Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘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?’

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it.

They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

You fly no one’s flag. You’re free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.’

‘Sometimes rare and expensive things are worse.’ ‘Don’t tell the English that, it’ll shatter their entire sense of taste.’

He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history.

A dangerous trap indeed, for a player to believe his own stories, to be blinded by the applause.

‘A curious defence,’ said Ramy, ‘to justify a vice with virtue.’

‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.’

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact.

the last false binary he’d constructed in his head – the one between scholars and the blades of empire – fell away. He recalled Griffin’s words. He recalled his father’s letters. Slave traders and soldiers. Ready killers, all of them.

That was no favour, Sterling. It was cruelty. Don’t ask me to love my master.’

Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb.

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.

the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo.

Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markets, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt.

Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured.

How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.

‘Are you telling me this country’s going to fall because of academic territoriality?’ ‘Well, yes.’ Professor Craft lifted her teacup to her lips. ‘It’s Oxford, what did you expect?’

‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’

‘You have to believe there’s an after,’ she murmured. ‘They did.’ ‘They were better than us.’ ‘They were.’ She curled around his arm. ‘But it all still wound up in our hands, didn’t it?’

In theory they would be martyrs, heroes, the ones who’d pushed history off its path. But none of that was a comfort. In the moment, all that mattered was that death was painful and frightening and permanent, and none of them wanted to die.

Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

He remembered the stillness. The peace. As the windows smashed in, Robin shut his eyes and imagined his mother’s face. She smiles. She says his name.

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.