Translation was not just the prime vehicle through which early-twentieth-century Egyptian intellectuals assimilated European literature and thought into Egypt, but also the trope that some of those intellectuals used to describe both the failed and the desired Egyptian nation. Writing in 1928, the Egyptian writer and critic Muhammad Haykal—author of what is usually called the first Arabic novel (Zaynab, 1913) and editor-in-chief of the major newspaper al-Siyasa—compared 1920s Egypt to the Tower of Babel, arguing that the nation’s chaotic mix of secularist versus Azharite intellectual tendencies, languages, and even modes of dress had plunged Egypt into a state of mutual intranational untranslatability. According to Haykal, this state—if left unchecked—ultimately would undercut the efforts of European-educated Egyptians to “culture” the minds of their compatriots back home and to foster the “freedom of thought” and expression proper to a cohesive (read: centralized) nation. That same year, the Egyptian critic Ahmad Hasan Al-Zayyat (later editor-in-chief of the periodical al-Risala) blamed Egypt’s incoherence on the “chaos” of Arabic literature and the dangerous indeterminacy of its boundaries and rules. Claiming that Arabic literature had been frozen for centuries in arrested “incompletion”—as an amalgam of disjunctive tongues and cultural forms thrown together by the rise of Islam—al-Zayyat argued the incompatibility of an unreformed Arabic literary tradition with national modernity. Here again “tradition” is suspect for its Babel-like heterogeneity. In this paper, I argue that the writings of Haykal, al-Zayyat, and others suggest that Egypt would not become “orderly” and take its place among “civilized” (European) nations until its culture had changed from one in which nothing was translatable into one in which everything was translatable, everything commensurable. I show that such assertions hark back to nineteenth-century ideologies of colonial origin, which maintained that modern Egypt was not a nation because it was “a melange without unity,” an “assemblage of different races of Asia and Africa” whose diverse traits “do not add up to a physiognomy”—a coherent, monoethnic face. (The words are those of the Egyptian-born French Orientalist Joseph Agoub, translated into Arabic in 1834.) I contend that the effort to institute Egyptian nationality surrendered Egypt to imperial translationality, eradicating any and all local incommensurability within a “national universal” of European colonial origins. What is lost, I ask, in the nation’s demand for a culture in which everything is translatable?