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After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation QUOTES

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation QUOTES

1 " We are, in the main, 'word-blind' to Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent verse. This blindness results from a major change in habits of sensibility. Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin de siécle ideals. "

― George Steiner , After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

2 " After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate. "

― George Steiner , After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

3 " It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since). "

― George Steiner , After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

4 " Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or ‘un-say’ the world, to image and speak it otherwise. In that capacity in its biological and social evolution, may lie some of the clues to the question of the origins of human speech and the multiplicity of tongues. It is not, perhaps, ‘a theory of information’ that will serve us best in trying to clarify the nature of language, but a ‘theory of misinformation’. "

― George Steiner , After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

5 " Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is. "

― George Steiner , After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation