Book Report Sen Henry LI 803, Dr. Wyatt 12-11-01

Steiner, G. (1998). After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. (3rd ed.). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

In After Babel, George Steiner, Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford,

presents an erudite, academic investigation of the linguistic processes of translation

both inside and between languages and philosophical aspects involved. His main

thesis is that we all speak our own private languages, or idiolects, and that every act of

communication between humans involves translation. He returns to this idea repeatedly

through the text. At the heart of the book is the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel and

the resulting prodigality of individual human languages. After Babel is also enriched with

metaphors of Jewish Cabalistic mysticism, which holds the belief that a day of

redemption will come when we all regain understanding of the lost language of Adam,

and translation will be unnecessary.

In Understanding as Translation, the first of six chapters in After Babel, Steiner

asserts that language is in perpetual change. Every language-act has a temporal shelf-

life: No semantic form is timeless (24). How many of us still fully understand the idioms

of Shakespeare or Dickens? It is interpretation, also called diachronic (historical)

translation, which gives language life beyond the moment of utterance. Steiner prefers

bertragen (carry over), one of three German words meaning to translate, as the best

word to describe all the nuances of transmitting meaning across time (32). Time is not

the only internal boundary of understanding within a language. There are also

synchronic (contemporary) linguistic issues: Children have their own semantic approach

2

to language which is difficult for adults to understand. In turn, gender and sexuality

evokes a need for translation: men and women use language differently. Steiner

concludes the chapter by declaring that a human performs an act of translation

whenever he or she receives speech-acts from any other human being. Knowledge of a

foreign language is not required!

The second chapter Language and Gnosis delves into the spiritual mysticism of

language and translation. Here, Steiner cites the German mystic Angelus Silesius who

declared that God has only evoked one single word since the beginning of time, in

which the entirety of reality is contained, but undecipherable after Babel (65).

Translation from language A into language B seems to imply that some mysterious,

intangible third language system exists that intermediates and is common to languages

A and B. Is this the pre-Babel, lost language of Adam? After a lengthy, but relevant

discussion of the polyglot Kafka and his interpretation of the Tower of Babel, Steiner

introduces this question as the point of origin for the modern field of linguistics,

beginning with the Germans Leibnitz, Hamann, and Humboldt during the 18th and 19th

centuries. He differentiates between two schools of linguistic thought: the universalists

who believe all languages have a commonality, and the relativists, who hold that

languages are too fragmented, and that if any universal force governing all languages

exists, it is too abstract or deep for the human mind to comprehend. At this point,

Steiner takes a clear stance with the relativists and expresses opposition to the

positivistic universalists, particularly formal linguists who applies mathematical formulas

to their theories, like Noam Chomsky.

3 Word against Object is a particularly interesting chapter, because Steiner

discusses his personal interest in translation as a polyglot who has internalized English,

German, and French as part of himself, and in hindsight remembers only the meaning

of conversations, forgetting which language was used as vessel of communication.

That struck a personal chord in me as somebody fluent in the very same languages who

has also experienced the same situations. The polyglot mind undercuts divisions

between languages by reaching inward to the symbiotic core (125). But in which

language is one most oneself? Steiner offers no easy answers. This chapter goes

farther to probe how differently languages perceive time. Does the past exist outside of

grammar? Does raw data from the past have any intrinsic value without the past tense

of language to shape it in our memories? Steiner insists that memory is articulated as

the past tense of a verb (138). Moreover, could we conceive of the near or distant

future without the paradigm of language? Steiner compares future tenses in French

and English at this point, but provides no solution to the question. Additionally he

considers the validity of human communications. How valid is the written word? Is it the

truth just because it has been recorded? He recommends that we critically ponder the

message of Nietzsche: the lie and not the truth is divine! (232). Steiner concludes

the chapter by stressing how important a hermetic, private language expressing relative,

individual truths, has evolved as a conscious rebellion against socializing language

norms since the late 19th-century. He cites the French poets Jean Arthur Rimbaud and

Stphane Mallarm, as well as Germans Stefan George (Mallarms pupil), Rainer

Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan as examples.

4

The central chapters, Claims of Theory and The Hermeneutic Motion

constitute Steiners defense of a hermeneutic model to define translation. Simply put,

hermeneutics is the particularly German science of interpreting and translating texts

while keeping in mind that time, cultural distance, and subjective idiosyncrasies are

factors to overcome. Steiner calls it the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of

meaning (312). Accordingly, he describes the hermeneutic cycle of translation as

consisting of three stages: trust, aggression, and incorporative assimilation. The

translator begins with a text from the standpoint of trusting the content to be relevant.

He or she then aggressively translates -- an invasive action of extracting and bringing

home the meaning of the text into the target language. The assimilation stage is the

most difficult. The translator attempts to make the rendered text pertinent and

meaningful for an audience that may be far removed culturally or temporally from the

texts immediacy. Steiner admits that this hermeneutic motion is imperfect, chiefly

because translators naively commence by placing intrinsic trust in the text as worthy of

translation.

The last chapter Topologies of Culture initially looks at how verbal signs in one

language can be successfully interpreted into the verbal signs of another. Steiner

transcends this to consider the translation of verbal signs into musical notes as another

dimension of translation. He cautiously praises the operatic version of Goethes Faust

by Berlioz, but sharply criticizes what he deems Schuberts misunderstanding of the

poet Heinrich Heines mordant irony in various Lieder. In the final pages, Steiner

considers how the traditions of Western thought bias our reception of translations from

5 exotic sources. He also finds fault with English, the new world-language. He rightly

describes how the global diffusion of this language in all its derivations, along with its

cultural baggage and pre-packaged semantic field (494), threatens to erode the

native-cultural autonomy of nations where it is imposed. English might be the current

lingua franca, but hardly the satisfactory substitute for the lost language of Adam.

Steiner muses: It would be ironic if the answer to Babel were pidgin and not Pentecost

(495).

After Babel was a joy for me to read as one whose previous MA and PhD studies

dealt with a lot of the topics and personages discussed (particularly Heine, Stefan

George and Kafka). However, this book is not for everybody. The writi ng style is

pedantic and difficult to digest. Every page drips with esoteric philosophy and linguistic

terminology. I often reached for an encyclopedia, dictionary, or an old textbook in order

to fully understand the discussion. The appropriate audience for this book would be

graduate students and professors of comparative literature or comparative/contrastive

linguistics, particularly with a Eurocentric focus. Many linguists probably take offense at

this controversial book because it belittles the study of modern, formal linguistics as a

pseudo-science, particularly when it comes to the writings of their influential guru Noam

Chomsky. On the other hand, modern literarians may smirk at Steiners precious,

grandfatherly approach (largely unchanged since the first edition of After Babel in 1975),

but nevertheless admire After Babel because it upholds the mystical qualities of the

written/spoken word. His cynical, relativist ideas, even if stated in a very old -fashioned

way, are largely in sync with cool post-modernist theoreticians like Jacques Derrida or

Michel Foucault.

6

What I think is most relevant in After Babel for SLIM LI803 students to remember

is that all information transfer essentially begins as translation between individuals.

Human beings may share the same common language, but never the same idiolect.

Steiner reminds us that our perception of truth and reality is common only to ourselves

and that any information transference is colored by our own subjective perceptions.