This monograph applies poetics, literary criticism, and the history of cultural forms to aspects of natural language, the main focus being on the act of translation. Translation is fully implicit in the most rudimentary communication. It is explicit in the coexistence and muatal contact of the thousands of languages spolken on the earth. Between the utterance and interpretation of meaning through verbal sign systems on the one hand, and the exteme multiplicity and variety of human tongues on the other, lies the domain of language as a whole. In this book, the author argues that these two ends of the spectrum - elementary acts of speech and the paradox of Babel - are closely related, and that any coherent linguistics must take both into account.