In chapter 2 we saw how Humboldt does not understand the task of linguistic translation as being to conceal or remove what is “Other” in the original language (“Das Fremde”), but rather to overcome its foreign quality or appearance (“Die Fremdheit”). The real task of translation is to enable us to understand the true meaning of the difference between languages. Humboldt’s insight about the task of translation between languages is directly relevant to his understanding of translation between cultures: that is to say, to intercultural understanding. In this chapter I will explore Humboldt’s engagement with the sacred texts of ancient India and how it differs from the practice of “Orientalism” in Germany at the time he was writing.

Humboldt’s insight anticipates a formulation of the German orientalist scholar Andrea Polaschegg, who has argued that the key categories of intercultural study should not be what is our own and what is other than ourselves—“das Eigene” and “das Andere”—but rather the dialogue between what we initially experience as familiar (“das Vertraute”) and what is initially foreign to us (“das Fremde”). As Polaschegg shows, an exaggerated concern with deconstructing false ideas of the Oriental Other—which may or may not be the product of language—might prevent us from communicating with and so understanding the actual other person whom we encounter. Understanding people who are other than ourselves necessarily involves making them “strange” to ourselves—that is, becoming conscious of the false linguistic and cultural categories we may project on to them—precisely in order that we might recognize who they are in themselves. But this “making strange” always involves a dialogic relationship that will ultimately change ourselves as much as our understanding of others. To recognize what is truly strange (“das Fremde”) about peoples as much as languages is the first step to making them known and trusted. By the same token, Humboldt’s idea of cultural as well as linguistic translation necessarily requires the “making strange” (“Verfremdung”) of our own culture and language: a creative act of self-alienation which for Polaschegg is the unavoidable precondition for understanding the cultural and linguistic Other, whether she be “Oriental” or otherwise.