What is translation? Which place does translation occupy in a culture? What does this operation of translation of one language into another consist of; what is initially ‘test from the stranger’? Berman tackles his problems by studying an era and a culture in which these issues were posed with strength and passion, and in which they constituted the subject of debates and controversy: Romantic Germany. From Herder to Hölderlin over Novalis, Goethe, Humboldt and the Schlegel brothers, the act of translation indeed occupies a central place in the German cultural and literary field. Translation, in the history of the Occident, had never been meditated in such a rich and lively way. And, beyond the specific problem of the translation, it is a whole series of fundamental questions which emerge, questions that revive our modernity.