Translation and the Untranslatable

Translation and the Untranslatable Synopsis

The ground-breaking and monumental encyclopedia of philosophical terms read through the history of their translation, Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Robert/Le Seuil, 2004), finally appeared in English translation in 2014 with Princeton University Press as the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, eds. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood. Translations of the Vocabulaire are now under way in several other major languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian. This special issue of Paragraph will be the first sustained critical reflection following the publication of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, and includes contributions by those who were most closely involved in the editing of this volume, by two of the translators (Mehlman, Syrotinski), as well as others whose work has been significantly inflected or influenced by the questions raised by the Dictionary.