George Steiner (1) (1929–2020)
Author of After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
For other authors named George Steiner, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
George Steiner was born in 1929 in Paris, but also lived in Vienna and New York. Steiner was a critic, novelist, philosopher, translator, and educator. Currently, he is a professor at Cambridge University and the University of Geneva. He has written for the New Yorker for over thirty years and has show more published the books No Passion Spent, Errata: An Examined Life, and Martin Heidegger: With a New Introduction. George Steiner died in Cambridge, England on February 3, 2020, at the age of 90. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: By TheNexusInstitute (youtube) - George Steiner - The Humanities Don't Humanize (at 3min 43s), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43136163
Series
Works by George Steiner
Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (1979) 238 copies, 1 review
Prefacio a la Biblia Hebrea (Biblioteca Ensayo) (Biblioteca De Ensayo: Serie Menor) (Spanish Edition) (2001) 18 copies
What Is Comparative Literature?: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 11 October, 1994 (Ina (1995) 2 copies
The Genius of Small Things 1 copy
Språkdyret 1 copy
Inner lights 1 copy
Associated Works
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (1950) — Introduction — 410 copies, 6 reviews
The Queen of Spades; The Tales of Ivan Belkin; Dubrovsky; The Captain's Daughter (1961) — Foreword, some editions — 37 copies
Lezen, een kunst die uit de mode raakt — Author, some editions — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Steiner, George
- Legal name
- Steiner, George Francis
- Other names
- STEINER, George Francis
STEINER, George - Birthdate
- 1929-04-23
- Date of death
- 2020-02-03
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Lycée Français de New York
University of Chicago (BA|1948)
Harvard University (MA|1950)
Balliol College, Oxford
Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, Paris, Île-de-France, France - Occupations
- professor (English and Comparative Literature)
literary critic
novelist
translator
essayist - Organizations
- University of Oxford
Harvard University
University of Geneva
University of Cambridge (Churchill College)
The Economist - Awards and honors
- Premio Príncipe de Asturias (Communications and Humanities, 2001)
Légion d'Honneur (Chevalier, 1984)
Fellow, British Academy (1998)
Zabel Award (1970)
Truman Capote Lifetime Award for Literature (1999)
King Albert Medal (show all 9)
Rhodes Scholar (1955)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1971)
Bell Prize (1950) - Relationships
- Steiner, Zara Shakow (wife)
Steiner, Deborah Tarn (daughter) - Short biography
- Son of Dr Frederick George and Mrs Else Steiner, George Steiner was raised trilingually, in German, English and French. His first formal education took place at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris and then at the Lycée Français de New York after the family moved to the United States in 1940. In his Memoirs, Steiner recalled being hit by a piece of chalk in the face by a teacher at the Lycée. His field is comparative literature. His work as a critic has tended toward exploring cultural and philosophical issues, particularly having to do with translation and the nature of language and of literature. Steiner's best-known book, After Babel (1975), was an early and influential contribution to the field of translation studies.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Neuilly sur Seine, France
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
Geneva, Switzerland
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK - Place of death
- Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Members
Reviews
could I accidentally
get eaten
slipping into your
sandwich [castle]
— Eileen Myles, School of Fish
On Spikes
Gertrude Stein, on the occasion of delivering a lecture, receives some humorous counter-advice from an unnamed French professor: "Talk as quickly as you can and never look up." (From Autobiography of Alice Toklas; a previous well-wisher had suggested the antithetical approach, "talk as slowly as possible and never look down.") This anticipates what would later become the infamous style of show more Nabokov's lectures on literature at Cornell; his coercive refusal to engage with students belying an insecurity about losing his monopoly on time. It's always a mistake to forget the moment in which erudition is substituted for aggression. The battle over temporal scarcity takes a more frank form in competitive forensics (debate). An absolutely equal division of time produces, among other tactics, "spreading" (i.e. reading the case as fast as possible) and the "spike" i.e. the proleptic anticipation of the stock counter-argument. Every Spike is a risk. One can't always anticipate what an opponent will do — the spike, under such circumstances, in danger of becoming wasted speech. Though there are ways to tempt an opponent into opening the door to this kind of argument i.e. where erudition has produced what Nicki Minaj would call "strategically designed architecture."
George Steiner's text begins with a (proleptic) moral reckoning on the Holocaust. The notion that, "the Jew became, as it were, the 'bad conscience' of Western history [. . .] the holocaust as a polytheist reflex [. . .] in a botched attempt to kill god," is not new, being one of the stock theological responses to the centuries-old historical pogrom. We are less interested in this than in how he recuperates the "irretrievable loss" which has turned even the "precisely restored house fronts" of Warsaw into a "stage set": i.e. in the immaterial memory (what has now become "postmemory") of those still living. In this way, even those lost have access to a piece of immortality possessed by the "Immortal Poets of the Western Canon". From these unobjectionable, albeit anemic, origins, we proceed to more contentious interests. Steiner's critique of culture is perhaps the primary contention of this essay:
“What is occurring now is new : it is an attempt at a total break. The mumble of the dropout, the "fuck-off" of the beatnik, the silence of the teenager in the enemy house of his parents are meant to destroy. Cordelia's asceticism, her refusal of the mendacities of speech, proves murderous. So does that of the autistic child when it stamps on language, pulverizing it to gibberish or maniacal silence. We empty of their humanity those to whom we deny speech. We make them naked and absurd." (115)
Among the many responses to this kind of myopic historicism (Were the "Beatniks" the "Superpredators" of the 1960's?), one intuitively understands that the renunciation of coherent speech is simply the winning refusal to be brought into a debate in which one can be destroyed by erudition (read: aggression). Since the dawn of time the "destructive silence of the teenager" has never matched the power of his parents to destroy him (though they (mostly) keep it in abeyance). A more erudite response comes from Marianne Constable (Just Silences, 2006) regarding the compelled speech act (e.g. Native American cultural artifacts forcibly disclosed to the Ministry of the Interior), the Miranda Warning, and the notion, per Edward Said, that, "They cannot speak for themselves because they are already spoken for." To Steiner's subpoint that their loud music (too much sound in too little time) deafens the hearing, one might say "leave it be." To his point that they'll never memorize the verse of the Immortal Poets, one might say "then forget them."
We recall the fable of Bluebeard's Castle, in which the newly married maiden is given the keys to the castle and uses them to open a forbidden room in which the slain bodies of her husband's previous wives are cached (and possibly eaten). (One wonders: wouldn't the story work just as well if the room instead contained a fantastic gift, and scary old turban-wearing Bluebeard wasn't such a bad guy after all (responses to Steiner's "Orientalism" abide in another review) . . . Or perhaps the room contained something embarrassing like Bluebeard's peasant-boy lover, or a "Pickle Rick" poster.) The dialectic goes: Bluebeard shouldn't have given the key if he didn't want it opened, so in fact he did want it opened, so perhaps it was inevitable and he was sowing the seeds of a future punishment, and perhaps because the author wanted all this to happen.
It's not too cute to say this text itself is like Bluebeards Castle; preparing a horror scene to confront the reader who possesses an impulse for inquiry. Erudite readers will have already noted how Steiner proleptically linked the "Immortal Poets of the Western Canon" to the preservation of the memory of the holocaust. Upon refuting the absolute importance of the former "sure, Shakespeare's nice," one encounters perhaps the strongest Spike ever written in a modern essay on pop culture: i.e. "so that's what you think of the Holocaust." It's difficult to formulate a response to this, esp. because notions of Memory are already intimately linked to the Holocaust, but perhaps a possible rejoinder lies in the author's treatment of the central theme. Steiner is notably (tastefully) sparing in his use of "Bluebeard's Castle" as a motif, but he does key into the notion of inevitability we have evolved in our brief dialectic. ("We open the successive doors in Bluebeard's castle because 'they are there,' because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal-radical, self-mutilating-Of the inquisitive, probing, forward tensed stance of our species." (136)) Perhaps the best response, then, is to keep silent. This would be to let Steiner (and his argument) go down with the inevitable collapse of the high culture he espouses. Something better will (inevitably) take its place. The Holocaust will remain — and the time we have to wait for the Inevitable is always shorter than we expect, as in Warhol's famous anecdotes: "Victor and his boyfriend walked me back to the office. A fortune teller told Victor’s boyfriend that he would be hit by a cab. Then she said maybe that wasn’t right, that she’d better read the tarot cards, too, so she did, and then she said, “It’s going to happen even quicker than I thought.” (Pat Hackett, The Andy Warhol Diaries) show less
Another example of intelligent people making dumb decisions. Whatever possessed Steiner to publish this? It ought to have been a back-of-the-napkin thought experiment, but instead it's out and about, doing no good to anyone.
The premise of the novel(la) is that a trio of Israeli commandos find Hitler alive, well, and ancient, in some corner of South America so remote they have to bring him out literally on their backs and arms, crossing swamps and rivers on foot. Their ultimate goal is to show more take him to court. Other national and political factions who got wind of this are monitoring the situation and may act to foil them, for no clear reason (there are only some short and utterly clichéd snapshots of various American, Soviet, French, British high-ups remarking cryptically on the scheme). The jungle trek exhausts everyone but Hitler, who seems to be getting stronger as they get closer to the pick up point.
And that's it, that's the story. However, the point isn't the story, but the horrible last pages Steiner gives over to Hitler's self-exonerating speech. It's the usual well-trodden litany of antisemitic thought since the late 19th century, as ever blaming the victims as perpetrators and piling on every possible insult to the injuries on record.
The effect is awful. Steiner may have hoped people would know (or be?) better, but considering that exactly the same reasoning still thrives and spreads around, he achieved nothing; or, even worse, he appears to leave Hitler in the "winning" position.
Fwiw, there's a section about the middle of the book when one of the men carrying Hitler is recalling a long list of crimes against Jewish individuals and wondering what sort of punishment could begin to expiate for a single one--I would have had that at the end, because it speaks for itself, because it is real and unanswerable. show less
The premise of the novel(la) is that a trio of Israeli commandos find Hitler alive, well, and ancient, in some corner of South America so remote they have to bring him out literally on their backs and arms, crossing swamps and rivers on foot. Their ultimate goal is to show more take him to court. Other national and political factions who got wind of this are monitoring the situation and may act to foil them, for no clear reason (there are only some short and utterly clichéd snapshots of various American, Soviet, French, British high-ups remarking cryptically on the scheme). The jungle trek exhausts everyone but Hitler, who seems to be getting stronger as they get closer to the pick up point.
And that's it, that's the story. However, the point isn't the story, but the horrible last pages Steiner gives over to Hitler's self-exonerating speech. It's the usual well-trodden litany of antisemitic thought since the late 19th century, as ever blaming the victims as perpetrators and piling on every possible insult to the injuries on record.
The effect is awful. Steiner may have hoped people would know (or be?) better, but considering that exactly the same reasoning still thrives and spreads around, he achieved nothing; or, even worse, he appears to leave Hitler in the "winning" position.
Fwiw, there's a section about the middle of the book when one of the men carrying Hitler is recalling a long list of crimes against Jewish individuals and wondering what sort of punishment could begin to expiate for a single one--I would have had that at the end, because it speaks for itself, because it is real and unanswerable. show less
George Steiner's classic study of the peculiar nature of translation as a literary and linguistic process, which drags you through some fairly knotty thickets of the philosophy of language before opening up in the last couple of chapters into a string of brilliant case-studies.
We get to think about why there are different languages in the first place, and about how — since the meaning of words shifts between contexts, times and individuals — any reading of a text anywhere is going to show more involve some kind of translation. And we get to confront the paradox that whilst an "exact" 1:1 translation between different languages, even of the most trivial phrase, is clearly impossible, we still use translations every day and find them helpful. Even the most complex and baffling literary texts have been translated in ways that seem to serve a useful purpose for readers and scholars.
This is something of a literary steeple-chase, where we are expected to cope with references from a broad range of literature, linguistics, philosophy and other disciplines (in numerous different languages). At one point we leap straight from a detailed discussion of prophecy in the Old Testament to a (non-trivial) excursion into statistical thermodynamics and the Second Law. So you will need that parachute. But it is fun, and when we get to the case-studies of how literary translation is actually done it is also very useful. show less
We get to think about why there are different languages in the first place, and about how — since the meaning of words shifts between contexts, times and individuals — any reading of a text anywhere is going to show more involve some kind of translation. And we get to confront the paradox that whilst an "exact" 1:1 translation between different languages, even of the most trivial phrase, is clearly impossible, we still use translations every day and find them helpful. Even the most complex and baffling literary texts have been translated in ways that seem to serve a useful purpose for readers and scholars.
This is something of a literary steeple-chase, where we are expected to cope with references from a broad range of literature, linguistics, philosophy and other disciplines (in numerous different languages). At one point we leap straight from a detailed discussion of prophecy in the Old Testament to a (non-trivial) excursion into statistical thermodynamics and the Second Law. So you will need that parachute. But it is fun, and when we get to the case-studies of how literary translation is actually done it is also very useful. show less
George Steiner’s comparative study of the two giants of Russian literature, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is subtitled “An Essay in the Old Criticism.” When it appeared in 1959, the “New Criticism” movement held the field in literary studies, so Steiner’s subtitle is programmatic. It should not be understood, however, as rejecting the insights of the New, which devoted attention to the text itself. Indeed, Steiner studied with some of the best practitioners of it. Instead, Steiner’s show more concern is that the approach was too narrow, especially when applied to forms such as the novel or drama. He turned out to be a harbinger.
Not only do novels generally profit from the broader context Steiner espouses, but the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which present a particular problem, especially so. If the novels of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—-from Samuel Richardson to Henry James—are taken as defining the form, then the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are outliers. They sprawl and present semi-digested blocks of philosophy (some New World writers—Poe, Hawthorne, and especially Melville—present a similar problem).
Part of the problem is formal. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky incorporated earlier literary forms in their work—forms said to be played out in their day and superseded by the novel. Tolstoy’s model was the epic poem; his point of reference—one could even say his peer—was Homer. Dostoevsky’s was tragic drama. His pole star was Shakespeare. It is remarkable, given their length, how much his books focus on dialogue and action.
But the oddity of these books is not only a matter of form. As Steiner sees it, the heart of the “problem” with these novels is that the Western novel is secular, concerned with this world alone, while Tolstoy and Dostoevsky spent their lives grappling with God. This concern unites and divides the two authors, for as Steiner demonstrates if the God of Tolstoy and the God of Dostoevsky were to meet, they probably wouldn’t get along.
Steiner’s book is divided into four long chapters. This may seem daunting, but the chapters are subdivided into sections. I read one section at a time and could follow the argument. The first chapter, the briefest, situates Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the European literary tradition. The second offers a close reading of Tolstoy, arguing for the greatness of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and his other works. The third does the same for Dostoevsky. Chapter Four is the payoff, devoted to the interplay of art and mythology in both authors. In an imaginative foray, Steiner recasts the poem of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov as a dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He admits that Dostoevsky could not have known the points of contact between the philosophies of the Grand Inquisitor and Tolstoy since many of them were expressed in private notes and remained unpublished until after Tolstoy’s death, yet Steiner’s treatment illuminates. The final section builds on this and touches on the paradoxical posthumous fate of the two authors. Tolstoy, the landed patrician, was lauded in post-revolutionary Russia as a precursor of the new order. Dostoevsky, by contrast, though initially acclaimed for his grim portrayal of life in Tsarist Russia, quickly fell out of favor. Meanwhile, he was more influential than Tolstoy in the West as one of the giants of existential thought. Gide, Camus, and others acknowledged their debt to him.
George Steiner was the product of a world that no longer exists. It could be summed up by his self-identification as Middle European, although academically, his training was in Paris, Oxbridge, and the United States. He was thus uniquely fitted to appreciate the best of what the New Criticism had to offer, yet knew the value of the historical-philological work that it sought to displace. The result here is a valuable book that is both erudite and humane. Highly recommended, although no substitute for deep reading of Anna Karenina, The Idiot, and the other masterpieces he analyzes. show less
Not only do novels generally profit from the broader context Steiner espouses, but the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which present a particular problem, especially so. If the novels of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—-from Samuel Richardson to Henry James—are taken as defining the form, then the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are outliers. They sprawl and present semi-digested blocks of philosophy (some New World writers—Poe, Hawthorne, and especially Melville—present a similar problem).
Part of the problem is formal. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky incorporated earlier literary forms in their work—forms said to be played out in their day and superseded by the novel. Tolstoy’s model was the epic poem; his point of reference—one could even say his peer—was Homer. Dostoevsky’s was tragic drama. His pole star was Shakespeare. It is remarkable, given their length, how much his books focus on dialogue and action.
But the oddity of these books is not only a matter of form. As Steiner sees it, the heart of the “problem” with these novels is that the Western novel is secular, concerned with this world alone, while Tolstoy and Dostoevsky spent their lives grappling with God. This concern unites and divides the two authors, for as Steiner demonstrates if the God of Tolstoy and the God of Dostoevsky were to meet, they probably wouldn’t get along.
Steiner’s book is divided into four long chapters. This may seem daunting, but the chapters are subdivided into sections. I read one section at a time and could follow the argument. The first chapter, the briefest, situates Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the European literary tradition. The second offers a close reading of Tolstoy, arguing for the greatness of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and his other works. The third does the same for Dostoevsky. Chapter Four is the payoff, devoted to the interplay of art and mythology in both authors. In an imaginative foray, Steiner recasts the poem of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov as a dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He admits that Dostoevsky could not have known the points of contact between the philosophies of the Grand Inquisitor and Tolstoy since many of them were expressed in private notes and remained unpublished until after Tolstoy’s death, yet Steiner’s treatment illuminates. The final section builds on this and touches on the paradoxical posthumous fate of the two authors. Tolstoy, the landed patrician, was lauded in post-revolutionary Russia as a precursor of the new order. Dostoevsky, by contrast, though initially acclaimed for his grim portrayal of life in Tsarist Russia, quickly fell out of favor. Meanwhile, he was more influential than Tolstoy in the West as one of the giants of existential thought. Gide, Camus, and others acknowledged their debt to him.
George Steiner was the product of a world that no longer exists. It could be summed up by his self-identification as Middle European, although academically, his training was in Paris, Oxbridge, and the United States. He was thus uniquely fitted to appreciate the best of what the New Criticism had to offer, yet knew the value of the historical-philological work that it sought to displace. The result here is a valuable book that is both erudite and humane. Highly recommended, although no substitute for deep reading of Anna Karenina, The Idiot, and the other masterpieces he analyzes. show less
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