The limits of cosmopolitanism and the case for translation

This article argues that the term cosmopolitan is too imprecise and widely contested to serve as a useful register of interactions between homelands and others, either for a historical‐empirical inquiry or as an ethical mandate. In the British debate cosmopolitanism has often been contrasted with localism, with a patriotic attachment to place. But the British state did not and does not make feasible such a simple distinction: attention to the “other” should begin within the elements of the internally diversified nation‐state itself. The situation is better described by resorting to a model of translation, which governs both the dissonant dictions within English (Clare, Burns) as well as more obviously foreign ones. The Romantic geohistorical epic can offer an exemplary paradigm for presenting the foreign as an estranged medium not open to easy understanding while at the same time destabilizing the assumed security of the English language and the culture that depends upon it.