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. ANTONIO DE NEBRIJA, Gramática de la lengua castellana

The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.

‘Shortbread,’ Robin repeated. ‘Because they don’t last long?’ They had been playing this game since the night of the bannock debate. ‘No, dear.’ She laughed. ‘Because of the crumble. Fat “shortens” the pastry. That’s what short means, you know – it’s how we get the word shortening.’

Wúxíng – in Chinese, ‘formless, shapeless, incorporeal’.* The closest English translation was ‘invisible’. These people, whoever they were, were trying to hide.

They stood looking at each other in silence. There was no question about what had happened. They were both shaken by the sudden realization that they did not belong in this place, that despite their affiliation with the Translation Institute and despite their gowns and pretensions, their bodies were not safe on the streets. They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud. And they never would say it out loud. It hurt too much to consider the truth. It was so much easier to pretend; to keep spinning the fantasy for as long as they could.

This was a pattern, Robin noticed – the initial authors all tended to be white British men rather than native speakers of those languages.

‘Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign peoples that brings wealth and prosperity to all.

After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’

No, the power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing – the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.’

It was another thing to witness with their own eyes the warping of reality, the way words seized what no words could describe and invoked a physical effect that should not be.

By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them. The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire’s sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial, or when they all knew Letty was about to come to class with a paper bag full of lemon biscuits because it was a Wednesday morning and Taylor’s bakery put out lemon biscuits on Wednesdays. But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.

My cute babies I just want them to be happy.

Later, when everything went sideways and the world broke in half, Robin would think back to this day, to this hour at this table, and wonder why they had been so quick, so carelessly eager to trust one another. Why had they refused to see the myriad ways they could hurt each other? Why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side? But the answer was obvious – that they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.

Nooo foreshadowing.

You’ve noticed by now that London sits at the centre of a vast empire that won’t stop growing. The single most important enabler of this growth is Babel. Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent the same way it hoards silver and uses them to produce translation magic that benefits England and England only. The vast majority of all silver bars in use in the world are in London. The newest, most powerful bars in use rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic to work, but you’ll count less than a thousand bars in the countries where those languages are widely spoken, and then only in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. And that’s wrong. That’s predatory. That’s fundamentally unjust.’

‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism. Ask yourself why the Literature Department only translates works into English and not the other way around, or what the interpreters are being sent abroad to do. Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire.

‘The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another. The Swiss philologist Johann Breitinger, who claimed that languages were merely “collections of totally equivalent words and locutions which are interchangeable, and which fully correspond to each other in meaning”, was dreadfully wrong. Language is not like maths. And even maths differs depending on the language* – but we will revisit that later.’

‘That is the dilemma. Do we take words as our unit of translation, or do we subordinate accuracy of individual words to the overall spirit of the text?’

So you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases.

‘Then you’ll have read that Tytler recommends three basic principles. Which are – yes, Miss Desgraves?’ ‘First, that the translation conveys a complete and accurate idea of the original,’ said Victoire. ‘Second, that the translation mirrors the style and manner of writing of the original. And third, that the translation should read with all the ease of the original composition.’

‘I’m not a traitor,’ Robin pleaded. ‘I’m just trying to survive.’ ‘Survival’s not that difficult, Birdie.’ Ramy’s eyes were very hard. ‘But you’ve got to maintain some dignity while you’re at it.’