DAVID MARTYN

What follows has its origin in a personal fascination with an aspect of his-
torical linguistics I came across some time ago that seemed to have sur-
prising consequences for our conceptions of linguistic identity and of what it
means to translate from one language into another. I mean the so-called calques,
or loan translations, words that seem to be made of domestic linguistic elements,
such as superman or normal school, but which were in fact coined as literal, part-
for-part translations of foreign words: Übermensch and école normale. The im-
mediate effect of this simple phenomenon is to disturb the clarity of the distinc-
tion between foreign and domestic words. When what looks like a domestic word
turns out to be not originally German but translated from a foreign language--
einwandern from Latin immigrare--then a foreign origin suddenly appears be-
neath what had seemed natively German, and the line separating the domestic
from the foreign is upset.

This curiosity of language is of particular concern where, as in the nationalist
theory of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, national identity is seen as depending on the
purity of a nation's language. When the German language appears as the soul of
what is German, any displacement of the line between the native and the adopt-
ed or foreign elements in the language will disturb the identity of the German na-
tion as well. And when the relationships at work in the constitution of this na-
tional identity are strongly gendered--Fichte depicts the German language as the
"mother tongue" that gives birth to the "fatherland" of Germany--then the re-
liance on questionable assumptions about linguistic purity turns out to involve an
equally vulnerable reliance on the stability of gender. Uncovering hidden dis-
placements of such seemingly natural and immutable distinctions as those be-
tween domestic and foreign words or between mother and father makes visible

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