LIONEL ABEL
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its most important and rhetorically interesting reviews . Steiner has
written with verve and penetration on the achievements of Dante,
Homer, Sophocles, Corneille, and Hoelderlin. He knows the lan–
guages of these very different European poets, and his critic's rhetoric
is often influenced by their choice of words. Can he not then be called
a "good European"? Even if I knew he desired the designation, which
I strongly doubt, I think I would not grant it to him. My reason: he
never tries to find a harmony connecting the works of the writers he
has studied. Quite to the contrary, he seems interested in removing
them from under any shareable rubric; I think he would even like to
segregate each particular European masterwork within its own ob–
scurity of language and culture.
In
After Babel,
a study of linguistics
and linguistic theories, he tried to justify the
secretiveness
of lan–
guages, which makes any "radical translation" from them difficult,
by claiming that the "incomprehensions" built into each different
tongue are expressions of the genius of language as such . Corre–
spondingly, in his literary studies, he has been interested in pointing
up in the Greek poets what European poets, Renaissance and
modern, have not been able to match, and in Hoelderlin's transla–
tions of Sophocles what could not conceivably be Sophoclean . His
focus has been on cultural conflict and divergence, not on cultural
harmony . He likes nothing so much as to set up Shakespeare and the
moderns against the Athenians, and European writers against the
Americans.
The "good European" Nietzsche gave us
The Birth of Tragedy:
Steiner, entitling his work on the genre,
The Death of Tragedy,
has
earned for it the odd distinction of an unfavorable comparison with
Nietzsche's great essay- unfavorable even on the one register where
Nietzsche, too, can be faulted (mildly, to be sure). Nietzsche did,
after all, separate the organic, dithyrambic side of tragedy, vulner–
able to decay and death, yet capable of rebirth, from its formal side,
secure against the effects of time and change. He told us that Diony–
sus can die, but can be reborn, while Apollo, for his part, is death–
less. So if it was not quite correct of Nietzsche to use the word "birth"
in describing the appearance of tragedy in Athens, where the dithy–
rambic drive of the genre was
first
graced with an appropriate form,
yet this can hardly be called an error; on the other hand, it is
definitely an error of Steiner to posit the
death
of tragedy in our own
time, for the latest tragedy to have been written will most certainly
not be the
last.
Only that side of tragedy which it owes to Dionysus is
subject to time, and whatever the time, the Apollonian form will be
