sprache, des gemeinschaftlichen des Schriftstellers und Lesers und suche nur in diesem die Möglichkeit der Interpret[ation]. (HD 57) Th e fi rst canon is: one should construe the meaning from the total pre-given value of language and the heritage common to the author and his reader, for only by reference to this is interpretation possible. (HE 70).3 3 In icotic terms the "total pre-given value of language" is "the heritage common to the author and his reader": social value is constructed as evaluative somatic pressure (your aff ect becoming my conation) to conform behaviorally and ideologically to group norms; to the extent that that pressure works, to the extent that it does organize group thinking and feeling and saying and doing, it becomes "the heritage common to the author and his reader" that makes mutual understanding possible. When the author and the reader are separated by language, sociolect, or centuries, developing a feeling for this heritage requires research: Dagegen mehrere Schriftsteller al seiner anzusehen sind und einander erläutern wenn sie zu derselben Sphäre, Periode, Schule gehören. Anm. 1. Dies führt wieder daraf zurück dass in der grammat[ischen] Interpr[etation] der Redende ganz als Organ der Sprache gedacht wird. 2. Man kann auch Erläuterung nehmen aus verschiedenen Schulen derselben Periode um an der Diff erenz noch das Gemeinschaftliche zu messen, auch aus verschiedenen Perioden Einer Schule welches aber natürlich zu dem höheren Verstehen gehört, das den Schriftsteller selbst überbietet. (HD 67) Conversely, a group of authors who belong to the same sphere, period, or school are to be regarded as a single author and used to explain each other. Note that (1) this leads back again to the rule that in grammatical interpretation a speaker is regarded entirely as the organ of language, and that (2) information can also be gained from various schools from the same period and from various periods of a given school in order to identify the common element amid the diff erences. But this, naturally, belongs to a higher understanding of which the author himself was unaware. (HE 85) SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES14 Th e individual entering the dialogue, however, feels those norms "subjectively," as a Bedürfniss des Gemütes, without necessarily being able to articulate them verbally or otherwise cognitively; the dialogue is itself a communal encounter by and through which the individual brings those felt norms a step or two toward an awareness of them as norms, as rules, and thus as candidates for objectivity and universality. Th e linchpin of my reading of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is this notion that meaning, and so understanding, is both stabilized-apparently "objectivized" and "universalized"-by the community, and phenomenologically actualized-"felt" or "subjectivized"-by individual embodied human beings in dialogue. Th e "intuition" that the individual interpreter applies in reaching understanding is thus no metaphysical pie in the sky; as Schleiermacher himself hinted in the 1809-1810 hermeneutics draft, that intuition had been instilled in the individual by the community (HD 61, HE 76). Th is communal stabilization of meaning is never perfect, but it does make an infi nite approach to accurate understanding possible. As he says in his 1805 notes on hermeneutics, „eine Hauptsache beim Interpretiren ist dass man im Stande sein muss aus seiner eignen Gesinnung herauszugehen in die des Schriftstellers" (HD 32)/"in interpretation it is essential that one step out of one's own frame of mind into that of the author" (HE 42 #8), and „man muss suchen der unmittelbare Leser zu werden um Anspielungen zu verstehen, um die Luft und das besondere Feld der Gleichnisse zu verstehen" (HD 32)/"the interpreter must try to become the immediate reader of a text in order to understand its allusions, its atmosphere, and its special fi eld of images" (HE 43 #12). Application of the instruction in note #8, for which the German Romantic tradition from Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) to Robert Vischer (1847-1933) used the term sich hineinfühlen-"feeling one's way into" someone's meaning, or in Vischer Einfühlung "empathy"-does give the interpreter a sense of immediacy or unmediated connection; in fact, of course, the Preface 15 connection is mediated by Gefühl "feeling," which is organized by the community. For Herder and Schleiermacher, too, "feeling one's way into" someone's meaning always had to be supported by extensive linguistic, literary, and historical research. Many of the persistent misunderstandings of Gefühl and Einfühlung arise out of the assumption that feeling is a purely private production of the individual imagination-a random subjective projection. For Herder and Schleiermacher, by contrast, research-based understanding of an author's meaning is only possible because the researcher's reading of inert facts on the page is guided by the community, through collectivized feeling; and feeling-based understanding of an author's meaning is possible because the researcher fi lls in the cognitive gaps left by the aff ective vagueness of feeling through research. In applying this hermeneutics to the diff erent methods of translating, however, we face two problems. One was addressed by Schleiermacher directly: the translator is tasked with mediating between the (semantic, musical, tonal, etc.) stabilizations of understanding eff ected by two communities, the source culture and the target culture, and those stabilizations inevitably diverge and confl ict. In important ways this is also true of a text written in the "same" language in an earlier historical period, or by a member of another social group in the "same" period (a parallel Schleiermacher himself draws in the Academy address [§2]). Th e other has been addressed by Schleiermacher's critics, especially twentieth-century hermeneuts like Gadamer (1960, 1989): to the extent that Schleiermacher shifted away from a languagebased hermeneutics to a psychological hermeneutics, if he ever did, it seems as if the interpreter's evidence for understanding would have dried up and blown away, leaving behind a putative channel of interpersonal intuition that seems like "divining"-guessing- and in any case like bad metaphysics. My icotic theory is an attempt to engage both problems. Th e main channel through which I attempt that engagement is body language: both [1] physical body language (especially SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES16 tonalization, mentioned specifi cally by Schleiermacher in §8 and §32) as an additional channel of hermeneutic guidance in spoken conversation, and [2] as-if body language, virtual or simulated or imagined body language as organized icotically by the culture in textual encounters, where no body language is physically visible or audible. Specifi cally, in (2) we feel the tonalities and other "musical" or "prosodic" or "kinesic" qualities of a written text not because the structural features of that written text are intrinsically musical or prosodic or kinesic, but because each culture organizes and "plausibilizes" the referential relations between form and feeling. We feel form as music when culture has taught us to feel form as music. Th e "missing" evidence on and by which the interpreting subject "intuits" meaning, in other words, is icosis: the felt power of culture to regulate our sense of what means what. Th is icotic model doesn't exclude language, obviously: not only am I not siding with late Schleiermacher's "psychological" model over early Schleiermacher's language-based model, I resist Heinz Kimmerle's early-late binarization of Schleiermacher's thought. According to Kimmerle, the problem with his early language-based model was that Schleiermacher could not think of a way to link language with thought that would allow for the obvious gaps between them and still stabilize meaning; and not only does my theory of icosis solve that problem, I develop it here out of Schleiermacher's own 1813 formulations. As it appears in the undertheorized peripheries of the Academy address, icosis has a multiply recursive movement: culture <> language <> culture <> psychology <> culture Culture organizes/regulates language in a way that organizes/ regulates psychology, which organizes/regulates culture; culture organizes psychology in a way that makes cultural sense of, and so culture out of, that culturally organized language. Culture is the collective undercurrent that swirls linguistic form and subjective response together to normative ends, which make Preface 17 understanding (of some sort, not always entirely satisfactory to all parties) possible; but culture is also the collective byproduct of such acts of understanding. When Schleiermacher says that „jedes Kind kommt nur durch Hermeneutik zur Wortbedeutung (HD 40)/"every child comes to understand the meanings of words only through hermeneutics" (HE 52 #68), I take him to mean by „Hermeneutik"/"hermeneutics" all of the interwoven forces and pressures in this paragraph, including what I'm calling culture, language, and psychology. When he says that „insofern nun diese Talente allgem[ein]e Naturgeben sind ist auch die Herm[eneutik] ein allgem[eine]s Geschäft" (HD 78)/"insofar as these abilities are universal gifts of nature, hermeneutics is everybody's concern" (HE 101), I take him to mean by „Natur"/"nature" some kind of inclination to interpret that is hardwired into our nervous systems, but as that inclination is organized by culture. Th e answer to Schleiermacher's concern about translation as a mediation between two icoses-two cultural systems of feeling and thinking and valuing-is that, as he himself suggests in the Academy address (§24-25), the source-cultural icosis that seems to function in and through the target text is only a simulation. Target readers should feel as if they were participating in a source-cultural icosis, but they aren't, and can't-at least not through the target text alone. (A source-and-target reader reading stereoscopically can obviously participate in a sourcecultural icosis.) Th ey are participating in a target-cultural icosis that simulates a source-cultural icosis. A foreignizing translation is one kind of simulation, with a simulated Feeling of the Foreign mixed in; a domesticating translation is another kind of simulation, with an overwhelmingly local fl avor that is equally simulated. According to Schleiermacher, the target-textual simulation of the source-cultural icosis has to be grounded in the translator's complex participation in and deep understanding of that icosis: the translator has to work very hard (do historical, linguistic, SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES18 literary, philosophical research into the source culture) to transfer something like the source-textual stabilization of meaning into the target-textual simulation. Th is is not an anything-goes kind of postmodern hermeneutics based on hyperreal seductive Baudrillardian (1981, 1994) simulacra. But it's still a simulation. What saves the translation-as-simulation from being dismissed as pure illusion (irreality) is that, according to the postKantian social-constructivism that informs icotic theory as well, all knowledge is a cultural construct, so that everything we take to be reality is an "illusion" in very much the same sense. Th is notion is a bit like Baudrillard's hyperreality, in fact-just without the nightmarish cast that Baudrillard threw over it, in a pique of "postmodernized" objectivism. What makes Baudrillardian hyperreality nightmarish is that postmoderns know it's not real, know it's illusion, and yet are seduced by its very illusoriness; what makes icosis quite ordinary and even mundane is that when an illusion is somatically supported by the culture, it feels real. Th at is "only" a feeling, of course; but the impulse to denigrate it for that reason (which I take to be Baudrillard's impulse) comes from a vestigial objectivism that believes we should be more directly in touch with objective reality, should base our epistemologies more rationally in the way things really are. What icosis does is to naturalize illusion as reality normatively. For intellectuals, especially Romantic and post-Romantic intellectuals, including Marxists as inverse Hegelians and postmoderns as hyper-Hegelians, it becomes essential to teach the denaturalization of those illusions as the fi rst step toward true learning; we will see that Romantic-becoming-modernist impulse at work in Schleiermacher, Shklovsky, and Brecht in Chapter 4. But even intellectuals committed to denaturalization continue to participate in the icotic normalization and naturalization of cultural constructs as reality. If we didn't, we simply could not function in the world. In Walter Lippmann's (1922/2010) vocabulary, all knowledge of reality is culturally organized knowledge of a Preface 19 "pseudoenvironment." Because our pseudoenvironments tend to be icotically stabilized and supported, however, they feel like reality. Ultimately any social or cultural construct, whether in the "original" or in the translation, whether normalized in the source culture (and therefore apparently "always already" legitimized) or simulated in the target text (and therefore a new construct that has to struggle for legitimation), is a simulation that has to feel real to be functional. Th e Structure of the Book I grapple with Schleiermacher's Academy address in a modifi ed version of the old commentary format. In Chapter 1, I isolate and number fi fty key passages spanning the entire address, quoting and commenting-providing some historical and intertextual glosses-but above all questioning, interrogating, with an eye more to noting problems than to solving them. Above all I want here to direct the attention-more questions than answers, in other words. Readers in search of answers to the questions I ask of almost every passage may want to skip ahead-or else skim through Chapter 1 quickly and then keep referring back as they proceed through the rest of the book. Not only have Schleiermacher's readers typically not noticed the complexities that surge along just under the surface of his argument; he himself does not seem to be always entirely cognizant of those complexities either. In the remainder of the book, then-Chapters 2-6-I off er some answers to the questions raised in the fi rst chapter, based on a trans-Schleiermacherian hermeneutic theory of social ecologies, or icoses. Th ose answers are "trans-Schleiermacherian" in the sense that I fi nd the germ of each icotic formulation in his address and then water and weed that germ a little, help it grow. Each chapter culls together several thematically related passages interrogated in Chapter 1 and theorizes an icotic coherence stitching together what on the surface of Schleiermacher's argument may sometimes seem arbitrary, or driven merely by SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES20 ideological hobby-horses. Th ese large-scale (re)theorizations also provide commentary on the fi fty numbered passages in Chapter 1, with the specifi c passages discussed in each section identifi ed by passage number(s) in the section heading; along the way I also provide fuller historical backgrounds to Schleiermacher's claims. In Chapter 2 I analyze the logical problems in Schleiermacher's analogical reasoning. It is not often appreciated how heavily Schleiermacher depends on analogies to make his case. In fact, I think it's fair to say that he deals less with translation directly than he does with analogues for translation-notably with the analogues for which his address is best known, "taking the author to the reader" vs. "taking the reader to the author." His strongest argument against the former is in fact grounded in yet another analogue, the source author writing originally in the target language, which he refutes by demonstrating at great length that it could never happen in reality. To the extent that we judge the success of his argumentation on the logical solvency of this analogical reasoning, I show, it has to be declared an abject failure. In this I set myself against André Lefevere's (1981: 11) description of Schleiermacher's Academy address as "a not-illogical and very spirited defence of what we know now as 'translationese'"-in Chapter 2 I show that his argument is in fact highly illogical.4 I show this not in order to demolish 4 Cf. also Th andeka (2005: 198) on a late (1831) university lecture on practical theology, which as critics complain (and Th andeka agrees) omits a key step in the proof; Th andeka's foundational premise for her counterargument is that "Schleiermacher was a master logician. He would not have made such an elementary error" (199). Based on that premise, then, she looks for evidence that Schleiermacher knew that he had left a logical gap in his argument and "tells his readers how to fi ll in the missing parts of his argument: they must look to his works on aesthetics." Unless she means only that Schleiermacher "was a master logician" at one late point in his life, my reading of the Academy address on translation in Chapter 2 would indicate that she is wrong: at least in 1813, he could very well have "made such an elementary error." For more information on Th andeka and the "Aff ect Th eology" that she derives partly from Schleiermacher, see http://revthandeka.org/. Preface 21 Schleiermacher, however, but rather in order to show that decontextualized logic is simply not the appropriate lens through which to assess what Schleiermacher was trying to do. I return to the issue of his analogical reasoning in Chapter 5, through the lens of icotic theory, and argue that through this lens his claims may still be problematic-he clearly has not quite worked out what he's trying to do along these lines yet-but more interesting and worthy of being taken far more seriously than it would be on purely logical terms. In Chapter 3 I turn to three other obstacles to our twenty-fi rst-century response to Schleiermacher: his patriotism, his moralism, and his mysticism. In each case I track the obstacles these ideological slants pose for us as intellectuals-we tend to be anti-patriotic, anti-moralist (we may be pro-moral but tend to hate moralizers), and skeptical about mystical claims-but then show how an icotic perspective on each gives us a signifi cant point of contact with Schleiermacher's goals that enables us to appreciate what he is trying to do without kneejerk ideological rejection. It's possible, I suggest, to continue to react negatively to the specifi c expressions he off ers of his patriotism, moralism, and mysticism while nevertheless recognizing in those expressions historically situated attempts to understand the shaping infl uence culture and communities have on translation, language, and generally communication and thought. In Chapter 4 I track the suggestive parallels between Schleiermacher's defense of foreignism and the aesthetics of "estrangement" reaching from the German Romantics (especially Novalis) up through the Russian and German modernists (especially Shklovsky and Brecht). It is surprising to me that these parallels have not been explored before, especially by Schleiermacher's recent followers among translation scholars, as they off er much more powerful justifi cations for foreignizing translation than the bald assertion that it is good for us. It is striking, in fact, how closely Schleiermacher's hints along these lines anticipate Viktor Shklovsky's 1917/1925 article "Art as Device": the SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES22 notion that ordinary language deadens us to perception; the notion that the best way to enliven perception again through art is to "belabor" it, to create an impediment to easy understanding; and the notion that what the reader experiences in that case is not just laborious reading but traces of the labor that went into creating the piece. Read this way, Schleiermacher's insistence that the translator leave a Feeling of the Foreign in the target text becomes a vicarious experience of the translating process- and his grand National Translation Project (which I think the Academy address should be read as proposing) becomes a pitch to turn "German" readers into vicarious translators. Chapter 5, as I mentioned above, is my rereading of Schleiermacher's analogical reasoning from an icotic perspective-in particular, translation as situated conversation through body language and aff ect regulation. Chapter 6 is a more general study of icotic processes as adumbrated in dozens of passages in the address: the collective regulation of understanding, the conventionalization of language, the collective construction of individual "freedom" and "autonomy" (and even mystical notions of a "vital force"), the collective shaping of both literary traditions and innovations and transformations of those traditions by "geniuses," the problems caused for translators by divergent sourceand target-cultural icoses, and the broad cultural implications of a National Translation Project: what existing cultural tendencies might prevent or postpone it, what might be done to transform the "audience eff ect" in the target culture so as to make the receptor icoses more receptive to foreignizing translations, and what icotic entropies might block or undo all of a culture's best efforts along these lines. Th e general directionality of my chapter structure is a movement from perceived problems to icotic solutions: Chapters 2 and 3 identify problems, logical in Chapter 2, ideological in Chapter 3; Chapter 4 draws parallels between Schleiermacher on foreignization and Shklovsky on estrangement in order to Preface 23 fl esh out a fuller theorization of moments in Schleiermacher's Academy address that might otherwise seem under-motivated; and Chapters 5 and 6 expand Schleiermacher's not-quite-fullytheorized icotic tendencies into a full-blown theory of icosis. Acknowledgments Larisa Cercel invited me to write an article on Schleiermacher's Academy address, to be published in an essay collection in the bicentennial year, 2013; when the article I wrote turned out to be 22,000 words long, and still way too short, I began to suspect that I really needed to write about the address at book length. In the process of trying to cut the article down to a slightly more reasonable length, Larisa and her coeditors also helped me rethink my reading of Schleiermacher. My colleague at Hong Kong Baptist University, Stephen Palmquist of the Religion and Philosophy department, a Kant scholar, responded several times to both my thinking out loud on Schleiermacherian hermeneutics and my drafts of the article and the book. Anthony Pym read drafts as well, and directed me to the YouTube video of Lawrence Venuti delivering a new version of his 1991 "Genealogies of Translation Th eory" paper, this time on Locke and Schleiermacher, at the Nida School for Translation Studies in Misano, Italy, on September 14, 2012, and to Michael Forster's trenchant response. In July, 2013, I presented key points from the book's argument at the 2nd Hermeneutics and Translation Studies conference at the Fachhochschule Köln, and the Q&A that followed my talk helped me tighten my argument in signifi cant ways, as did the copy of her freshly published book (Cercel 2013) that Larisa handed to me immediately after that session ended. It was also clear from that discussion in Köln that my reading of Schleiermacher was provocative and unexpected; let me just say in the spirit of that exchange that any errors in this book are to be attributed entirely to my pigheadedness, and not SCHLEIERMACHER'S ICOSES24 to the generous assistance of the people who contributed to its current form. Th anks also to the good people at Zeta Books for publishing the book expeditiously enough for it to appear in Germany during the Academy address's bicentennial year, and to Larisa Cercel again for helping make that happen. Marius Dumitru read the book for the press, and I thank him for his suggestions. Heartfelt thanks also to Radegundis Stolze, who read the entire book in .pdf page proofs in two days, and found several key errors that I'd either made or missed in the German.