Interesting points for discussion

I have only read the posts of Freda and Lita (DO YOU PREFER LITA OR LOLA?) so far, but I think both make important points. I think that Freda's question concerning the Eurocentrism of Goethe's theory of world literature is an important one. We have to keep in mind the historical limitations to the project of World Literature at that time (we can look, for example, at Goethe's distinctions between the "West" and the "East"), and to consider whether or not the "expansion" of its model to a more inclusive global society is possible or desirable. In other words, are ideas of cosmopolitanism themselves colonial? Does the idea of the "multitude" posited by Hardt and Negri get out of the "bad universalism" of Goethe's Enlightenment project? In the Japanese empire, for example, ideas of cosmopolitanism became effective as colonial discourse, and as a means for national assimilation. As Freda suggests, we have to address the problem of "universality" in Goethe's work, and in the various theories of translation in German Classicism and Romanticism.

Lita's comment brings up many important points. I also think that Goethe's discussion of the relationship between translation and economic exchange is significant. If translation occurs in a cultural marketplace, it is not solely a process of actualizing the spirit, but has close material connections with the modern (capitalist) economy. How do economic relations dictate what gets translated and what dies away, confined to its own language? If translation is a way to re-vivify texts, then which texts are lost to history and translation because of the economics of translation? These are important questions, I think, and are not unrelated to the colonial dimension of "World Literature." For example, why is there a whole canon of Japanese literature available in English, but most of the classics of modern Korean literature have not been translated? This problem is certainly related, but not limited, to the economics of translation.

Both Lita and Freda point out the position of German in Goethe's discussion. This is very problematic, and I don't think Berman really gives it enough attention. For example, Goethe's assertion that one need only learn German in order to read Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian literature (because of the quality of German translations) seems directly at odds with Berman's own claim, mentioned in my post below, that the translating drive posits the foreign language as superior to one's own language. I agree that Berman could have better addressed the problem of the universality of German in these theories of translation, although Berman's text is an explication, so we cannot necessarily impute the problems in German Classicism and Romanticism directly to him. I am curious to read his other texts on translation, to see if his own theories of translation repeat some of the problems of Eurocentrism, universality, and cosmopolitanism found here. For example, he mentions in the introduction that he came to the problem of translation through a project of translating Latin American literature into French.