Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Worse if you are an American writing about Oxford, for what do Americans know about anything?

silver-work

I’ve moved the date of its construction up just a little bit, all for the sake of a cute reference.

second, because I needed to get my characters to London a bit faster.

If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.

Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos. 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 boy lay still in his shadow, wondering if this tall, pale figure in black had come to reap his soul.

The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith.

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

A stranger in a strange land, who had to learn the local languages if he wished not to die.

Laughter was strange coming out of that severe mouth; it sounded too abrupt, almost cruel, and the boy couldn’t help but flinch.

The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.

‘London is a blathering mess. It’s impossible to get anything done here; the city’s too loud, and it demands too much of you.

Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.’

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.

melodramatic pseudo-news like colourful crime reports and a series on the dying confessions of condemned prisoners. For cheaper stuff, he entertained himself with the Bawbee Bagpipe

The Pickwick Papers by someone named Charles Dickens, who was very funny but seemed to hate very much anyone who was not white.

For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them;

You must learn to overcome the pollution of your blood.

She’d like to think that it’s a hop and a skip from abolition to women’s suffrage.’ Mr Ratcliffe let out a nasty laugh. ‘That would be the day.’ And with that, the conversation turned to the absurdity of women’s rights.

You can safely ignore anyone from Worcester or Hertford. They’re poor and ugly,’

Magpie Lane* –

gropecunt lane; previous whore place. lol

He was forever astonished by its mysterious alchemy, by how easily two badly socialized, restrictively raised strangers had transformed into kindred spirits in the span of minutes.

tell me, how would you like to read an epic with a doddering Frenchman breathing down your neck at all the raunchy bits?’

If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage.

The cobblestones beneath their feet seemed like roads leading into and out of different centuries. This could be the Oxford of the Reformation, or the Oxford of the Middle Ages. They moved within a timeless space, shared by the ghosts of scholars past.

girls were mysterious subjects imbued not with a rich inner life but with qualities that made them otherworldly, inscrutable, and possibly not human at all.

Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire.’

you, like Psammetichus’s boys, are the tongues that will speak this vision of global harmony into being.’

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

‘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.

verbum e verbo and sensum e sensu. Can anyone—’ ‘Word for word,’ Letty said promptly. ‘And sense for sense.’

‘That servile path thou nobly dost decline,’ Ramy recited, ‘of tracing word by word, and line by line.’ ‘Those are the laboured births of slavish brains, not the effect of poetry, but pains,’ Professor Playfair finished. ‘John Denham.

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.

it’ll feel more like folding laundry than chasing the ephemeral.

never forget the audacity of what you are attempting. Never forget that you are defying a curse laid by God.’

we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.’

Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’

‘Because if language is free, if knowledge is free, then why are all the Grammaticas under lock and key in the tower?

Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet. The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth. CHARLES V

vituperation.

translating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible.

‘Translators are always being accused of faithlessness,’ boomed Professor Playfair. ‘So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty?

an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

words are connected to the concepts they describe by something invisible, intangible – a mystical realm of meaning and ideas, emanating from a pure mental energy which only takes form when we ascribe it an imperfect signifier.’

‘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.’

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular.

They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

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