Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

‘I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.’

‘That’s the thing about secret societies,’ said Griffin. ‘They’re easy to romanticize. You think it’s this long courting process – that you’ll be inducted, shown a whole new world, shown all the levers and people at play. If you’ve formed your only impression of secret societies from novels and penny dreadfuls, then you might expect rituals and passwords and secret meetings in abandoned warehouses.

‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

You need to be able to think in a language – to live and breathe it, not just recognize it as a smattering of letters on a page.

‘We hold the secrets, and we can set whatever terms we like. That’s the beauty of being cleverer than everyone else.

‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’

‘In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.’