Progressive Geographies

Last summer I wrote a series of posts on the choices involved in translating Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” into English. Attempting something similar for Moses Mendelssohn’s answer to the same question, which appeared three months before Kant’s in the same journal, would be a less promising undertaking. In what turned out to be a massive duplication of efforts, Daniel Dahlstrom, Hans-Herbert Kögler, and I all produced translations of the essay in the late 1990s and, while they differ on a few points, there is not a lot to be learned from comparing them.¹ As we labored away on what each of us assumed would be the first translation of Mendelssohn’s essay into English, none of us was aware that, almost two centuries earlier, an anonymous translation of the essay had been published in the second volume on an obscure British called the The German Museum.