This is a book about languages, what languages can and what they cannot do.

In this dialogue between a Nobel Laureate and a leading translator, provocative ideas emerge about the evolution of language and the challenge of translation.

Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe: which one is true, or are both false? Speaking in Tongues - taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel-Laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimópulos - explores questions that have constantly plagued writers and translators, now more than ever. Among them:

• How can a translator liberate meanings imprisoned in the language of a text?
• Why is the masculine form dominant in gendered languages while the feminine is treated as a deviation?
• How should we counter the spread of monolingualism?
• Should a translator censor racist or misogynistic language?
• Does mathematics tell the truth about everything?

The twenty chapters of the book are divided into three parts. Part One contains the leading essay in the book, `Metaphysical Imagination', a study of two complex concepts that have been of great importance in our understanding of both science and philosophy, together with an essay on how the writings of past philosophers are to be understood. The essays in Part Two are individual studies of some of the most influential European thinkers of the nineteenth century. While Hegel, Nietzsche and the continental tradition of Dialectical Thought might appear to have little in common with the English tradition of Mill, Bentham and Coleridge, the author points to the similarities as well as the differences. Part Three has essays on major twentieth century thinkers: Benedetto Croce, Bertrand Russell, Ernst Cassirer, Ortega y Gasset, C.J. Jung and J.P. Sartre, and a chapter in which the author gives a fascinating account of his personal relations with Sir Isaiah Berlin. Berlin once wrote to the author thanking him for a review which, he said, `is at once the most generous, penetrating, interesting and to me ... unbelievably welcome review of anything I have ever written... It shows more Einfuhlung into the character and purpose of what I think and believe than anyone has ever shown.' (p. 657, chapter 18 of this book) In the final two essays of Part Three the author considers the nature of philosophy. He is critical of certain movements in current philosophical thought, and, unlike many of the thinkers that he discusses, he does not believe that philosophy can be a source of factual knowledge or that it can reveal some 'true essence' of reality. He sets out his own view of what philosophy is, and the implications of this view for the teaching of the subject.