Reviewed by: Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts Susan Bernofsky Rainer Nägele, Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. vii + 143 pages. Echo, echoes, echolalia are at the heart of Rainer Nägele’s Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts, a highly personal and compelling meditation on the nature of reading. This is a book that everywhere rejects the trappings of academic discourse. Its chapters are “essays,” Nägele tells us, in the most literal sense, attempts at demonstrating a praxis of reading that emerges “not from a rejection of theory, not from the phantasm of an innocence free of theory, but from the impossibility of theory in the kernel of theory” (13). Nägele as a reader is as sensitive and imaginative as he is astute, and the pages of this slim volume are full of the pleasures of following the associations of a mind thoroughly steeped in Western philosophy and literature. As a work on reading it is in no way prescriptive (and thus not strictly speaking theoretical) but rather exemplary: a demonstration of the tools that history, philosophy, linguistics, etymology, theology and sheer imaginative bravura have to offer. The echoes of Nägele’s title, these “reflexes and resonances in the confusion of languages” (8), refer not only to the happy multiplicity of tongues in “Babel heureuse” (Barthes) but also to a view of literary history that sees texts as things to be read between—read, that is, for their shared resonances, motifs, themes. Translation, as Nägele uses the term, encompasses various forms of transmission, transformation, and inheritance. These essays circle around a narrowly circumscribed canon of authors: Benjamin, Baudelaire, Kafka, Brecht, Nietzsche, Freud, Sophocles, and above all Hölderlin. Nägele offers a personal explanation for why these texts chose him as their reader. But of course this selection of authors at the same time makes his book a study of the origins of modernity, and if Hölderlin’s poems provide the crux to which these readings return again and again, it is because in their lines Nägele locates a radical transformation of the romantic idea of consciousness whose rejection was to mark the most important twentieth-century writing as well as reading. Central to Nägele’s praxis of reading is the notion of the constellation: of texts, images, words, syntactical elements; for when “[t]otalities are broken into pieces, [...] the broken pieces enter into readable constellations.” The [End Page 1174] term comes from Benjamin, where it appears in various contexts, for example in the Wahlverwandtschaften essay, where it is used to describe both the relationship and the difference between “idea” and “phenomenon” (“Ideas are related to things as the constellations of the stars to the stars” [25]). The recognition of the constellation is also its construction, thus the project of literary reception, of reading, as a creative and active process. Assembling a constellation of exemplary texts is of necessity the task of an individual reader, yet Nägele is careful to distance his work from any lax or self-indulgent mode of subjectivity. Acknowledging that by beginning “where a trace is felt as an impact” his project risks being associated with “utter subjectivism,” he cautions against mistaking his relation to these texts as one of “empathy” (Einfühlung). The critique of empathy with which he allies himself is a constitutive feature of modernist writing, central to a tradition that has detached itself from the romantic legacy of Reflexion. Romantic reflection—with its motifs of circularity, of departing only to return, including in its scope the spiral path of Hegel’s consciousness—has its “most virulent” culmination, Nägele reminds us, in a European anti-Semitism that constructs the Jewish spirit in terms of “an originary leave-taking without return” (6). Nägele’s presentation assigns a salutary moral weight to modernism’s “deflection and rupture in the movement of (self-)consciousness and reflection” (6). The figure of this deflected and ruptured reflection is echo, a ghostly version of reflection in which the reiteration is at the same time a diminishing: the return marks the reiterated object’s loss. Echo is also a specifically aural figure...