For some years now, George Steiner has been writing books and essays that deal with vast cultural problems on the one hand and subtleties of literary texture on the other; After Babel is a very large, dense, insightful study that puts together in a new way the intellectual and stylistic emphases of Steiner's previous work. His device for fusing the philosophy of culture with fine technical analysis is to examine translation: its history, practice, theory, and its almost infinite ramifications.

The book is, first of all, a compendium of ideas and data not only about translation in the strict sense but also those areas concerned somehow with translation, which means virtually everything. (p. 16)

[Noam Chomsky] provides Steiner with a kind of negative support that spans the entire and considerable length of the book. Above all Steiner is the man of letters, the quintessential student of language and literature...