Now, one of the last Renaissance men is gone, and a world that has taken to fetishising specialisation is the poorer for it.
For want of a word with a broader intellectual ambit, let us call George Steiner a philologist. The French-American critic and teacher of comparative literature who has died aged 90 was both admired as a polyglot polymath, and occasionally criticised for failing to see the trees for the wood.
Now, one of the last Renaissance men is gone, and a world that has taken to fetishising specialisation is the poorer for it. Steiner taught in four languages in Princeton, Cambridge and Geneva, and believed that no one who was proficient in only one language could possibly know it very well. A prolific reviewer and critic, he also found time to write fiction, in which he sometimes opposed this own thesis, perhaps to see where the synthesis would fall.
Steiner will be best remembered for After Babel (1975), one of the most seminal yet accessible works on translation and its centrality in human understanding, and in relations between cultures. He saw all communications as a form of translation, and his ideas remained at the cutting edge until the publication of Umberto Eco’s Mouse or Rat almost 30 years later, which viewed translation as a process of negotiation.
But Steiner’s influence extended far beyond language, because it is the bearer of culture. The investigation of culture and its politics is the domain of the critic, and Steiner brought to the subject the wide-angle vision of an academic who read Ulysses in English and the Odyssey in Homeric Greek with equal facility. Regrettably, his geographical domain was largely restricted to the West and as a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Germany, he was extraordinarily focused on the Holocaust as an endpoint of European culture. Nevertheless, the world will remember him as one of the last Renaissance men, who addressed the deepest question: What makes us human?
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