Sunt în prefaţa celei de-a doua ediţii, din '92, necirculată la noi, şi în postfaţă nişte pasaje pe care le redau mai jos. E în ele, dincolo de idee, o pasiune pentru ficţiune pe care extrem de rar o găsesc în textele teoreticienilor şi chiar ale criticilor autohtoni.
(45 de secunde - atât i-a luat noii redactoriţe-şefe de la New Yorker, Tina Brown, conversaţia telefonică prin care l-a anunţat pe Steiner că renunţă la serviciile lui după 33 de ani de colaborare. Am aflat asta de pe blogul lui Pierre Assouline. Asta da capodoperă perlocuţionară!)
Din prefaţă:
"After Babel argues that it is the constructive powers of language to conceptualize the world which have been crucial to man's survival in the face of ineluctable biological constraints, this is to say in the face of death. It is the miraculous - I do not retract the term - capacity of grammars to generate counter-factuals, 'if'-propositions and, above all, future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond the extinction of the individual. We endure, we endure creatively due to our imperative ability to say 'No' to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or willed or awaited 'otherness' for our consciousness to inhabit. It is in this precise sense that the utopian an the messianic are figures of syntax".
Şi din postfaţă:
"I believe that the communication of information, of ostensive and verifiable 'facts', constitutes only one part, and perhaps a secondary part, of human discourse. The potentials of fiction, of counterfactuality, of undecidable futurity profoundly characterize both the origins and nature of speech. They differentiate it ontologically from the many signal systems available to the animal world. (...) Through language, we construct what I have called 'alternities of being'. To the extent that every individual speaker uses an idiolect, the problem of Babel is quite simply, that of human individuation. (...) To move between languages, to translate, even within restrictions of totality, is to experience the almost bewildering bias of the human spirit towards freedom. If we were lodged insisde a single 'language-skin' or amid very few languages, the inevtiability of our organic subjection to death might well prove more suffocating than it is".
Finalul:
"The Kabbalah, in which the problem of Babel and of the nature of language is so insistently examined, knows of a day of redemption on which translation will no longer be necessary. All human tongues will have re-entered the translucent immediacy of that primal, lost speech shared by God and Adam. We have seen the continuation of this vision in theories of linguistic monogenesis and universal grammar. But the Kabbalah also knows of a more esoteric possibility. It records the conjecture, no doubt heretical, that there shall come a day when translation is not only unnecessary but inconceivable. Words will rebel against man. They will shake off the servitude of meaning. They will 'become only themselves, and as dead stones in our mouths'. In either case, men and women will have been freed forever from the burden and splendour of the ruin at Babel. But which, one wonders, will be the greater silence?"
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