The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book retraces the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to the literature and philosophy of Romanticism, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another—most often unbeknownst to the speaker herself. In prophecy, in other words, the confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, and prophecy means, first of all, speaking in more than one voice—and more ... More

The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book retraces the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to the literature and philosophy of Romanticism, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another—most often unbeknownst to the speaker herself. In prophecy, in other words, the confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, and prophecy means, first of all, speaking in more than one voice—and more than one tongue—at once, unpredictably. This book argues that the relation between translation and prophecy drawn by German Romantic writers fundamentally changes the way we must approach this so-called “Age of Translation.” Instead of taking as its point of departure the opposition of the familiar and the foreign, this book suggests that Romantic writing provokes the questions: how could one read a language that is not one? And what would such a polyvocal, polyglot language, have to say about philology—both for the Romantics, whose translation projects are most intimately related to their philological preoccupations, and for us? Through careful readings of major texts by G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin, this book proposes a version of philology that does not take language as a given but rather attends to language as it pushes against the limits of what can be said.