Winner of a 2015 Outstanding Reference Sources Award, Reference and User Services Association, American Library Association
"One of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2015, selected by Hari Kunzru"
"One of The Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year 2014, chosen by David Wootton"
"One of The Times Higher Education Supplement’s Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Robert S. C. Gordon"
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2014
"[W]hat may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced. . . . [T]his is a considerable and entertaining book, full of odd words beautifully, at times owlishly, annotated."—-Adam Gopnik, New Yorker
"[An] extraordinary book. . . . Many of the entries are illuminating, but what is most fascinating about the book is its partial vision of a fragment of European culture, through the dissection of its philosophical vocabulary."—-Tim Crane, Times Literary Supplement
"[A] cornucopia of lexical trajectories and semantic adventures across a wide variety of languages and histories. . . . As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic . . . this book is another valuable reminder that a philosophy that ignores its own history, that pretends to operate as if it had no history, is self-impoverishing."—-Christopher Prendergast, London Review of Books
"Praise for the French edition: "This dictionary's great idea is to address European philosophy from the point of view of translation. . . . [It] attains its goal by putting this principle to work: one cannot always translate a foreign concept in one word, but one can always explain it. And when one has grasped the explanation, one has acquired the concept."—-Le Figaro Littéraire
"Praise from the French edition: A dictionary cannot be summarized. One great lesson, nevertheless, which can be distilled from this one (it can be gathered in the masterworks of the entries 'Traduire' ['Translate'] and 'Langues et traditions' ['Languages and traditions']), is that no language is born a philosophical one. It becomes philosophical, as it engages in exchanges with other languages. Philosophical language is impure language, and a national philosophy cannot, therefore, exist. This conviction can perhaps be one of the meanings of the unity of Europe, to which the Vocabulaire renders homage, and service."—-Vincent Aubin, Le Figaro
"[I]nteresting reading. The Dictionary of Untranslatables is a wonderful addition to my language library. . . . [A] book to savor and think about and to learn in the broader sense of learning. For anyone interested in language, in words, and the scope of meaning that a word can encompass, I recommend the Dictionary of Untranslatables."—-Rich Adin, American Editor
"[G]reat success. . . . By preserving the specificity of words in their source languages, but then proceeding though so many near-synonyms in other tongues, the Dictionary bridges this ideological divide, providing a different way of understanding what it is to be in, and between, languages."—-Tom Bunstead, Independent on Sunday
"[Y]ou should equip yourself with this extraordinary book. . . . You could probably, and profitably, spend your life reading this book. . . . The volume offers a detailed and up-to-date map of abstract thinking, from the classical age to now."—-Douglas Kerr, South China Morning Post
"The Dictionary of Untranslatables, newly translated from the French original, wears its modest megalomania well. An 11-year project involving some 150 contributors and comprising more than 400 entries, the Dictionary suggests comparison with Volume XI of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön, described by Borges as 'a vast and systemic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet.' The planet in question here is what we usually call 'continental philosophy.'. . . [A] heady universe of speculative thinking about the meaning of life, the history of ideas, the fate of mankind, and so on. . . . [T]he Dictionary is revealing for the way it sketches, lexically, a set of parallel but alternate intellectual traditions. What language teachers call 'false friends' are everywhere, inspiring a constant alertness to nuance. . . . Scrupulous and difficult, it's everything that the Internet, which wants everything to talk 'frictionlessly' with everything else, is not. No dreams of universal translation here—enjoy the friction. Use it for bibliomancy, the lost art of divination by book (with scripture or Virgil or Homer or Hafiz)."—-Ross Perlin, New Inquiry
"A vast, lovingly detailed translator's note to western philosophy. . . . This fascinating book belongs to the interesting-in-itself side."—-George Miller, Le Monde Diplomatique
