“Just Ask the Stones”: Eco-Translation, Natural History, and Geomedia

How is the past recorded, transcribed, and translated? What raw materialities make recordings, transcriptions, and translations possible? What role does the lithic as a recording medium play in the Jena Romantics’ nature-philosophical writings and mineral fictions? This chapter draws on Novalis’s speculative theory of translation as an antecedent of geolinguistics (Le Guin 1974) and geotranslation (Cronin 2022) to outline a natural history of translation whereby translation itself emerges from the earth. It thus seeks to unearth not only a prehistory of eco-translation but also an eco-translation prior to history.