After Babel: Aspects of Language and TranslationWhen it first appeared in 1975, After Babel created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory. In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the "Babel problem" in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. With this provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions. For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantially updated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in the academy today. |
Contents
Understanding as Translation | 13 |
Language and Gnosis | 51 |
Three Word against Object | 115 |
Four The Claims of Theory | 248 |
Five | 276 |
The Hermeneutic Motion | 312 |
| 499 | |
Common terms and phrases
argument articulate Babel Celan century Christopher Logue classic communication complex consciousness context crucial cultural Cymbeline deep structures dialectic discourse English Euripides expression fact feeling fiction formal French future genius German Goethe grammar Greek Hebrew hermeneutic Hölderlin Homer human speech I. A. Richards ideal idiom Iliad interlingual interpretation Kabbalistic Latin Leibniz lexical linguistic literal literary literature logic meaning metaphor modern modes motion native natural language obvious original paradox Paris past Paul Celan philosophic Philosophy of Language phonetic phrase Pindar poem poet poetic poetry possible precisely private language 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 thought tion tongue trans transformational transformational grammars truth understanding universal utterance verb verbal vital vocabulary Walter Benjamin Wittgenstein words