Weathering Translation: Goethe, Howard, Kalidasa

Abstract: The following article examines the curious imbrication of two nascent disciplines in Goethe's scientific imagination: meteorology and Oriental philology, specifically as represented by the British taxonomizer of clouds Luke Howard and the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, whose texts reached Germany through secondary translation from the English. Tracking the publication history as well as morphophonemic dynamics of Goethe's meteorological poems opens up a discursive field that thinks through meteorological transformation, interlingual translation, and intercultural encounter as processes inhabiting a vexed continuum. Goethe's engagement with both Howard and Kalidasa brings to the fore the ineluctability of translation not only in the case of literary texts for which the original remains inaccessible, but also in the case of "untranslatable" natural scientific terminology charged with the task of bringing an international community of mutually intelligible observers into being. Rather than fetishizing the (potentially exclusive) untranslatability of an original text or jargon, on the one hand, or advocating for the (potentially homogenizing) pan-translatability of texts and terms as they enter international circulation, Goethe thinks through how translations can re-originate their own target languages.