The recent preoccupation of all thoughtful practitioners of the humanities with language is [Steiner's] preoccupation. Semantics, semiotics, psycho-linguistics, structuralist literary criticism: these are his concerns. These he orchestrates in his continuing effort to explain how human beings communicate and what their manner of communication does to the content and style of their minds. Always well informed about the latest turns of Western discourse, he gives us astute extrapolations, so that we may contemplate many consequences (or at least implications) of the ideas and words that color intellectual life today.

[On Difficulty and Other Essays] is apparently the residue of After Babel (1975). Most, if not all, of the eight chapters have appeared as articles; and they take up issues already addressed or hinted at in his earlier treatise. All communication, including "internal speech," is translation in some sense; and the human calamity symbolized by Babel is that we translate...