As the fictional account of a British Editor's attempt at translating a German philosophical manuscript, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus has persistently frustrated critical analyses of its awkward combination of philosophical argument and rhetorical experimentation. This paper examines the highly paradoxical position that translation occupies in the work, arguing that Sartor Resartus is a self-subverting text that disarticulates its organicist aesthetic in the process of translation. Sartor Resartus emerges as a culminating critique of a key episode in the British Romantic attempt at cross-cultural transmission of German Idealism to Britain.