ABSTRACT
In a 1937 essay that deserves to be more widely known than it is, Jose´ Ortega y
Gasset portrays himself telling a colloquium of professors and students from the
Colle`ge de France and other academic circles that, not only is it utopian to imagine
that we can translate a text from one language into another, but that ‘for us to speak
to each other in our mother tongue [. . .] is also a utopian exercise’ (1992 [1937], p. 100). Our experience as individuals is unique, and while we may be able to
communicate part of it to another, not all of it can be captured in the signs of
language. Nor do we control how our interlocutors interpret our utterances.
