Social groups both fear and need difference, and three of the essays in this section are linked by this double preoccupation. The other essays explore difference from a slightly different angle: within the very concepts of translation and naming, and across the line, if there is such a line, which divides lived history from memory.

Translation, paradoxically, has often been used to build national identity by means of organized borrowing from different languages and cultures. In this "specular process," as Lawrence Venuti aptly calls it, one becomes more one's self by selectively becoming another. Or rather by openly trying and secretly failing in the attempt. Venuti's essay lucidly lays out the theory of this project, and offers precise case studies. There are forms of nationalism, he suggests, where "the national status of a language and culture is simultaneously presupposed and created through translation," and Schleiermacher's argument about German and Germany is precisely this: "Our language can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only by means of the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign." Yopie Prins shows how a whole generation of scholars, poets, and educators in Britain tried to become more truly English by becoming more Greek than the Greeks. Matthew Arnold, Prins says, thought "modernity was the demand for the right measure and......England was a nation in need of measure," and the Homeric hexameter offered itself as the haunting and implausible solution to a problem both of poetry and culture. The hexameter, Prins shrewdly adds "was invoked by Arnold as a metrical imaginary," a way of getting the "native genius" of English to speak in tones that mere native forms did not allow. It measured, as she says, "the distance between culture and anarchy" — always a little further than Arnold wanted to think.

Azade Seyhan also notes, in her study of German exiles in Turkey during World War II, "the coexistence of an extensive practice of translation with a passionately articulated uniqueness and moral superiority of Turkish nation and national identity." The paradox returns, and looks less paradoxical each time. Her essay is a study in what she calls "cultural geography," the formation of "cities of refuge," places where exiled modes of thought and teaching could both be preserved for their own future and rather different life and have a very large effect on the local culture. "In a certain sense," she writes, "the best intentions of the Enlightenment paradigm survived in a self-reflexive, reinterpreted or reimagined mode in pockets and margins of exile."