George steiner, a literary critic and translation theorist, died at the age of 90.

2025年11月3日 | admin | A1
Reporter | Pan WenjieEdit | Huang Yueone
According to The New York Times, on February 3rd, local time, 90-year-old George Steiner died at his home in Cambridge, England.
Born in a wealthy Jewish family, German, French and English are his mother tongues. Steiner, a literary critic and translation theorist, calls himself a "Central European humanist": he knows a lot about classical culture and European literary languages, knows many languages and reads a lot. His main research areas involve the relationship between language, literature and society and the influence of the Jewish Holocaust. A.S.Byatt, an English novelist, once described him as "a Renaissance giant who came too late … a European metaphysician, but had an intuition to understand the mainstream thoughts of our times".
Against the background of the persecution of Jews, Steiner went to new york in 1944 and became an American citizen. While reflecting on the Holocaust, he observed the degradation of language in modern life, and based on this, he completed his masterpiece Language and Silence in 1967. As a "Central European humanist", Steiner saw in Nazi officers that a person could play Bach and Schubert, read Goethe and Rilke, but did not prevent him from going to work in Auschwitz concentration camp. Why is this happening? He asked, what kind of influence should literature and knowledge have on society? Steiner saw that language is the representative of culture. The inhumanity of modern western politics (especially Nazi), together with the technological society that followed, made mass education teach "a special kind of semi-illiteracy, reading and understanding only in a very limited and utilitarian range", which led to the abuse and pollution of language and culture and made the creation of western literature fall into suicide rhetoric.
Leo Oufan Lee, a scholar who prefaces Language and Silence, believes that Steiner’s criticism method is "all around the world". Steiner pointed out that as a knowledgeable literary critic, it is bound to use the method of comparative literature; Not reading western classics is almost the same as illiteracy, but confined to a country’s literature, which is also a bottom view. Therefore, he criticized his teacher, Leavis, a famous critic of Oxford University, saying that he only talked about English literature and praised D.H.Lawrence, but if Lawrence’s works were compared with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, they were obviously dwarfed, so he hated literary intolerance most.
Language and Silence: On Language, Literature and Inhumanity[America] Translated by george steiner and Li XiaojunCentury Wenjing/Shanghai People’s Publishing House 2013-11
Like harold bloom, who died in 2019, Steiner is not a "theorist" like structuralism or psychoanalysis. In his view, theory is a depraved expression of human beings’ loss of perceptual patience, which not only simplifies the richness of words, but also deprives them of the unique dignity of literary appreciation and interpretation functions. He said that the victory of theory in literature, history, sociology and other discourses is actually self-deception, because science has the upper hand and humanities have been developed for last stand.
In Language and Silence, Steiner always pays attention to the concept of humanistic literacy. He pointed out that in reading, readers are not passive roles, and critics have special responsibilities for contemporary art. Critics "must not only ask, whether it represents the progress or sublimation of skills, whether it makes the style more complicated, and whether it skillfully scratches the pain of the times;" It is also necessary to ask where the contribution of contemporary art is to the increasingly exhausted moral wisdom, or where the loss it brings. What scale does the work advocate to measure people? " Leo Oufan Lee said, "In this book, I was deeply moved by his reflection on the reaction of European culture after the Holocaust. I chewed the chapters in this book again and again, and even learned Steiner’s English style. " In literary criticism, Steiner shows that "with the power of style, criticism may also become literature".
George Steiner
In the field of literary criticism, Steiner shows people that a real literary critic is not a setter, but a re-creator. In the field of translation studies, Steiner also emphasized the translator’s subjectivity. In the "cultural turn" of translation studies in the 1970s, the translator gradually rose from a marginal position to a central position as a cultural disseminator and historical participant. Steiner’s 1975 book After the Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation has become an important perspective to study the translator’s subjectivity. In this book, he puts forward the judgment that "understanding is translation" and points out the four steps of translation based on hermeneutics: trust, invasion, absorption and compensation. Trust means that the translator believes that there must be understandable meaning in the original text. Invasion is reflected in the translator’s understanding, because the translator "has to compromise his time and background", and the intrusion of the translator can also give the original a second life in the translated language. Absorption is the purpose and result of the translator’s invasion, and the translator should introduce and digest the core information of the original text. However, the translation will inevitably change or even reset the structure of the original text, and the loss is inevitable after invasion and absorption. Therefore, the fourth step of compensation is to achieve a balance between the original and the translated version. These four steps are all connected with the translator’s subjectivity. Today, when "teacups, microphones and translators" become the mainstream and translators often compare them with machine translation, translators also constantly quote Steiner to defend their own value.
With the departure of contemporary humanist intellectuals such as harold bloom and george steiner, we may be entering an era without masters.
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