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El precario refugio de las ideologías, los torvos fantasmas de la familia o la figura de Dios centran estas singulares parábolas y sirven para que el escritor desvele sus postulados éticos. Este no es un libro de tesis, sino una singular reunión de narraciones.
127 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
3 people are currently reading
120 people want to read
About the author
George Steiner
188 books569 followersSee also: George A. Steiner, author on Management and Planning.
Dr. Francis George Steiner was an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He wrote for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. Among his many awards, he received The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford University 1998. He lived in Cambridge, England, with his wife, historian Zara Shakow Steiner.
In 1950 he earned an M.A. from Harvard University, where he won the Bell Prize in American Literature, and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (Balliol College) on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1955. He was then a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for two years. He became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961, and has been an Extraordinary Fellow there since 1969. Additionally, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, which he held for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He later held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St. Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.
Dr. Francis George Steiner was an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He wrote for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. Among his many awards, he received The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford University 1998. He lived in Cambridge, England, with his wife, historian Zara Shakow Steiner.
In 1950 he earned an M.A. from Harvard University, where he won the Bell Prize in American Literature, and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (Balliol College) on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1955. He was then a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for two years. He became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961, and has been an Extraordinary Fellow there since 1969. Additionally, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, which he held for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He later held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St. Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 22, 2023
A self-denier with amused eyes and a touch of courtliness in his spare gestures.
From the Grand Inquisitor template and following the example of Fuentes and Greene, the titular novella is interesting (4 stars) as a Marxist copy editor is losing his eyesight as State Communism collapses in Eastern Europe.
The other pieces were so much histrionics although the last was an intriguing riff on Abraham and Isaac. This is another example of when critics pen fiction, which is a mixed field. The cover features Stalin so my peers could feel at ease.
From the Grand Inquisitor template and following the example of Fuentes and Greene, the titular novella is interesting (4 stars) as a Marxist copy editor is losing his eyesight as State Communism collapses in Eastern Europe.
The other pieces were so much histrionics although the last was an intriguing riff on Abraham and Isaac. This is another example of when critics pen fiction, which is a mixed field. The cover features Stalin so my peers could feel at ease.
June 19, 2023
"Sono un socialista. Sono e rimango un marxista. Perché altrimenti non potrei essere un correttore di bozze! "
May 28, 2019
Not your typical book, picked up based on recommendation awhile ago from a colleague -- not many novels have a proofreader as the main character. Brief portrait of life in Fascist Italy -- work, socializing, party meetings. Protagonist (we never learn his name) has bad eyestrain, goes to doctor too late, and has to take time off from work. Two statements jumped out at me:
"If California triumphs, there will be no need of proofreaders. Machines will do it better. Or all texts will be audiovisual, with self-correctors built in. Night after night after night, Carlo, I work till my brain aches. So as to get it absolutely right. So as to correct the minutest misprint in a text which no one may ever read or which will be shredded the next day. Getting it right. The holiness of it. The self-respect. ... Utopia simply means getting it right! Communism means taking the errata out of history. Out of man. Reading proofs."
And when he is watching the person temporarily filling in for him and spots typos and the substitute protests that it's just a hand-bill for an auction of farm tools so who cares:
"Do you know what the Kabbala teaches? That the sum total of the evil and miseries of humankind arose when a lazy or incompetent scribe misheard, took down erroneously, a single letter, one single solitary letter, in Holy Writ. Every horror since has come on us through
P and because of that one erratum. You didn't know that, did you?"
Powerful stuff!
"If California triumphs, there will be no need of proofreaders. Machines will do it better. Or all texts will be audiovisual, with self-correctors built in. Night after night after night, Carlo, I work till my brain aches. So as to get it absolutely right. So as to correct the minutest misprint in a text which no one may ever read or which will be shredded the next day. Getting it right. The holiness of it. The self-respect. ... Utopia simply means getting it right! Communism means taking the errata out of history. Out of man. Reading proofs."
And when he is watching the person temporarily filling in for him and spots typos and the substitute protests that it's just a hand-bill for an auction of farm tools so who cares:
"Do you know what the Kabbala teaches? That the sum total of the evil and miseries of humankind arose when a lazy or incompetent scribe misheard, took down erroneously, a single letter, one single solitary letter, in Holy Writ. Every horror since has come on us through
P and because of that one erratum. You didn't know that, did you?"
Powerful stuff!
September 30, 2017
"Sa cosa insegna la Cabala? Che tutto il male, tutte le sofferenze dell'umanità provengono dallo sbaglio di uno scrivano pigro o incompetente che sentì male, o trascrisse erroneamente, un'unica lettera, un'unica e sola lettera nel Testo Sacro. Ogni orrore successivo ci è pervenuto tramite e a causa di quell'unico erratum. Non lo sapeva, vero?" (pp. 76, 77)
December 6, 2020
Fulminante, molto acuto (straordinarie le connessioni con “Nessuna passione spenta”). Questo correttore di bozze è il mio ideale di vita.
«L'Utopia significa semplicemente l'esattezza! Il comunismo significa togliere gli errata dalla storia. Dall'uomo. Correggere bozze.» Altre citazioni qui: http://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_S...
«L'Utopia significa semplicemente l'esattezza! Il comunismo significa togliere gli errata dalla storia. Dall'uomo. Correggere bozze.» Altre citazioni qui: http://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_S...
September 10, 2023
A grey, outside time accounting of Italian Communists around the time the Berlin Wall came down. Read it for the exchange between the Profesore and the Priest as they walk around town at night. Incredible monologues.
March 13, 2011
George Steiner, an eminent critic whose fictions include "Anno Domini" and The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., has called his fiction "allegories for argument" or "scripts for thought." In "Proofs" he centers his story on an Italian proofreader so devoted to his craft that "if the winds blew a piece" of wastepaper "towards his feet, he would pick it up, smooth it, read closely and make any correction needed." Then: "He would deposit it in the garbage receptacle, feeling obscurely rewarded and saddened. Any witness to this rite would have thought him deranged." But there are signs of problems with his eyes, pains, and he goes to an opthamologist: "Had you come to me in good time, it would have been worth operating on the left eye. To remove those cataracts. To implant a lens. As matters stand now . . ."
The proofreader is in a Marxist study group, but each evening he sees the news of the crumbling of the Communist edifice throughout Eastern Europe and Russia - the doubts begin. Into the story is added an eloquent debate that the proofreader carries on with Carlo, a priest and friend from his study group, over the relative merits of Communism, capitalism and Christianity. In this discussion neither side seems to fare well but the proofreader, in spite of the news and debate, will not give up his belief in Marxism. This suggests that the blindness is two-fold -- a Dante-esque prescription for a man who devoted his life to getting texts right. In a fiction written with as meticulous and spare a style as the protagonist proofreader himself exhibits we have a thoroughly Steineresque commentary on the twentieth century, the power of belief and the nature of the humane.
The proofreader is in a Marxist study group, but each evening he sees the news of the crumbling of the Communist edifice throughout Eastern Europe and Russia - the doubts begin. Into the story is added an eloquent debate that the proofreader carries on with Carlo, a priest and friend from his study group, over the relative merits of Communism, capitalism and Christianity. In this discussion neither side seems to fare well but the proofreader, in spite of the news and debate, will not give up his belief in Marxism. This suggests that the blindness is two-fold -- a Dante-esque prescription for a man who devoted his life to getting texts right. In a fiction written with as meticulous and spare a style as the protagonist proofreader himself exhibits we have a thoroughly Steineresque commentary on the twentieth century, the power of belief and the nature of the humane.
January 5, 2012
Un momento di disimpegno per mettervi a parte di una nota citazione da Il correttore di George Steiner, uno di quei libri che il correttore di bozze ha acquistato per curiosità, letto per gusto e conservato sulla propria mensola per vezzo.
«È un volantino. Per una vendita all’incanto di attrezzi agricoli usati e sacchi di concime! Avrà luogo al consorzio di San Maurizio – Dio sa dov’è quel buco – martedì prossimo. Cento copie. Che verranno affisse sulla porta del cesso esterno di qualche fattoria o buttate nel fosso più vicino. E lei si preoccupa per un accento!»
«Disperatamente. Sa cosa insegna la Cabala? Che tutto il male, tutte le sofferenze dell’umanità provengono dallo sbaglio di uno scrivano pigro o incompetente che sentì male, o trascrisse erroneamente, un’unica lettera, un’unica e sola lettera nel Testo Sacro. Ogni orrore successivo ci è pervenuto tramite e a causa di quell’unico erratum. Non lo sapeva, vero? [...] È proprio qui che conta, più che mai in passato. Agire diversamente è segno del più profondo disprezzo. Disprezzo per quelli che non si possono permettere di sfogliare un’edizione di lusso, che non vedranno mai un foglio di carta di qualità o dei caratteri artigianali. Disprezzo per quelli cui Dio, sì, Dio!, ha concesso il diritto di avere un volantino senza pecche, anche per una svendita di concime! È proprio per quelli che vivono in qualche sperduto buco di campagna, nei bassifondi, che dovremmo produrre il lavoro migliore. Perché qualche scintilla di perfezione penetri nelle loro vite sconsolate. Non capisce quanto disprezzo ci sia in un accento sbagliato o in un trattino fuori posto? Come se lei sputasse su un altro essere umano.»
http://correttricedibozze.wordpress.c...
«È un volantino. Per una vendita all’incanto di attrezzi agricoli usati e sacchi di concime! Avrà luogo al consorzio di San Maurizio – Dio sa dov’è quel buco – martedì prossimo. Cento copie. Che verranno affisse sulla porta del cesso esterno di qualche fattoria o buttate nel fosso più vicino. E lei si preoccupa per un accento!»
«Disperatamente. Sa cosa insegna la Cabala? Che tutto il male, tutte le sofferenze dell’umanità provengono dallo sbaglio di uno scrivano pigro o incompetente che sentì male, o trascrisse erroneamente, un’unica lettera, un’unica e sola lettera nel Testo Sacro. Ogni orrore successivo ci è pervenuto tramite e a causa di quell’unico erratum. Non lo sapeva, vero? [...] È proprio qui che conta, più che mai in passato. Agire diversamente è segno del più profondo disprezzo. Disprezzo per quelli che non si possono permettere di sfogliare un’edizione di lusso, che non vedranno mai un foglio di carta di qualità o dei caratteri artigianali. Disprezzo per quelli cui Dio, sì, Dio!, ha concesso il diritto di avere un volantino senza pecche, anche per una svendita di concime! È proprio per quelli che vivono in qualche sperduto buco di campagna, nei bassifondi, che dovremmo produrre il lavoro migliore. Perché qualche scintilla di perfezione penetri nelle loro vite sconsolate. Non capisce quanto disprezzo ci sia in un accento sbagliato o in un trattino fuori posto? Come se lei sputasse su un altro essere umano.»
http://correttricedibozze.wordpress.c...
June 2, 2023
Leggi la recensione qui: https://sfoglialibri.wordpress.com/20...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews