George Steiner, a literary polymath and man of letters whose voluminous criticism often dealt with the paradox of literature’s moral power and its impotence in the face of an event like the Holocaust, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, England. His death was confirmed by his son, Dr. David Steiner. An essayist, fiction writer, teacher, scholar and literary critic — he succeeded Edmund Wilson as senior book reviewer for The New Yorker from 1966 until 1997 — Mr. Steiner both dazzled and dismayed his readers with the range and occasional obscurity of his literary references. Essential to his views, as he avowed in “Grammars of Creation,” a book based on the Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1990, “is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.”His own speech was polyglot. “On a level self-evidently minor,” he wrote in a memoir of his intellectual development, “Errata: An Examined Life” (1998), “I owe to the cross-weave of three initial languages” — the French, German and English in which he was reared — “to their pulse and flicker within me, the very conditions of my life and work.”

Source: New York Times February 03, 2020 19:07 UTC