Literary CriticismThe one book I always recommend to students in my translation courses in Milan is George Steiner's After Babel. "It is far too long," I tell them, "it is idiosyncratic and sometimes presumptuous, but no other work will give you such a powerful sense of the uniqueness of every language at each moment of its development, and hence the arduous challenge of any literary translation."
Born to Jewish parents in Paris in 1929, Steiner was brought up trilingual in French, German and English and has spent his life mapping the borders of these and other cultures, so it's hardly surprising that the seven pieces in My Unwritten Books - each an essay where a full-length work was originally planned - are also largely about language. The first features Joseph Needham, a micro-biologist who became enamoured of China, learned Chinese and spent much of his life producing a 17-volume history of Chinese culture which, aside from its exhausting "baroque compendiousness", sets out to show the Chinese arrived first at most major scientific discoveries.
Steiner is clearly attracted to vast projects where failure is inevitable and "majestic"; he also feels an affinity for the scholar out on a limb defying received wisdom. Demonstrating his own flair for provocation, he claims that in so far as there was invention as well as scholarship in Needham's encyclopaedic venture, the work it most resembles is actually Proust's Recherche. So spurious is this analogy it can only draw attention to Steiner's wayward audacity and away from Needham.
Intellectual showiness is a problem throughout. The third piece, Tongues of Eros, claims that since language is central to love-making, sex is different when experienced in different languages. The idea is intriguing and there is fun to be had here, but alas most of it comes at Steiner's expense. The decision to give examples from his own affairs, moving rapidly between piquant particulars and weighty academic reflection is fatal. We are asked to believe that one German lover, approaching orgasm, would cry "Sankt Nepomuk the Lesser", this being the name of a medieval saint whose carved image "brandished a memorably elongated index finger". "It would be rewarding," Steiner solemnly continues, "to inquire into the differences in the sex lingo of adolescence as between Roman Catholic and Lutheran regions of Germany."
Indeed.
Other gems include the lady whose request for a sip of a certain white wine indicated her willingness to "imbibe [ his] urine". The French lover who shouts "Mon brioche" on orgasm (but surely it should be ma brioche) demonstrates how French is a language "where gluttony and starvation saturate the argot but also the poetics of desire". Steiner caps this argument thus: "Having, he claimed, made love during three days and nights, Zola staggered into the street enwrapped in the odour of sperm and of fresh-baked bread, warm and golden as was his lover's cunt at daybreak".
What are the words "imbibe" and "enwrapped" doing in these sentences? And was Zola's lover's cunt that temperature and colour only "at daybreak"? It is time to say something about Steiner's language.
Sex, he surprisingly tells us, "should be the most spontaneously anarchic, individually exploratory and inventive of human encounters", but thanks to the pressure of modern media it is now "to a very large degree scripted". That is: "In the American cadre of democratised libido and publicised consumption, innovations, genuine addenda to the executive means of sexual encoding, require genius".
Once-rich erotic dialogue, he complains, has been reduced to "texting, oral or electronic". Aside from the fact that this overburdened prose has the reader yearning for abbreviation, it's odd that Steiner remains unaware of the erotic potential of the text message. Nor does he appreciate how much his own language is "scripted" by a tiresome academic jargon (this is only one of numerous uses of the verb "encode") that, once again, turns attention away from the matter in hand and towards Steiner's performance.
Worse, when he starts to talk about sex he himself borrows heavily from pornographic commonplace. We hear that one lover was "gloriously astride me" while another "panted" . . . "even as I parted her comely legs". Of the two activities, writing and sex, the first would seem more likely to be an expression of freedom, since it is hardly determined by our animal nature, but not in this case.
Steiner's great redeeming qualities are his impassioned engagement and determined honesty. Just as he's not afraid to tell us he's adulterous, so in a piece about man's relationship with the animal world he admits that the death of a pet dog upsets him more than that of an acquaintance. Struggling to explain the survival of the Jews, he's not afraid to field the idea of some yet undetected genetic distinction. Clearly attracted to mysticism and arcane research of every variety, in a piece on religious belief, he nevertheless confesses that theology is and always has been so much "verbiage".
In particular, in the best essay in the book, comparing systems of education in France, Germany, England and the United States, Steiner has the courage to insist that a successful school system must fully accept inequality of ability. Even braver, he tells us that most of our teachers feel second-rate and defeated and communicate their defeatism to our children. The innovative core curriculum he elaborates is impressive.
Success and failure, levels of ability, the extent to which any grand enterprise is impossible, these are the keys to reading Steiner's latest and perhaps last book. Beneath it all is the question of his own lifetime's achievement. In an essay on intellectual envy he shows himself at once unashamedly elitist yet aware of being second to the very best. Again the honesty is admirable, though the discovery that such an intelligent man is so impressed by the Nobel as to feel disappointment when it is given to others is disquieting. Steiner should not worry: the Swedish professors have got it wrong so often he may yet be in the running.
Tim Parks is a novelist and literary critic. His most recent book, The Fighter: Essays, was recently published by Harvill Secker
The decision to give examples of his own sexual affairs is fatal in George Steiner's latest - perhaps last - book My Unwritten Books By George Steiner Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 224pp. £12.99