An entire volume could be devoted to de Man as a translator. It might include his wartime translation into Flemish of Melville's Moby Dick, or the texts produced while working as a hired hand for Henry Kissinger's journal Confluence, when he was making ends meet prior to becoming a Junior Fellow at Harvard and translating across a range of European languages. It would include his edition of Madame Bovary and the French edition of Rilke. It would certainly include de Man's translation into English of Martin Heidegger's Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, published in 1959 in the Quarterly Review of Literature. This text demonstrates de Man's significant engagement with the work of Heidegger while living in America in advance of his meeting with Derrida and the subsequent self-characterisation of his work as ‘deconstruction’. Such a volume would also include material from The Portable Rousseau, for which Paul and Patricia de Man translated substantial sections of Julie and the Confessions, as well as versions of ‘On Public Happiness’ and ‘Four Letters to Monsieur de Malesherbes’. The de Mans also translated Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Language, which is included in this volume, given the importance of that essay to the dialogue between de Man and Derrida concerning Rousseau (see ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’, ‘Bibliography’, p. 333, and ‘On Reading Rousseau’, in this volume).