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Cloud Modification Translation

ABSTRACT Most readings of Goethe’s 1821 poem on the cloud terminology proposed by the English meteorologist Luke Howard, “Howards Ehrengedächtnis,” have taken it as celebrating the potential unification of meteorological language and poetic language. On this basis, it has been advanced as a text that might speak to our contemporary moment of ecological crisis, in which moving between natural-scientific modes of knowledge, on the one hand, and the cultural and imaginative practices investigated by the humanities, on the other, has been widely acknowledged to be a pressing transdisciplinary imperative. The reading I offer of the poem is more negative. I take it to address a semantic paradox of atmospheric Romanticism, in which the lexicon of atmosphere was pulled in two contrary directions around 1800, becoming more culturally metaphorical at the same time as it was becoming more scientifically and precisely conceptualized. Rather than seeking to bridge or transcend this divide, Goethe’s poem instead locates it within a broader set of concerns centered around translation, memory, and print culture. In support of this reading of the poem, I provide a new translation of it under the title “Howard: An Inscription.”