After Babel Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Cada lengua —y no hay lenguas menores o 'insignificantes'— funda un conjunto de mundos posibles y geografías de la memoria. Son las conjugaciones del pasado en su sorprendente variedad las que constituyen la historia.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“As no generation of men can hope to complete the high edifice, as engineering skills are constantly growing, there is time to spare. More and more energies are diverted to the erection and embellishment of the workers’ housing. Fierce broils occur between different nations assembled on the site. ‘Added to which was the fact that already the second or third generation recognized the meaninglessness, the futility (die Sinnlosigkeit) of building a Tower unto Heaven—but all had become too involved with each other to quit the city.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“Statistically, the incidence of ‘true statements’—definitional, demonstrative, tautological—in any given mass of discourse is probably small. The current of language is intentional, it is instinct with purpose in regard to audience and situation. It aims at attitude and assent. It will, except on specialized occasions of logically formal, prescriptive, or solemnized utterance, not convey ‘truth’ or ‘information of facts’ at all. We communicate motivated images, local frameworks of feeling. All descriptions are partial. We speak less than the truth, we fragment in order to reconstruct desired alternatives, we select and elide.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“The externals of English are being acquired by speakers wholly alien to the historical fabric, to the inventory of felt moral, cultural existence embedded in the language. The landscapes of experience, the fields of idiomatic, symbolic, communal reference which give to the language its specific gravity, are distorted in transfer or lost altogether”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation