Modernist music scholarship seems to be at an impasse. On the one hand, it recognizes that earlier narratives focusing on select technical procedures did not accurately reflect the diversity of compositional practices in Western art music of the twentieth century. Even the works of putative radicals contain more traces of the prior common practice than initially historicized; tonality may have only partially collapsed and dissonance not been fully emancipated. On the other hand, the realization that there was no cohesive modernism but multiple modernisms leads to historiographic disorder. If there are as many ways to be musically modern as there are scholars who write about it, then the term becomes meaningless. Either as a time period or aesthetic commitment, it indicates no coherence other than “a cosmopolitan simultaneity of musical languages.” Indeed, the social and linguistic conditions of musical modernism resemble those George Steiner has theorized as “after Babel”: the postlapsarian cacophony of idioms and idiolects. Modernisms, in effect, are ways to cope with the disintegration of a common musical tongue. While some composers did retreat into their private linguistic spheres, many others reconfigured old musical languages anew. Despite claims to the contrary by the most progressive and original of modernists, they regularly translated. “New” music could not be entirely new, since translation, according to Steiner, is a truism under Babelian conditions. This dissertation thus reconsiders modernism as translational with Benjamin Britten and his “Russian” works—The Poet’s Echo, op. 76, six songs set to poems by Alexander Pushkin, and the Third Suite for Cello, op. 87, based on four Russian melodies—at the center. In addition to illustrating his translational techniques, these works disclose Britten’s ostensibly unexpected identification with a strain of nineteenth-century Russian literary thought, shaped largely by Pushkin, that was also a post-Babel response. Britten and Pushkin, as it turns out, shared a radical theory of translation—that it could be original—which may offer ways out of modernism’s impasse and in the process, revise its assumptions.