Nach Babel

This revised edition of "Nach Babel" aims to engage philosophers of language, historians of ideas, scholars in the fields of poetics, the arts, and music, linguists, and of course, translators. However, it also seeks the attention and enjoyment of generally interested readers, especially those who love language and see it as essential to their humanity. This book is directed at anyone who understands that Babel was both a disaster and – this is the origin of the word disaster – a shower of stars for humanity. George Steiner's seminal work from 1972 (revised in 1992) recognizes translation as a permanent fundamental act of human communication. It is also a plea for the diversity of languages, each of which offers its own access to the world and thus an irreplaceable insight into the nature of our realities. This book represents an attempt to connect the various fields of rhetoric, literary history and literary studies, linguistics, and philosophy of language, illuminating their mutual influences. Such a systematic, detailed effort to situate and explore translation at the core of all human communication has not been undertaken until now.