Ian Robinson on Steiner, or how to know everything without really trying

Professor Steiner's style is very off-putting and recognisable*. What a vile phrase-maker he is, and what a bully! Goethe and the Persian singer Hafiz are said to "conjoin their respective forces in t transformational encounter" which next sentence has become "this meeting and melting." Why not say so first time? As for bullying: "Familiarity with an author, the kind of restive intimacy which demands knowledge of all his work, of the best and the botched, of juvenilia and opus posthumum, will facilitate understanding . . . " The index is twenty three pages long and includes all the well-known authors of the literatures of Europe as well as hundreds I have never heard of. Steiner refers to all with the utmost familiarity, frequently quoting the later pages of long and little-known works; and he appears to have mastered en passant all the philosophy, Kabbalic lore, theology, musicology, linguistics (glottochronology an' all) and natural science and mathematics ever written. And he is still under a hundred years old. Steiner like any other polymath must expect the natural doubts of academic minds. Chomsky to Steiner, in an earlier volume, giving examples of the application of TG grammar: "Thus I think of Hugh Matthews' grammar of Hidatsa, the most detailed grammar so far of any American Indian language, Paul Postal's work on Mohawk, Ken Hale's beautiful studies of Papago and Walbiri • • . [etc.]". Steiner to Chomsky: "No disagree ment so far as the work cited goes ..." (Extraterritorial, p. 126). Now come off it, George! You are in no position either to disagree or to agree about the work cited.

Alas! on the authors I know something about I quite frequently can't trust Steiner an inch. "Murderous Cordelia" isn't the only outrageous judgement. "Has there been an 'English English' author of absolutely the first rank after D. H. Lawrence and J. C. Powys?" he asks with a straight face. I didn't need to master all the juvenilia and opera posthuma to judge the latter old third-rate windbag. (And how, by the bye, does his great flood of words square With Steiner's well-known thesis that literattifeis lapsing into silence? What a-pity, in that case, that it didn't!) After three hundred large pages of nonetheless formidably erudite discussion of hundreds of authors, all the major topics of linguistics and some of the central issues of philosophy, Steiner gets to his own subject, which he calls "the hermeneutic motion" and 1 "translation."

*After Babel, Aspects of Language and Trans__ _ lation George Steiner (Oxford University Press

£8.00)

Unfortunately en route his central thesis has collapsed, in a way that ought to be obvious enough in the generation after Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin (with both of whom of course, Steiner displays familiarity — he can do anything with Wittgenstein except understand him). All understanding of language is translation, says Steiner, though in words that bear out his thesis by needing translation into English. This just Isn't so. Nothing called translation happens when an English speaker hears another English speaker or reads an English text. Steiner gives his game away with his phrase "interlingual translation" later glossed "translation proper". "Interlingual translation" is just what everybody calls translation, not some special sort, and Steiner should have applied J. L. Austin's principle "no modification without aberration."

He falls into the fallacy by way of two others, both very common in contemporary linguistics. The first is that language conveys or suppresses experience. Translation then comes in because it is supposed to be the "encoding" of experience into language, or the "decoding" of experience from .language. Actually what language conveys is not experience but sense. My experience is my own, thank you very much, and yours is yours. The relations between our experiences and the sense we make as we talk are of infinite variety and complexity, but experience isn't the underlying meaning of sense,. i.e. something mysteriously

carried by it, and sense isn't a translation to or from experience, because translation is always a relationship between two languages and experience is not a language. The other fallacy is that there is something called "a comprehensive reading." Steiner begins by chasing many of the words of a Cymbeline passage through numerous dictionaries, social contexts, associations and echoes. He thinks that if he comes back to the text armed with all this information he will be granted this comprehensive reading of the text which is a form of translation of it.

The most likely result of the activity is academic boringness or a dispersal of effort over "that tempting range of relevancies called the 'universe"; but even if we go on hoping that knowledge can indeed help us to understand, the knowledge we bring back to Shakespeare still has nothing to do with translating him. Perhaps we are enabled to read him "with understanding," but then the understanding isn't anything added to the words, but something that allows the words to be more fully themselyes and not another thing. Steiner's argumentsabout "translation proper" are no better.

,There are some genuinely good bits of criticism, though, here and there in the book: the chapter on translation when it comes has some acute observations, in amongst miscel laneous theorising; and I thought the remarks on the relation between the tense system of Hebrew and the nature of Old Testament prophecy first rate. I think in some of his instincts about language, too, Steiner is quite right. I wholly share his suspicion of Chomskyan linguistics. I agree with him that the idea of a universal deep structure underlying all languages is an evasion of the stupendous fact of the multiplicity of language, a leading of linguistics away from its proper task into the very irrelevant precision of mathematical logic. Steiner sometimes says these things well: if I had not sent my own New Grammarians' Funeral to press I would have quoted Steiner's "The application of the concept of exact science to the study of language is an idealised simile." But he hasn't done the ordinary slogging labour he needed to get his hunches explicit. (The Chomsky letters I • quoted above would have embarrassed anyone but Steiner in the number of misunderstand ings they found.) And Steiner is always going back on his own good things. In After Babel, having convincingly insisted on the importance

for lingistics of the fact that there are•

thousands of languages, he yet concludes with a chapter called Topologies of Culture (read Cultural Invariants or Universals) in which he

insists with a really grotesque academicism that Europeanliterature is an endless rework

ing of a very few themes and plots and that "Western art is, more often than not, about preceding art; literature about literature." Oh no it isn't, it's about life.

For all its verbal pyrotechnics and air of lucidity After Babel isn't a book. It is a bundling together of the notes Steiner has been making on his vast range of reading. Steiner • appears to be a compulsive skimmer of books, but he is unable to make much of them because he doesn't know what they are about.

Reading Middlemarch at the same time I couldn't help seeing After Babel, despite the differences, as a kind of Key to Ml Mythologies.

• If Mr Casaubon had had the recklessness to publish his great work as well as his parerga, if his need to believe in his work had taken the form of bullying Brasenose and a determination to shine rather than the proud recoil upon himself that more interested George Eliot — and if he had lived in the age of polymath journalists rather than scholars and gentlemen — Mr Casaubon might have done something very like After Babel.