Prophecies of Language ─ The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism

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 in more than one voice--and more than one tongue--at once, unpredictably.

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 Hölderlin. These readings not only disclose more of what is said in each text than can be noticed, when one departs from the presupposition that they are composed by individual authors in one tongue--: namely, the "plus" of their linguistic plurality. Each chapter also advocates for a philology that, in and through an inclination towards language, takes neither its unity nor its structure for granted, but allows itself to be most profoundly affected, addressed--and afflicted--by it.

Mendicino's reading of these Romantic philological endeavors contributes to a recent move (in which Fordham's list has played an important role) to further a version of philology that attends to language as it pushes against the limits of what can be said.

Kristina Mendicino is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She has previously served as Assistant Editor of The German Quarterly. Her recent scholarship includes publications in Modern Language Notes, differences, Monatshefte, and Praxis, as well as two co-edited volumes, Sema: Wendepunkte der Philologie (2012) and Playing False: Representations of Betrayal (2013).