ABSTRACT
Herder's account of a national language echoes many of the topoi of The Poet and the intellectual milieu of New England Transcendentalism. Almost all of the New England Transcendentalists were translators. Margaret Fuller translated Johann Peter Eckermann's Gesprache mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens and Bettina von Arnim's Gunderode and included translations in Summer on the Lakes. Hedge's translations ranged from the twenty-eight lengthy excerpts from German Idealism and Romanticism anthologized in his Prose Writers of Germany to many translations of Schelling and Schiller for The Dial. In fact, translation appears to be invested with the potential to enable an experience of the present as a site interpenetrated by those traditions to which it is indebted, the experience essays such as History want to repudiate. The synchronic unity of the Emersonian image, in which differences transform instantaneously into self-identity, is structurally opposed to normative understandings of translation.
