Georges Steiner
(Paris, 1929) American intellectual, essayist and literary critic of German origin, considered one of the most brilliant in European culture and a fundamental figure in comparative literature studies.
George Steiner was born in Paris on April 23, 1929.One of the doctors who attended his birth later traveled to the United States to assassinate a senator; this detail, like others more or less macabre, would mark his first memories.His mother, a Viennese "to the fingertips," and his father, a Jew of modest origins who held important legal functions on the Vienna bank, had left Austria in 1924, chased away by the specter of anti-Semitism and by the most concrete measures of Mayor Lueger, the same one who would be an example of the young Adolf Hitler.
George Steiner
The father thus gave up a bright future in the high Viennese spheres, and George would never understand what strange clairvoyance allowed him to guess what it was happening and making a decision that ran counter to the logic of events and maternal will, and that even he was not fully satisfied: like the Jewish intelligentsia of the time, Steiner's father dreamed of reaching Britain; His health, however, forced him to stay halfway, in the most beneficial climate of the French capital.
Steiner grew up listening to Hitler's speeches on the radio and the exhortations of his father, who from 1933 became accustomed to speaking without being attended to.He warned his Jewish friends and family in Prague or Vienna of the tragedy he saw coming; in return, he received incredulous taunts and was called pessimistic, alarmist, and even hysterical.
American exile and war in Europe
Meanwhile, little George already he began to read, to be intrigued by a certain translation of the Iliad that his father's reading aloud surrounded with mystery, to respect the educational impositions that his father made on him: you had to read in French, in English and German; none of the three languages spoken at home should not be neglected."I accepted, with absolute ardor, the idea that study and the thirst for understanding were the most natural, most determining ideals," he would later write.In reality, the consequence of those years was the obsession to add something to the readings, to read in such a way that one day I could enrich what was read with a comment.
In 1940, when the family took personal exile to the last resort-Steiner and his parents moved to New York-the boy's entry into the French Lyceum in Manhattan was no problem for him.While the war raged in Europe, Steiner read Racine and Shakespeare and learned Latin and classical Greek.
After obtaining his French Baccalaureate, Steiner was admitted to Yale University.It was the year 1949; Jews were not yet beginning to be well accepted as part of the ruling intelligentsia .He then had his first contact with the pure sciences, and the study of physics and chemistry would determine one of the recurring obsessions of his work: the struggle between scientific language and the humanities.
At the same time, the young student was making essential discoveries: Heidegger, through the great philosopher Leo Strauss; contemporary political consciousness, through communists who had read neither Marx nor Hegel, and, above all, the vocation to teach.At the end of a course, when his classmates asked him to help prepare an exam on the novelist Henry James, the young Jewish student discovered his particular talent-and the derived pleasure-for commenting on a work and transmitting those comments pedagogically.Steiner, the most famous interpreter of the literature of his time, the commentator on contemporary man, may have been born at that time.
Work and recognition
From then on, and for several years, the events of his life took a frenetic pace.Steiner finished his studies at Yale and completed them at Harvard, traveled to Oxford, received his first recognitions-the Chancellor's Essay Prize, for example-, was invited to join the editorial team of The Economist, returned to the United States.United in 1956 and joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.He was ready to write his first book, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky .He had just turned thirty.However, he had not managed to get rid of an idea that haunted him: he began to rewrite and revise his Oxford dissertation, which was rejected at the time.
Forty years later, The Death of Tragedy is still considered one of the greatest studies of comparative literature of the 20th century.In it, Steiner devoted four hundred pages to examining the reasons why tragedy, that quintessential form of Western culture-"neither the East nor Judaism has produced tragedies," Steiner wrote-had disappeared from the contemporary world.Under this premise, the concern about man and his being-in-the-world was already present.
Steiner expanded it unceremoniously in his next essay, and incidentally opened a gap in the way we understand our relationship with language. Language and Silence (1967) shaped the thinking of a whole generation of students with a very simple thesis: the loss of value of the word was inseparable from the barbarism in which the West found itself immersed between 1914 and 1945.
When the book appeared, Steiner had already been in The New Yorker for a year: he had been asked to take the place left by Edmund Wilson, the most prestigious critic of his generation.Thus, practically at the same time, he became the main example of a strange species: the commentator of literary news who is also the moral conscience of his time.
In the years that followed, Steiner continued to write.Not specialized, however, but following the dictates of the passion of the moment or his omnivorous curiosity, stealing time from the Cambridge professorship in which he had established himself as a classic. In Bluebeard's Castle (1974) proposed a challenge to T.S.Eliot's cultural pessimism. After Babel (1975) was an acute and scholarly study of the arts of translation, but also a passionate defense of linguistic variety by a man who grew up speaking three languages and reading five.And in Real Presences (1988) he established that the words and the signs that compose them are imbued with philosophical, historical and religious insights.Each book was a confrontation with the rhetorical falsehood of new currents of thought, and also an affirmation of passions that are not negotiable.
In May 2001 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.He received the award with gratitude but calm, and continued to prepare his most recent book: Gramáticas of creation .It is a book as elegant and as incisive as everything he has written."An elite," he had said, "is simply the group that knows, that says that certain things are better, more worthy of being known and appreciated than others." Today, Steiner embodies that ideal like no one else, and can be spoken of as the last humanist.
For many, George Steiner is the greatest living literary critic.His name is usually placed in conjunction with that of Harold Bloom, the prestigious Yale critic, and even the figure of the British poet T.S.Eliot is evoked to give a measure of his importance.The truth is that nobody embodies the image or the ideal of the cosmopolitan intellectual like him; Nobody, either, has been able to combine in a better way the devoted study of classical literature with the passionate exercise of criticism of novelties.
Steiner has written avant-garde prose fiction, autobiographies of a great painful lucidity and some of the most important essays of our time, and he has simply become the great master of what has become called «comparative literature».Something essential distinguishes him from his detractors (who tend to be, at the same time, his closest imitators): the naturalness with which he assumes the act of reading, commenting on what is read and thinking about the world.Passionate and critical of his Jewish condition, a polyglot of enviable perfection, George Steiner suggests to the reader the idea of being born with a book in hand.
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