Edward Skidelsky on George Steiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein & Esperanto poetry

Skidelsky, Edward. "Beware the false prophet. George Steiner is celebrated and reviled in equal measure. Is he the most influential critic of his generation, as some say, or merely a fraud?" [review of Grammars of Creation by George Steiner], New Statesman, 19 March 2001.

Less appealing is the aesthetic theory that underlies the particular interpretations. Is it really true that poetry seeks to transcend the historicity of language, to achieve "liberation from imposed, borrowed, eroded reference"? Were that indeed the case, one might wonder why more poets did not avail themselves of the easy expedient of writing in Esperanto. Esperanto is a language with no history; its words are mere counters, without resonance or depth. Writing in Esperanto, poets would achieve without difficulty that "immaculateness" that historical languages inhibit.

Yet the very notion of "Esperanto poetry" is repellent; it suggests, as Wittgenstein once remarked, a corpse. Why this should be so is an extremely interesting question. At the very least, it suggests that there is something radically wrong with Steiner's conception of poetry. Far from scorning the historicity of language, the poet should, of all people, delight in it. It is only because words have a history, because they teem with ideas not of the poet's choosing, that poetry is at all possible. As English transforms itself into the lingua franca of the global market, as it approaches more and more the condition of Esperanto, poetry in English becomes not easier, but progressively more difficult to write.

Here is a rebuttal from a reader:

Roberts, Gareth. "Poetic possibilities," New Statesman, 26 March 2001.

Edward Skidelsky (Books, 19 March) misunderstands. It is true that the meaning of a word is more than its definition, is in many ways a bundle of associations, historical and personal. But Esperanto is not ex nihilo; it has, by some reckonings, its roots too deep in Europe. Even if it had been created in one day (which it was not), its vocabulary unrooted and new and with no history, it would still have hope. Nobody I know of sees a baby and says, "You will never be a poet, you lack experience of life", or calls children's painting a repellent notion. Once people live a language (truly think and speak it), the language takes on life, and that is where it draws its power and resonance. People, if not an enormous number of them, "live" Esperanto, too; and no words in any language that ever lived are mere "counters". Those who live Esperanto know its strange, unique beauty, its poetry.

Gareth Roberts
Dolgellau, Gwynedd