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George Steiner

Sep 2
3 min read

George Steiner was a literary critic, essayist, teacher, fiction writer, and one of the most ambitious comparative thinkers of the twentieth century.


Francis George Steiner was born on April 23, 1929, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, to Viennese Jewish parents. In 1940, as German forces invaded France, his family escaped to New York. Most of the Jewish pupils he left behind at school were murdered in the Holocaust. This history shaped his central question: how could Europe’s literature, philosophy, and music coexist with organized torture and mass murder?


Language was not merely one of Steiner’s subjects; it shaped his life. Raised trilingually in French, German, and English, he resisted identifying any one as his sole mother tongue. French belonged to his Parisian schooling, German to his Viennese inheritance, and English became the principal language of his books. He later learned Italian and said that he taught in all four languages at Geneva, discussing works in their original language whenever possible.


Although Steiner lectured and gave interviews in several languages, most of his books were written in English and widely translated. His prose drew on German philosophy, French criticism, Greek and Latin literature, and multilingual writers such as Beckett, Borges, Nabokov, Kafka, and Celan. He called writers displaced among languages “extraterritorial”: able to inhabit several linguistic worlds without belonging completely to one.


This experience led to After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), his most influential book. Translation, he argued, was not confined to movement between languages: every act of understanding involves translation between individuals, periods, cultures, and different uses of one language. Meaning crosses a distance and is altered by the journey. The book became foundational in translation studies, although its sweeping theory remains debated.


Steiner’s other books ranged widely. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) contrasted opposing literary, religious, and historical visions. The Death of Tragedy (1961) traced tragedy from ancient Greece to modern drama. Language and Silence (1967) confronted language after totalitarianism and the Holocaust. In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) argued that the Holocaust arose within European civilization: knowledge of great art had provided no guarantee of humane conduct.


Antigones (1984) followed its ancient story across literature, philosophy, politics, music, and art. In Real Presences (1989), Steiner argued that serious art requires a wager on real meaning and transcendence, while warning that criticism can displace the work itself. Grammars of Creation (2001) examined creating and inventing; The Poetry of Thought (2011) explored how ideas depend upon literary form. His controversial novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981), about the discovery of an elderly Hitler, tested language’s power to expose evil but also to seduce.


Steiner studied at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford. He worked for The Economist, became a Founder Fellow and Director of English Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge, and held the Chair of Comparative Literature at Geneva from 1974 to 1994. For three decades he wrote major reviews for The New Yorker, bringing European writers and difficult ideas to a broad English-speaking readership. He later delivered Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on teaching.


Steiner was admired for his learning, seriousness, and power as a lecturer. He was also criticized for grand pronouncements, occasional inaccuracies, unapologetic elitism, and a canon that, though multilingual, remained overwhelmingly European and male. These limitations matter. Yet he made translation central to understanding, forced literary criticism to confront the Holocaust, and rejected the comforting belief that education and high culture automatically make people good.


George Steiner died at his home in Cambridge, England, on February 3, 2020, aged ninety. His work leaves a demanding proposition: language can preserve memory, cross borders, and create meaning, but it can also conceal, corrupt, and destroy. The responsibility lies not only in possessing words, but in how we read, teach, translate, and use them.



SOURCES AND FURTHER READING



Steiner’s Cambridge interview: https://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1130599/




 
 
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