Works
George Steiner's career spans half a century and he has published ground-breaking essays and books that address the anomalies of contemporary Western culture, issues of language and its "debasement" in the post-Holocaust age. His field is primarily comparative literature and his work as a critic has tended toward exploring cultural and philosophical issues, particularly dealing with translation and the nature of language and literature.
Steiner's first published book was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (1960), which was a study of the different ideas and ideologies of the Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Death of Tragedy (1961) originated as his doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford and examined literature from the ancient Greeks to the mid-20th century. His best-known book, After Babel (1975), was an early and influential contribution to the field of translation studies. It was adapted for television in 1977 as The Tongues of Men and was the inspiration behind the creation in 1983 of the English avant-rock group News from Babel.
Several works of literary fiction by Steiner include three short story collections, Anno Domini: Three Stories (1964), Proofs and Three Parables (1992), A cinq heures de l'après-midi (2008) and The Deeps of the Sea (1996), and his controversial novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981). Portage to San Cristobal, in which Jewish Nazi hunters find Adolf Hitler (A.H.) alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II, explored ideas on the origins of European anti-semitism first expounded by him in his 1971 critical work In Bluebeard's Castle. Steiner has suggested that Nazism was Europe's revenge on the Jews for inventing conscience. Cheyette sees Steiner's fiction as "an exploratory space where he can think against himself." It "contrasts its humility and openness with his increasingly closed and orthodox critical work." Central to it is the survivor's "terrible, masochistic envy about not being there – having missed the rendezvous with hell".
No Passion Spent (1996) is a collection of essays on topics as diverse as Kierkegaard, Homer in translation, Biblical texts and Freud's dream theory. Errata: An Examined Life (1997) is a semi-autobiography and Grammars of Creation (2001), based on Steiner's 1990 Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow, explores a range of subjects from cosmology to poetry.
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“Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the “drisk,” with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour, we were undeceived. So much do the works of man resemble the works of nature. A moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle.”
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“His works are not to be studied, but read with a swift satisfaction. Their flavor and gust is like what poets tell of the froth of wine, which can only be tasted once and hastily.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)