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After Babel

by George Steiner

Fausto Lelles and Aminata Baldé

História e Teoria da Tradução 23-24

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Contents:

  • Author’s Biography

After Babel (short summary):

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  • Chap. 1 - Understanding as Translation
  • Chap. 2 - Language and Gnosis
  • Chap. 3 - Word against Object
  • Chap. 4 - The Claims of Theory
  • Chap. 5 - The Hermeneutic Motion
  • Chap. 6 - Topologies of Culture

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  • The Hermeneutic Motion (in detail)
  • Bibliography

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Biography

  • Francis George Steiner
  • 1929 - 2020
  • Scholar, critic and fiction writer
  • Universities of Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge
  • Modern Verse Translation (1966); After Babel (1975)
  • New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian

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Understanding as Translation

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Understanding as Translation

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Language and Gnosis

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Language and Gnosis

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Word against Object

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Word against Object

“But it is its great untidiness that makes human speech innovative and expressive of personal intent.” (1998: 213)

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The Claims of Theory

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The Claims of Theory

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The Hermeneutic Motion

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The Hermeneutic Motion

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Topologies of Culture

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Topologies of Culture

Musical translation

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The Hermeneutic Motion

There are 4 moves:

  • Initiative trust
  • Aggression
  • Incorporation
  • Compensation

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The Hermeneutic Motion (Cont.)

Initiative trust:

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  • belief/trust that there is something in the ST that can be understood and then translated;

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  • nonsense rhymes and other similar things are “untranslatable”;

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  • this “something” may turn out to be either “everything” or “nothing” depending on the context.

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The Hermeneutic Motion (Cont.)

Aggression:

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  • “incursive… extractive… invasive” move, “aggressive” or even “violent” approach;

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  • translator’s seizure of the ST and extraction of meaning;

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  • some texts “have been exhausted by translation” and others have been translated so well they now only read in translation.

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The Hermeneutic Motion (Cont.)

Incorporation:

  • ST meaning, extracted by the translator in the previous move;
  • Two types of assimilation: “complete domestication” and “permanent strangeness and marginality”;
  • “Sacramental intake” and “Infection”;
  • The “dialect of embodiment”.

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The Hermeneutic Motion (Cont.)

Compensation:

  • “leaves the original with a dialectically enigmatic residue”

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  • Enhancement

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Bibliography

Stern, David (1975) Commentary on After Babel, by George Steiner

Snell-Hornby, Mary (2006) The Turns of Translation Studies

Cercel, Larisa and Agnetta, Marco (2019) George Steiner’s After Babel in contemporary Translation Studies