"'Words, those guardians of meaning, are not immortal, they are not invulnerable,' wrote Adamov in his notebook for 1938; 'some may survive, others are incurable'. When war came, he added: "Worn, threadbare, file do down, words have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws.'" (21)
"We have histories of massacre and deception, but none of metaphor. We cannot accurately conceive what it must have been like to be the first to compare the color of the sea with the dark of wine or to see autumn in a man's face. Such figures are new mappings of the world, they reorganize our habitation in reality. When the pop song moans that there is no new way of saying that I am in love or that her eyes are full of stars, it touches one of the main nerves in Western literature." (23)
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
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