George Steiner

In this recording, theorist and critic George Steiner, with PEN President Susan Sontag, gives a talk in which he analyzes a single passage from Book 24 of the Iliad in numerous translations, from Chapman, Pope and Fitzgerald's translations all the way up to Christopher Logue's, for what they tell us about the translation between the body and the mind. "What," he asks, "is the channel whereby the body's ache becomes grammatical, becomes metaphorical, becomes a simile?" A deeply erudite and provocative discussion of translation, ranging from Borges and Beckett's acts of self-translation to the untranslatability of divine speech to the way that a great translation "gives you the impression of being the realization and unfolding of one of the potentialities that the original did not have time to fulfill."