Literature is bound by the language in which it is written, but it must also be able to defy it, or at least transcend it. If not, how else has the 19th-century Russian novel become so important to generations of readers who have had to depend on the medium of translation? True, much has been written about the failure of translation. No matter how skilfully this process is done, there invariably remains the feeling of having experienced a text through muslin. Whose voice are we hearing: that of the writer or that of the translator?
Still, while poetry is translation's most enduring victim, the novel does break through the translation process because of the power of story. With such simplistic notions in hand, along with a belief in the international personality of the novel, I went to meet the critic and champion of comparative literature, George Steiner.
Having been told he was exhausted on returning from New York, I made the mistake of asking him how long he had been there. The question set him on edge, as apparently the informed world is well aware that he lives in England. I knew he had retired from Cambridge so had reasoned he could now be living anywhere. My explanation was not accepted and so began a sequence of questions which apparently enraged him. "You know nothing about me. You have not researched your subject. This interview is a waste of your time and mine," and so on, including a quick-fire burst of the titles of books he had written - several of which I have read - and honours he has achieved. "Now that I am old they forgive me everything and give me awards." When he paused for breath, I said I was merely trying to get a sense of him as a person: this was an interview, not a thesis.
Subsequent questions were greeted with impatient shrugs and exasperated snorts of "I have written about that in a book called No Passion Spent which you obviously have not heard of". I have read it. This barrage continued, each time with my countering, "yes, I know that but I would like to have you respond to the question, or would you prefer if we abandoned the interview and I just quote from your books?" Such is Steiner's eminence he no doubt feels more at ease in the company of an equal, or at least a Nobel prize-winner or a doctoral student whose specialist subject happens to be the life and work of George Steiner. I then made the mistake of asking why his criticism remains so rooted in the European tradition. With the exception of Borges, most of the literary references in his criticism have tended to be European - indeed he has a mantra-like list of literary greats - Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Beckett, Nabokov, Borges. Apparently convinced (wrongly) that I was implying he had no interest in US writing, he stated: "I was the successor to Edmund Wilson on the New Yorker; you don't get appointed Edmund Wilson's successor unless you are very familiar with American writing." I had merely pointed out that his criticism, which tends to be general and thematic rather than textually-based, looks mostly to European writers and indeed European music - a feature of his writings are remarks such as, "a Bach partita, a Beethoven sonata" etc.
Steiner speaks four languages, and is, as he repeatedly reminded me, one of the world's leading intellectuals, and yet he consistently deflected every question put to him. When asked to discuss comparative literature, he simply directed me to an essay of the same title. I said I had read it but would like him to discuss the subject. He didn't. For the record he has written: "Comparative literature, while alert to the contributions of formal and abstract linguistics, is immersed in, delights in, the prodigal diversity of natural languages. Comparative literature listens and reads after Babel."
It is also strange that a former professor, at 70, could be quite so impatient, never mind uncivil. How did his more ordinary students fare? Odder still that an interview-veteran would expect a newspaper article aimed at the general reader to be conducted at doctoral seminar level. Here is a professional lecturer who makes performance speeches, not small talk, and appears not only to want an audience, but to need one. The Latin American novel, he says, is more important than the US one. Why? "Because the Americans don't experiment." But how about Gaddis or Barthelme? "No one reads Gaddis." Being an outsider has always been central. England was initially difficult for him. "I had this problem with personal diplomacy" - surely not - "but the Americans, luckily, are more tolerant." His Jewishness has a greater relevance in US literary life, although Steiner did win an audience in a literary England paranoid about its ignorance of Mitteleuropa.
The author of The Death of Tragedy (1961), Language and Silence (1967), In Bluebeard's Castle (1971), After Babel (1975) and Real Presences (1989) is a small, elderly man. He was born into a trilingual - French, German, English-speaking - household in Paris in 1929, to a father who loved books and seemed the perfect companion for him, someone who for a long time knew more, and a "radiant" Viennese mother "who would habitually begin a sentence in one tongue and end it in another".
His Jewishness is more important to him than nationality - "I am a Jew who writes" - but he does not speak Hebrew. He has often referred to himself as a chess player and did so several times during our interview and he certainly lives on the attack, making remarks such as "take that down with your shorthand" or "if you get everything else wrong at least try to get this right".
Asking him about his childhood is another waste of time, as he tells me it is "all in a little book I wrote, Errata, which you should read" and waves me away. I have read that book and say so but he doesn't appear to hear me. In it, Steiner is more concerned with chronicling his developing intellect - such as the day in Chicago when he explained Henry James to a group of older students and realised he was a teacher - than he is in recording the small but vital observations which shape a life. It is an interesting, if cold, book, lacking in atmosphere, barely an autobiography, more a professional account. Steiner's rhetorical, ideas-based criticism, preoccupied as it is by 20th-century totalitarianism, war and the Holocaust ("History has always been a witches' Sabbath"), while preaching to the converted ("I am sorry to admit I have been vindicated"), has never inspired me to race off to read a particular book, whereas so many critics and reviewers achieve exactly that result.
Where is his ideal home of the mind? In what literature does he most feel at ease? "Trees have roots; I, fortunately, have legs. I have many passports." He agrees that the fundamental dilemma of the compulsive reader is that no matter how much one reads, there is always so much more. Even when his ideas are at their most exciting, Steiner's prose is not beautiful. It is formal, dogged and mannered. He says the only way to appreciate a literature is to know its language, and admits to being frustrated by his lack of Hebrew. According to Goethe, "no monoglot truly knows his own language". It is a dictum Steiner has abided by. He says, "I ache for translation" and later adds, "Thank God, Kafka wrote in German." Steiner says he could make nothing of Japanese or Chinese literature because "I don't have those languages". Not having Russian did not, however, prevent him from writing his critical work, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.
His fiction is more about ideas than stories; he admits he lacks the "mysterious innocence" of the creative writer. Perhaps he is too clever to write fiction? "This may be so." Referring to Elias Canetti as "the only person I have met who would say `Goethe and I' ", Steiner laughs and says, "he wrote a masterpiece": Auto Da Fe (1946). He smiles and it is possible to get a glimpse of his other self, the one who is humbled before creative genius.
George Steiner, polymath and prophet, the self-proclaimed "teacher's teacher", may well be one of the cleverest men in the world, but he is not, perhaps, among the most courteous.
