Abstract
AbstractThis 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’.
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