Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

3 P rince of A sturias A wards 1981-2014. S peeches Laureates. Excerpts Dreams are the neutral ground of contradictions. The dream of a common language, spoken and understood by all human beings on this small, fragile planet is as ancient as history itself. In innumerable versions, expounded by theology, by liturgy, by myth, we find the motif of an “Adamic” tongue. At his creation, man spoke a divinely imparted language. This language was tautological, this is to say that words correspond exactly, with no possible falsehood or ambiguity, to that which they designated and communicated. Speech was identical with truth. Hence the possibility of direct exchange with God, of a direct comprehension of His discourse. In the beginning was the Word ( logos ) common to both man and creator. This single language would, presumably, have sufficed for all mankind had the children of Adam and Eve dwelt in Paradise, had there been no original sin and expulsion from Eden. For a time, and although tainted with possibilities of error and of falsehood, this primal idiom continued to be spoken. The second Fall came at Babel, with the shattering of an Adamic and unified tongue into countless other languages, mutually incomprehensible. There is hardly any mythology or cultural legend known to us which does not include some version of the Babel story. The causes of the disaster are narrated in many different modes: a crime against the gods, a fatal oversight, a mysterious accident. But there is universal agreement as to the consequence: henceforth, human communities and individuals are divided by linguistic barriers, by reciprocal deafness or misunderstanding. Every act of translation carries within it a trace of this primal catastrophe. The dream of repairing the damage, of restoring the human condition to the unison of pre- Babel, has never ceased. At various points in history, different languages have put forward claims to original universality. Hebrew has never renounced an aura of original and originating privilege. Classical Greek aspired to uniqueness and supremacy as contrasted with “barbarian chatter”. Via the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, Latin sought to demonstrate as self-evident its rights of universality, of legislative auctoritas over mankind. Calvinist divines argued for the purity, for the closeness to man’s pre-destined origins, of Dutch. The French have perennially harboured the suspicion that God speaks French. Charles V voiced the same intuition with regard to Castilian. But as it became clear that no natural language would restore the world to universal harmony and accord, the search began for an artificial interlingua, for a linguistic system which all men would want to share. From the 17th century onward, this dream has engaged great minds and energies. Among them a Comenius, a Leibniz and all those who, like Spinoza, were persuaded that human quarrels and errors would cease if all men and women could communicate with each other in a shared tongue. Esperanto is only one among a dozen systematic constructs of a “world-speech”. Today, and for the first time, such a “world-speech” is tiding across the planet. It is Anglo-American which, by virtue of economic, commercial, technological and mass-media domination will soon be spoken, either as a first or a second language, by three-fifths of the human species. All computers derive from Anglo-American and immensely reinforce the codification of all other languages into a basic Anglo-American. George Steiner — Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2001 Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities on 26/10/2001.