George Steiner

Sep 2

10 min read

Updated: 6 hours ago

George Steiner devoted his life to literature while questioning what devotion to literature could accomplish. Europe’s achievements in poetry, philosophy, and music had coexisted with organized persecution and mass murder. A person could respond deeply to a work of art and still participate in cruelty. Steiner refused to let admiration for culture conceal that disturbing possibility. He also refused to abandon the works he loved because their readers had failed to become humane. [12] [13]

This tension gives his criticism its urgency. Across books on translation, tragedy, artistic creation, and teaching, he asks what happens when another person’s words enter our lives. His answers can be illuminating, extravagant, and open to challenge. Their enduring force comes from the pressure of the question: how should we read when reading can enlarge understanding without guaranteeing goodness?

A childhood divided by catastrophe

Francis George Steiner was born on April 23, 1929, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, to Jewish parents who had left Vienna for France in 1924. His father, Frederick, placed literature and languages at the center of his education. In 1940, as German forces invaded France, George, his mother, and his sister escaped to New York, where his father was already working. His childhood joined an intense literary inheritance to displacement and the knowledge of lives that escape had not saved. [1] [2]

Steiner later recalled that only two Jewish children from his class at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly survived. The recollection places the destruction of European Jewry within the familiar world of a classroom. Survival made that destruction an enduring personal and intellectual concern. The question of culture’s failure arose from the civilization that had formed him and from people whose absence he remembered. [2]

French, German, and English shaped his childhood together. He resisted the expectation that one language must possess an exclusive claim on a person’s identity. French belonged to his Parisian schooling, German to his family’s inheritance, and English was present before it became the principal language of his published books. His multilingualism was therefore more than a professional accomplishment. It made the supposed natural bond between a language, a nation, and a self appear less inevitable. [3]

He later learned Italian and recalled teaching in four languages at Geneva, returning to literary works in their original languages whenever possible. Most of his books were nevertheless written in English. The distinction matters: the multilingual range of his reading did not make all his writing multilingual, and his account of translation did not dissolve the differences among languages. Those differences were precisely what interpretation had to encounter. [4] [5]

Translation as an encounter

In Extraterritorial (1971), Steiner considered writers whose relations to language and nationality unsettled familiar ideas of literary belonging. Beckett and Nabokov offered striking examples of writing across languages. Borges belonged to the argument through a different relationship to literary inheritance and linguistic worlds; he did not change his principal language of composition in the same way. “Extraterritorial” names a pressure on the boundaries of identity, rather than a single biography shared by every writer in the collection. [6]

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975) brought the question into a much larger argument. Steiner proposed that understanding itself involves translation. We interpret another person’s speech through differences of experience and intention; we interpret an older work across changes in vocabulary and social life. Translation between languages makes especially visible a distance that he believed was present within communication more generally. [7]

Consider a reader encountering a familiar word in a poem written centuries earlier. Recognizing the word may leave its historical associations, tone, and place in the poem unresolved. For Steiner, understanding requires movement toward a use of language that is not simply our own. This is a philosophical proposal about interpretation, not an established identity between every kind of understanding and the specialized practice of translating a literary text. [7] [9]

His account of the “hermeneutic motion” describes that movement through trust, aggression, incorporation, and restitution. The interpreter first trusts that there is something meaningful to seek, then enters and appropriates it, brings it into a receiving language, and attempts to restore a balance disturbed by that taking. These are related movements in an account of interpretation, rather than four mechanical instructions for producing a translation. The final movement gives the process an ethical demand: the source is owed something by the act that makes use of it.

The breadth of the argument is also a reason to question it. Matthew Reynolds, in The Poetry of Translation, challenges the expansion of translation into a name for all understanding. If every encounter with meaning becomes translation, the term can lose distinctions needed to describe particular literary practices. Steiner’s achievement survives that objection: he made translation central to the discussion of reading while leaving readers and translators a theory they must test. [9]

What culture failed to prevent

Steiner’s early books already crossed boundaries that academic specialization often keeps apart. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) examined contrasting literary, religious, and historical visions through two novelists. Its comparison asks how a writer’s understanding of the world takes form in narrative. The Death of Tragedy (1961) made a still broader claim about the conditions under which tragedy becomes possible. [10] [11]

For Steiner, tragedy confronts suffering that cannot finally be repaired or explained away. Religious or political systems promising ultimate reconciliation therefore create difficulties for his conception of the tragic. The title’s claim about tragedy’s death is an argument governed by that demanding definition. It should not be read as a settled report that modern drama has ceased to produce tragic works. [11]

Language and Silence (1967) returned to the danger that literary accomplishment and moral conduct might have little necessary connection. Its essays examine language under the pressure of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and modern cultural change. In “Humane Literacy,” Steiner asks what education in the humanities can promise when responsiveness to literature has proved compatible with brutality. He does not settle the question by declaring literature morally worthless. His continuing work as a critic and teacher keeps the difficulty open. [12]

In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) places the Holocaust within the history of European civilization. This changes the terms of the question. The catastrophe cannot be comfortably assigned to an alien world outside the culture that claimed refinement and learning as its achievements. Steiner examines the authority of that culture and the possibility of a changed cultural order after its assumptions have been shattered. The book’s range gives it power, but a diagnosis of an entire civilization also asks more of an argument than a close reading of a particular work. [13]

One distinction must remain clear throughout this discussion: coexistence does not establish a simple cause. The fact that great art failed to prevent atrocity does not demonstrate that art produced atrocity, or that readers gain nothing from it. Steiner’s work repeatedly returns to the gap between cultural responsiveness and conduct. The gap makes claims about the civilizing power of education harder to sustain; it also makes the responsibilities of educators harder to evade.

Answering a work of art

Real Presences (1989) gives Steiner’s trust in art an explicitly theological form. He argues that the possibility of meaningful communication ultimately rests on a wager involving God’s presence. This is stronger than a general defense of significant art and more controversial than an appeal to careful reading. Steiner presents a conjecture, not a demonstrated proof. Its force does not depend on the claim that every artist or reader consciously subscribes to a religious creed. [14] [15]

The book also asks whether the enormous production of commentary can displace the works commentary is supposed to serve. Steiner imagines a society in which much secondary criticism has disappeared, while textual editing and contextual explanation remain. His positive alternative is active interpretation: performing music, staging drama, reading aloud, memorizing, translating, and making new art in response to earlier art. Interpretation becomes a commitment made through choices that an interpreter must carry out. [15]

A performance can reveal an interpretation that an explanation has left abstract. Its pacing, emphasis, and silences give the audience something definite to encounter. Steiner’s argument invites critics to recognize this kind of answer as criticism in its own right. It also raises a question for his own profession: how can a critic’s language return attention to a work rather than make the critic’s brilliance the main attraction? [14]

Antigones (1984) shows how interpretation can give a work successive lives. Sophocles’ conflict over Antigone’s burial of her brother becomes a recurring encounter among family obligation, political authority, and competing claims to justice. Steiner follows the tragedy through translations, philosophy, literature, and other arts, including the responses of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. The plural title matters. An enduring work persists through differences among the acts that translate, perform, and explain it. [16]

In Grammars of Creation (2001), Steiner asks how making something new differs from inventing or discovering it, and how those distinctions relate to theological accounts of creation. He also attends to the imaginative reach of language: future and conditional forms let speakers consider what does not yet exist and what could have happened otherwise. These inquiries cross art, science, mathematics, and philosophy. They are exploratory arguments, rather than a rigid rule that assigns creation to artists and invention to scientists. [17] [18]

The Poetry of Thought (2011) turns toward the literary character of philosophy. Steiner examines how rhythm, metaphor, and form help constitute an argument rather than merely decorate ideas already complete. His comparisons ask readers to listen to thought as well as follow it. The book’s densely multilingual prose can make that invitation difficult to accept, a limitation discussed by the classicist Tom Palaima. The richness of a critic’s references is valuable only when a reader can follow the relations they establish. [19] [20]

Teaching, authority, and the public reader

Steiner studied at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford. He worked on the editorial staff of The Economist from 1952 to 1956 and became a Founder Fellow and Director of English Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1961. He held the Chair of Comparative Literature at Geneva from 1974 to 1994. These appointments gave institutional form to a vocation that moved among literary criticism, philosophy, journalism, and teaching. [1] [5]

For three decades, his reviews in The New Yorker brought demanding European writers and intellectual debates to a broad readership in English. His subjects ranged across literature, philosophy, music, and visual art. Journalism made comparison a public activity: the reader did not have to belong to a seminar to be invited into difficult works. Steiner’s insistence on cultural seriousness could be intimidating, but his commitment to a general audience complicates any simple picture of him as writing only for an academic elite. [21] [30]

His Harvard Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 2001–2002 became Lessons of the Masters (2003). Teaching appears there as a relationship involving power, dependence, betrayal, and mutual discovery. A teacher may injure a pupil through the misuse of authority; a pupil may reject or overthrow a teacher; both may also participate in an exchange sustained by trust and love. Transmission carries possibilities of harm alongside possibilities of growth. [22] [23] [24]

Steiner’s defense of learning by heart belongs to this account of transmission. A work carried in memory can remain available when books, institutions, or freedoms are taken away. Memorization therefore has a relation to vulnerability as well as discipline. Yet the larger lesson of his criticism still applies: possession of a poem is no moral certificate. What a teacher transmits and how a teacher treats another person remain questions that learning alone cannot answer. [23]

The danger inside eloquence

Steiner’s fiction brought his concern about persuasive language into an especially difficult form. The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. appeared in The Kenyon Review in 1979 and as a book in 1981. Its invented premise places an elderly Hitler in the Amazon jungle, where Israeli Nazi hunters discover him and attempt to bring him out for judgment. The story is an experiment in philosophical fiction, not a claim about Hitler’s historical survival. [25] [26]

The ending gives the fictional Hitler an extended defense containing distorted and antisemitic claims. Its rhetorical force, and the absence of a subsequent answering speech, provoked objections that intensified around Christopher Hampton’s stage adaptation in 1982. The controversy asks a question the novella cannot resolve for every reader: when literature gives persuasive evil a voice, does it expose that voice or allow it to regain authority? Distinguishing author from character does not by itself settle the effects of the work’s design. [27]

Other objections to Steiner concern the boundaries of his comparisons. Terry Eagleton challenged the restrictive account behind The Death of Tragedy, arguing that tragic works and religious or political worldviews do not correspond as neatly as Steiner assumed. The disagreement concerns what the definition permits a critic to recognize, including modern drama. It is a useful challenge to the authority of a sweeping thesis: an account of a form may exclude works before it has adequately encountered them. [28]

Salman Rushdie disputed Steiner’s picture of an exhausted European center and a creatively vigorous geographical rim. Rushdie treated transnational fiction as a renewal of the novel, challenging the geography implicit in the claim of exhaustion. His response tests whether a critic’s inherited literary map can recognize where important writing is happening. [29]

These objections should accompany an appreciation of Steiner’s learning. His canon’s center of gravity remained European, and his large arguments could move faster than their evidence warranted. At the same time, his writing crossed national and disciplinary boundaries and brought unfamiliar thinkers to new readers. The appropriate response is to examine a comparison, its exclusions, and the works themselves. Admiration becomes more useful when it can survive disagreement. [28] [29] [30]

The reader’s continuing task

George Steiner died at his home in Cambridge, England, on February 3, 2020, aged ninety. He left a body of work held together by recurring concerns rather than one completed philosophical system.

https://youtu.be/n1-eB1YGOik?si=ZESU_rLln9QxwdEA