Philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt: revisiting the problems of poetry translation

Abstract

The article considers a philosophical concept of Wilhelm von Humboldt about the untranslatability of poetry. According to the thought of the outstanding thinker and philosopher, the birth of a poetical composition is a mysterious process which transforms the sensual into the rational, the unconscious into the conscious, ethics (external) into aesthetics (interior), and up to the top of aesthetics, viz. the poetry he called “the law of the highest sensuality.” Poetry is beauty. Any poetic composition is untranslatable because the reverse process from the rational to the sensual, the conscious to the unconscious, aesthetics to ethics is impossible, for the law of highest sensuality is primarily the ancient first-born beginning of the people, “the spirit of the nation,” which can only be expressed by a poet belonging to the nation.

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