  The origins of Rosenzweig’s thoughts on translating stretch back to the speech-thinking he developed in the Star. In order to make sense of the tremendous import with which he invests the act of translation, it is helpful to recall two aspects of that speech-thinking in particular. First of all, the Star introduces speech as a revelatory form of relation that unites different individual beings—divine, worldly, and human—even as it secures them as individuals. In his writings on translation, Rosenzweig points back to this relational quality of speech and discovers in it the very act of translation itself. “All speech,” he writes, “is translation.” In every dialogue with another person, Rosenzweig suggests, one engages in a miniature act of translation. Insofar as such relations contribute to my own self-realization, this very act of translating—of being open to and cognizant of the words of someone “foreign” to me—becomes an integral part of the way I realize myself. The way in which the introduction of a foreign text into a language can enable that language to realize itself in new ways reproduces, then, on the level of whole languages, the manner in which the individual comes to realize herself, according to Rosenzweig, through the act of translation involved in every interpersonal exchange.