BOOK REVIEW Barbara Cassin, ed; Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, English trans. eds; translated by Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Steven Rendall, Nathaniel Stein, and Michael Syrotinsky. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 1344 pp. $65.00. ISBN: 978-0691138701 Lawrence Rosenwald 1 Published online: 26 October 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 When Barbara Cassin’ s Vocabulaire européen des philoso- phies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (a resolutely literal trans- lation would be, BA European Vocabulary of Philosophies: Dictionary of Untranslatables^) came out in 2004, it was a sensation – a surprising accomplishment for what Cassin herself called Bun livre fou,^ a crazy book: a formidably challenging philosophical work, running to some 1500 pages (9 million characters), weighing five pounds, containing some 400 entries and accounts of some 4000 words and phrases drawn from some fifteen European or European- philosophy-foundational languages, the work of some 150 scholars. But in retrospect a predictable accomplishment as well, given the work’ s four large innovations. It made a grand case for a specifically European philosophical vocabulary; it was based on a stimulatingly broad sense of what counted as philo- sophical (the plural in the title, philosophies, was no accident); it was no less innovative formally than intellectually; most importantly, it put the question of translation at the center of its investigations. (A clarification: Buntranslatables^ for Cassin are not for the most part words that defy translation but words that one can’ t stop trying to translate, retranslate, even decline to translate.) A comment or two on each innovation. The focus on European philosophical vocabulary, what in some philosophy departments is called Bcontinental^ philosophy, is polemical. Its attack is directed partly against what Cassin calls Ba mode of analytic philosophy that champions the naïve optimism of the universal; what counts is the concept, not the word, and Aristotle is my colleague at Oxford,^ and partly against what she calls Ba militancy of the ordinary . . . whether in empiri- cism (Hume) or in the ordinary language philosophy resulting from the linguistic turn (Wittgenstein, Quine, Cavell), it punc- tures the windbags of metaphysics in being, matter of fact and fact of the matter , attentive to what we say when we speak quotidian English.^ 1 The capacious reach of the book is a pleasure to document. I offer a list of the entries preceding and following the entry I turned to first, that on Sehnsucht: Secularization/ Profanation, Securitas, Sehnsucht (Bnostalgia, yearning, longing^), Sein ( Bbeing ^), Selbst ( Bself ^), Semiotics, Sens Commun (Bcommon sense^), Sense/ Meaning, Sensus Communis, Serenity, Sex, Shame. Some of these are clearly regular fare in philosophy courses and treatises; others are clearly not. The formal innovativeness of the book is astonishing. Some entries are word-based, focused on particular words or word-networks, e.g., the Italian word leggiadria (Bgracefulness,^ the smile of the Mona Lisa); some entries are more thematic, e.g., those on word order or aspect. Some are only Bdirectional^, like the one on Bpeace,^ pointing to all the articles of the first two kinds that might interest a reader trying to understand that elusive term. The individual entries are no less complex. Take that entry on Sehnsucht I began with. Sehnsucht is German; the entry begins by offering two French translations. It names a set of related entries in the book, then offers a philological preface and a two-part history of the term: its origine sentimentale and its philosophical freight, both enriched with long quotations (Fichte, Hegel). 1 Cassin, BPlus d’une langue,^ unpublished lecture kindly sent me by the author, my translation. * Lawrence Rosenwald lrosenwald@Wellesley.Edu 1 Department of English, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA Soc (2016) 53:662–664 DOI 10.1007/s12115-016-0080-y