After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation“A brilliant work . . . A dazzling meditation on the very nature of language itself” from the world-renowned scholar and author of The Poetry of Thought (Kirkus Reviews). In his classic work, literary critic and scholar George Steiner tackles what he considers the Babel “problem”: Why, over the course of history, have humans developed thousands of different languages when the social, material, and economic advantages of a single tongue are obvious? Steiner argues that different cultures’ desires for privacy and exclusivity led to each developing its own language. Translation, he believes, is at the very heart of human communication, and thus at the heart of human nature. From our everyday perception of the world around us, to creativity and the uninhibited imagination, to the often inexplicable poignancy of poetry, we are constantly translating—even from our native language. |
Contents
Two Language and Gnosis | |
Three Word against Object | |
Four The Claims of Theory | |
Five The Hermeneutic Motion | |
Six Topologies of Culture | |
Afterward | |
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argument articulate Babel Celan century Chinese Christopher Logue classic communication complex concept consciousness context conventions crucial cultural dialectic discourse E. R. Dodds English Euripides expression Ezra Pound fact feeling fiction formal French future genius GEORGE STEINER German Goethe grammar Greek hermeneutic Hölderlin Homer human speech Humboldt I. A. Richards idiom Iliad interlingual interpretation Kabbalistic Latin Leibniz lexical linguistic literal literary literature logic London meaning metaphor modern motion natural language obvious original paradox paraphrase Paris past philosophic Philosophy of Language phonetic phrase Pindar poem poet poetic poetry possible precisely private language problem prose psychological reading reality relations Roman Jakobson semantic sense sensibility sentence Shakespeare social Sophocles speak specific Sprache statement symbolic syntactic syntax tense theory of translation tongue transformational transformational grammars truth understanding utterance verb verbal verse vital vocabulary Walter Benjamin Wittgenstein words