Finished reading: After Babel by George Steiner 📚
“The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic."–Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
To borrow this fantastical literary taxonomy from Clarke, literary critic George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation is less a book about language than a book of language. The book’s relationship with modern linguistics is characterized by ambivalence. Steiner’s challenges to Chomsky’s universal grammar thesis do not strike me as particularly successful, and I am tempted to wonder whether Steiner understood UG as well as he thought he did. The last of six long chapters, “Topologies of Culture”, feels almost not worth the bother of reading, if you are (hypothetically) trying desperately to finish the book in time to get it back to your local university library. The metaphor of the mathematical field of topology is not explained with sufficient clarity for it to actually illuminate anything about human culture, and I suspect that even further explanation would not ameliorate my instinctive distaste for the metaphor as a paradigm for this particular topic. What Steiner has to say about specific cultures and languages being affected by globalization and technology-based monocultures was (for all I know) perceptive in 1975, but it is not illuminating fifty years later.
And yet, After Babel remains an incredible book, one that I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone thinking about what language fundamentally is, about what the act of translation fundamentally is, and especially about what role machines can and should play when it comes to language and culture and humanity. This book offers a remarkably well-written and engaging overview of philosophies of language over the millennia, along with a few new ideas. Big books are hard to write–particularly if you want to write a big book that is also good–and yet Steiner succeeds. The pages of the book are overflowing with treasures of many languages: poems, songs, phrases, Scripture, philosophy. One may object to the author’s interpretations of particular authors or passages (and there are indeed a few examples which I think Steiner simply misreads), but their abundance and quality is nevertheless remarkable. This book is the work of someone who loved language, loved particular languages very deeply, and brought decades of deep reading and living in them to the analyses gathered together in this book.
Does Steiner’s fourfold paradigm for the act of translation, his most original theoretical contribution, actually work? That I am not sure of; I will have to keep thinking about it. Does Steiner even escape the basic triad of word/spirit/combination that he argues (quite convincingly) underpins practically all philosophies of translation from antiquity to the present? I am not even sure that he pulls that off, since his fourth hermeneutic movement is rather difficult to capture; this also I will have to keep thinking about.
The book is long enough that it may put readers off. If you were only going to read part of the book, then read what Steiner has to say about the role of trust in the drama of translation (Chapter Five, “The Hermeneutic Motion”); his insights there are the most insightful, the most accidentally prophetic for the age of LLM’s and generative AI. No doubt it would be useful to read just that section. And yet, one would miss what is perhaps at the very heart of communication to begin with. Although the title reference is not wholly ignored, Steiner’s analysis of language sticks to the edges of theology, whether Jewish, Christian, or other: divine love cannot be part of the vision of what translation essentially is. Theologically, Steiner seems sympathetic to the ambivalent kabbalistic readings of the story of Babel. So where love is present in this book, it is behind the endless examples and cases and lines translated or paraphrased. Pentecost and the Incarnation are discussed, but receive slightly short shrift from an author who is after all not Christian himself. Steiner’s love is in the pages about the relationship between Shakespeare’s translations and German drama; it is in his commentary on Borges' “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"; it is in his word-by-word exaltation of Pierre Leyris' translations of Gerard Manley Hopkins' “Pied Beauty”. It is Steiner’s love, his generosity, his desire to return something for these impossible gifts that make After Babel not merely a book about language but a book of language. Books about language will be forgotten, updated, and replaced. But despite its flaws and its frustrations and its length, After Babel captures something real and true about language, something that endures, something that shines even through the limitations of the human soul. So, I would say: set some time aside, and treat yourself to reading the whole thing.