Lessons of Babel
Summer 2025 / Volume 27 / No. 2

Lessons of Babel

Even more than its centrality to communication and language, translation draws us closer to one of the paradoxes of the human person as both a member of a species and an irreducibly distinct individual. Coming July 1.

Table of Contents

From the Editor

Lessons of Babel

Jay Tolson

Notes & Comments

The Rakish Rogue Who Loved Me

Stephen Akey

The Unknowable After

Akshay Pendyal

Thematic—Lessons of Babel

A Question of Purpose

Gary Saul Morson

After Babel Fish

Richard Hughes Gibson

Untranslated

Olga Litvak

The Kafka Challenge

Paul Reitter

Translation and Taste

Blake Smith

Retranslating the Blues

W. Ralph Eubanks

Thinking Across Languages

Catherine Moon

The Word Made Lifeless

Talbot Brewer

Essays

Democracy by the Book

Antón Barba-Kay

Lionel Trilling and the Limits of Crisis-Thought

Sam Gee

Lexicon of the Phenomenon

Brad East

Book Reviews

The Birth of Modern Choice

Daniel T. Rodgers

Digesting Dante

Richard Hughes Gibson

A Distant View

Julia Friedman

The Self-Absorbed Bubble of Managerialism

Jonathan D. Teubner

Of Goats and Ancient Politics

Ryan S. Olson

Perplexity

Trevor Quirk

Reconsiderations

Alan Paton’s “Too Late the Phalarope”

David K. Anderson

Signifiers