Today, Humboldt's works have sloughed off their Victorian skins to emerge on to the Anglophone market in sleek, fresh translations. Lavishly illustrated and carrying a wealth of annotations, these acclaimed critical editions emphasise the centrality of Humboldt's writing to the cosmopolitan thought, global interconnections and environmental anxieties that shape our world. The new translations are visually enticing works that conform sufficiently in their dustjacket design to have the look of a series. Bohn would have approved. The misgivings he might hold about their price could be assuaged by reflecting that their target audience is now a scholarly market, and the reviewers’ comments on the dustjackets derive almost exclusively from an academic elite. Yet room has always been found in each of these weighty editions for a Translator's Note. Fundamental to the translation itself, it draws critical attention to the essential mediating role in these truly modern renderings of Humboldt's work. It also confronts us directly with the complicated business of transforming one series of ideas and images into a different language and culture, and, as twenty-first-century readers, into a different time.

These modern translators bemoan Humboldt's ‘massive, knotty, chewy subclauses’, his repeated over-layering of information and the elevated, formal character of his language (Humboldt 2014: 5). Yet they convince us that putting his works into clear and fluent English has demanded significant linguistic agility. They have risen admirably to this challenge. Tacitly, though, they testify still more persuasively to the extraordinary achievements of their nineteenth-century counterparts. Quite apart from the fact that today's translators can hone their word-processed documents with ease, use spell-checkers to avoid typing errors and make quick text searches to ensure continuity, they can also consult electronic dictionaries and thesauri at the touch of a button, call up search engines to hunt down rare terminology and leaf virtually through the latest scientific periodicals. The working environment for Humboldt's first translators was radically different. We can only stand in awe of those who wrote every single word long-hand with pen and ink before a translation went for typesetting, doubtless working late into the evening in dimly lit rooms as they met increasingly punishing deadlines.