Steiner's Synoptic Flop

...Again, his ideas are not as irreproachably fresh as he assumes...

...With one hand he casts a net of speculative affirmation too wide to be coherent...

...Steiner brings a unique linguistic education to his pursuits...

...Every form of speech, he insists, requires the translation of one set of verbal signs into another and is thus an act of interpretation...

...Steiner's erudition, in contrast, has an exasperating way of being more aggressive than enlightening, particularly when it takes the form of trendy judgments that brook no confutation: Paul Celan is "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945...

...But about the specific connection between one aspect of Hebrew philology and the wide-ranging term "Jewish thought" we are left in the dark...

...Faustian pride goeth before a fall: Just as Bloom tries to expand his view of poetry into a vision of the Godhead, Steiner wants to convert "translation" into an epistemology of language and culture...

...Speech, Steiner insists, is a means of overcoming uniformity...

...We lie-employ language as the vehicle of falsehood-in order to resist the world as it is, the tyranny of objects over our vulnerable individuality...

...Steiner is more persuasive in dealing with the mechanics of translation, and when he examines such intriguing aspects of his putative subject as the German mania for Shakespeare, English translations of Homer and the transformation of language by music...

...They excite the mind without resorting to windy self-importance...

...Of the two overreachers, I prefer Bloom, whose theoretical eccentricities never diminish his analytic clarity and his passionate commitment to the art of poetry...

...Nonetheless he has, I believe, written this book not for fellow-Renaissance men or linguistic specialists but for the educated "common" readers whose curiosity about language and translation far exceeds their scholarly competence...

...Though Steiner's tone constantly draws attention to his originality, his opposition to Chomsky recapitulates the late-18th-century battle of the books between the philosophe Condillac who sought the premiere verite of a universal language in the name of reason, and the German historian Johann Gottfried Herder, who proclaimed the uniqueness, separateness and diversity of languages and cultures (and whose romantic glorification of German as the voice of the Volk was later brutally distorted by the Nazis in their lunacies about race...

...Furthermore, he believes that culture itself is "the translation and rewording of previous meaning...

...Born in Paris of a Viennese-educated Czech father and a Polish-Galician mother, he grew up with "equal currency in English, French and German...

...Consider the staggering range and variety of matters he links, with unruffled virtuosity, to his central subject of translation in After Babel: contemporary linguistic theories, Wittgenstein's philosophy, mathematics, the physiology of the human brain, the particle in theoretical physics, computer science, the fate of the English language...

...Similarly, Steiner's overview of cultural tradition becomes so nebulous as to seem bereft of any useful meaning...

...After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford, 484 pp., $17.50), Steiner has proceeded on the confident assumption that no activity of the human mind is in any way alien or inaccessible to his own...

...A similar paradox haunts the reception of poetry translations, which are done for the benefit of those unable to read the work in the original tongue, but are always reviewed by native speakers who approach such translations with instinctive contempt for their necessity...

...From his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, published 15 years ago, to his awesomely ambitious new study...

...Steiner rejects this reductionist search for the One, preferring a more impressionistic approach to the Many of Babel's languages that welcomes plurality rather than attempting to codify its "messiness" into a systematic universal grammar...

...Because Steiner's sphere of reference is always too hugely inclusive, however, his version of the interplay between past and present is much less concretely suggestive than Bloom's...

...Not only does each of us yearn, in vain, for a private tongue untarnished by the demotic coinages of common usage...

...Presumably the ideal critic of After Babel would command Steiner's vast learning-would, in fact, be Steiner...

...In countering the arguments based on meticulous linguistic and anthropological investigation with an entirely symbolic formulation, Steiner haughtily refuses to meet the enemy on its own ground, yet declares himself the victor...

...He neglects to say, though the point seems crucial, why he chooses to write his books in English...

...the proof of their erudition comes not from bibliographical profusion but from the authoritative subtlety of their ideas...

...For all his phenomenal reading and the urgent drive of his restless intelligence, Steiner's obsessively mannered syntheses of language, translation and culture are strangely self-defeating in the end...

...If these people are inadequate to the task of judgment, they are, faute de mieux, the audience that Steiner is addressing...

...Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Noel Coward's Private Lives...

...From this "extraterritorial" position, Steiner confronts the mystifying quantity and diversity of languages (some 4-5,000 in the world today) in a manner that diverges sharply from that of the dominant linguistic theoreticians, particularly Noam Chomsky...

...Since Steiner clearly places After Babel in the tradition of criticism that is audaciously synoptic in its reach and design, the comparison with, say, Wyndham Lewis' Time and Western Man or Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity is inescapable and sobering...

...From the "universal deep structures" that make such transformations possible, Chomsky argues, "certain features of a given language can be reduced to universal properties of language...

...One may question, too, whether lying is always or necessarily "fictive...

...Indeed, in his concluding chapter on "Topologies of Culture," Steiner inflates the term translation so arbitrarily, willing it to incorporate every conceivable form of verbal activity, that it loses its discrete meaning-and when a word is no longer definable, it is no longer a word...

...today "Browning and Tennyson are visibly in the ascendant...

...What is genuinely troubling is Steiner's certainty that his incurably literary metaphor of language as a creative lie demolishes the plausibility of a universal grammar...

...The contrasting views take the form of an ancient dichotomy-between the One and the Many...

...I speak and I write them with indistinguishable ease...

...In a typically galactic sentence, Steiner fastens on Genesis, Wittgenstein and "Noam Chomsky's earliest, unpublished paper on morphophonemics in Hebrew" as evidence of the role Jewish thought has played in linguistic scholarship...

...Has there been an 'English English' author of absolutely the first rank after D. H. Lawrence and J. C. Powys...

...While he does not mention Harold Bloom's work on the role of influence in the writing of poetry-the poet's struggle with towering predecessors to achieve uniqueness-Steiner seems almost to be echoing The Anxiety of Influence when he notes "the 'abler' soul of the great precedent, the proximity of the rival version...

...Language, Steiner declares, is not merely a means of communication but, more indispensably, an instrument of creative imagination, a willful denial of mortality...

...Unlike most of us, he was reared not in a single "first language" but in three...

...And this list is the merest sampling...

...Yet when he borrows the term "topology" from mathematics to describe the elements of the classical-Hebraic tradition that have persisted in the West despite the defamatory assaults of history and opinion, I feel he is making an obvious point unnecessarily portentous because he has "translated" it into the specially devised vocabulary of After Babel...

...As Steiner has yet to recognize, original thought about literature and culture is the fruit of scholarship, and not its flamboyant demonstration...

...The human ability to say, not what things are but what they might be, is the liberating source of myth and poetry, as well as the reason for the teeming disorder within the Tower of Babel...

...with the other he batters us with a periphrastic abundance of reference and analogy that remains stubbornly beside the point...

...Actually, he resists confinement within the field of literature, preferring more venturesome forays into the history of ideas...

...A flat denial of the truth can also be a simple evasion whose motives are not in the least "creative...

...Chomsky believes there are universally innate qualities of the human brain enabling children to formulate intelligible sentences they have not heard before...