Ethard Wendel Van Stee

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George Steiner and The Poetry of Thought

George Steiner was born in 1929. He is a polyglot, teaching in four languages and, I suppose, a polymath as well. He became famous after publishing After Babel while in his forties. Almost four decades later we have his extended essay The Poetry of Thought. 

When I was a young man it was common to hear that if you want to improve your tennis game, play someone better than you. I like to read difficult books. The Poetry of Thought is one and this time I was seriously over-matched. I feel as though I tried to play a set with Pete Sampras and was promptly nailed to the back fence. 

From 1975 to  2011 Steiner went from comprehensible (After Babel) to barely comprehensible (The Poetry of Thought). One initial impression that stands out in my mind is how the size of his vocabulary increased over the years. The evolution of his linguistic skills no doubt took place slowly, but it stands in bold relief when you jump over a period of thirty-six years. 

The two books do not cover the same turf, but are nonetheless related. After Babel concerns itself with translation. Translation in his sense is not limited to transcribing a piece of text in one language from another. Rather, he looks at how we translate what we hear and read into meaningful ideas, and to what extent the ideas we receive are true to the sender’s intent. Think of a married couple speaking the same native language talking past each other. 

With respect to The Poetry of Thought, I couldn’t begin to give you a synopsis of such a dense work. As a polyglot he peppers his text with quotes and passages in languages most of us don’t read. He does provide an appendix with English translations of a few of the longer passages. Being at the end they are more of a nuisance than a help. But a man of Steiner’s noteworthy erudition doesn’t need a big readership to boost his ego, especially as he is in his eighties, which he betrays on page 214 where he refers to the “statistically tiny” number of his readers. Steiner writes for the ages.

Hear him state the purpose of The Poetry of Thought: The point I have been trying to clarify is simple: literature and philosophy as we have known them are products of language. Sound simple? It’s not.

Let me note a single emphasis appearing early in the book. A central theme in Steiner’s thesis is something near and dear to my heart: the kinship of music (and other expressive arts) and language. Here is one of my takeaways: language is particulate and discrete, whereas music is continuous and wave-like.  

The two are able to converge because of an often overlooked property of spoken language in particular. The white spaces between the words and the white spaces between the lines. This will be intuitively obvious to you who read this. Think of the pregnant pause, what is not said explicitly. Think of what we understand implicitly. All those silences and blank spaces burst with meaning, just like rests in a musical score.

The Poetry of Thought is not an easy read, but will reward those with the endurance to stick with it to the end

Whatever happened to style in writing? Has it grown so transparent as to disappear altogether? Good writing is good writing, wherever it is found. My goal is to help you become a sculptor of words as you pursue the art of fiction. Some of what I have gleaned over the years, as heir to an older tradition, I offer to you in this extended essay

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		Madimi should definitely be a best seller, better than Dan Brown. It is a marvelous mix of mystery, blood and gore, sex, and supernatural forces. You have painted many vivid representations of various ages 13th – 20th century. I love your splendid, rich vocabulary and language, details of history, geography and daily lives of people, their clothing, their utensils jobs, baths etc. It’s a gripping page-turner, as they say. One reason I like your work so much better than, for instance, Tolkein, is that, while you have overlaid the piece with supernatural forces, your references to historical people and places are accurate, and even add to our understanding and appreciation of some of the roots of our Western civilization. Bravo. Well done. Daniel Hoyt Daniels, Translator of Moliere   Read Dan Daniels' Full Review

Coming in 2012 Watch for it. The Boy Who Would Be King is a feast for the ears. Seven plays that will stir your love of story and language.

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©2010 Ethard Wendel Van Stee