Premium
Untranslatable Wordsworth?
Author(s) -
FAIRLEY IAN
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/j.1754-0208.2011.00379.x
Subject(s) - idiot , possession (linguistics) , poetry , philosophy , literature , meaning (existential) , psychoanalysis , epistemology , art , psychology , linguistics
This essay explores Coleridge's claim that the creative ground of Wordsworth's poetry is its ‘ untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning’. Proposing that Schleiermacher's concept of Unübertragbarkeit can be understood as an analogue of Coleridge's ‘untranslatableness’, I suggest that Schleiermacher's thinking about the ethics of self‐possession can gloss a Wordsworthian hermeneutic of self‐expression. I then seek to describe the operation of translation in the Simplon Pass episode of The Prelude , and conclude by exploring the translatable or untranslatable nature of selfhood in the mother–child relationships imagined in ‘The Blind Highland Boy’ and ‘The Idiot Boy’.