The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of
tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German
Romanticism and Idealism. This book begins by retracing the ways in
which the task of translation, so crucial to Romantic writing, 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 prophetic speech, the
confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, as language takes
place unpredictably in more than one voice and more than one tongue
at once. Mendicino 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." Whereas
major studies of the period have taken as their point of departure
the opposition of the familiar and the foreign, Mendicino 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? In Prophecies of Language,
these questions are pursued through readings of major texts by
G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and
Friedrich Hoelderlin. These readings show how, when one questions
the presupposition of works composed by individual authors in one
tongue, these texts disclose more than a monoglot reading yields,
namely the "plus" of their linguistic plurality. From such a
surplus, each chapter goes on to advocate for a philology that, in
and through an inclination toward language, takes neither its unity
nor its structure for granted but allows itself to be most
profoundly affected, addressed-and afflicted-by it.
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