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We have been through this before, but browsing around to look for some of the Steiner essays on folks such as Robert Musil (which latter is a lovely essay, not anthologized in Boyers' selection), I came across this withering extract from a review of Grammars of Creation (which I have never been able to read), which confirms my impression that while Steiner appears to be fluent in seven languages, he is not particularly fluent in Russian:
"The familiar criticisms include: verbosity, stating the obvious, name-dropping, hyperbole, misquotation, obscurantism and a self-dramatising taste for the apocalyptic. Even friends acknowledge that Steiner's immense range comes at the price of inaccuracy.
"While he admits making errors, critics accuse him of complacency. According to Jay Keyser, professor emeritus of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steiner was told at a seminar in the 1970s that, while he had written at length on Dostoevsky's use of the definite article, there was no such thing in Russian. 'It was as though a fly had landed on his shoulder,' says Keyser. 'A criticism that should have been devastating made no impact.'
"Unrepentant, Steiner continues to advocate generalisation over specialisation."
My kind of guy, obviously.
I am considering using this Steiner-cited quote from Fernando Pessoa as a proofreader's motto: "'To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.'"
The double set of quotation marks indicates the origin in Steiner's review of The Book of Disquiet, which appeared in the Observer.
"The familiar criticisms include: verbosity, stating the obvious, name-dropping, hyperbole, misquotation, obscurantism and a self-dramatising taste for the apocalyptic. Even friends acknowledge that Steiner's immense range comes at the price of inaccuracy.
"While he admits making errors, critics accuse him of complacency. According to Jay Keyser, professor emeritus of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steiner was told at a seminar in the 1970s that, while he had written at length on Dostoevsky's use of the definite article, there was no such thing in Russian. 'It was as though a fly had landed on his shoulder,' says Keyser. 'A criticism that should have been devastating made no impact.'
"Unrepentant, Steiner continues to advocate generalisation over specialisation."
My kind of guy, obviously.
I am considering using this Steiner-cited quote from Fernando Pessoa as a proofreader's motto: "'To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.'"
The double set of quotation marks indicates the origin in Steiner's review of The Book of Disquiet, which appeared in the Observer.
