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.

He enjoyed novels more than anything else.

but what a pleasure it was to hold the weight of an entire, finished story in his hands. He read any genre he could get his hands on.

It never occurred to Robin to run, not then, and not once in the weeks that followed. Some other child might have been frightened, might have seized the first chance to escape into London’s streets.

After all, it never happened again. Robin made sure it did not. He spent the next six years studying to the point of exhaustion. With the threat of expatriation looming constantly above him, he devoted his life to becoming the student Professor Lovell wanted to see.

Figuring out the precise grammatical formulation of a phrase that had been frustrating him gave him the same sort of satisfaction he derived from reshelving a book where it belonged or finding a missing sock – all the pieces fitted together, and everything was whole and complete.

Never, Robin thought, would he understand these men, who talked of the world and its movements like a grand chess game, where countries and peoples were pieces to be moved and manipulated at will.

But if the world was an abstract object for them, it was even more abstract to him, for he had no stake in any of these matters.

Robin felt that surely there were other words that should be said, words to mark this occasion – his growing up, leaving home, his entering university – as momentous. But he couldn’t imagine what they might be, and apparently neither could Professor Lovell.

He could have cried then. He’d been so desperately lonely, and had only now realized it, and now he wasn’t, and this felt so good he didn’t know what to do with himself.

These were three of the happiest days of Robin’s life.

For the first time in his life he was in full control of his own purse and schedule, and he went mad with freedom.

So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

That marked the difference between them. Ever since his arrival in London, Robin had tried to keep his head down and assimilate, to play down his otherness. He thought the more unremarkable he seemed, the less attention he would draw. But Ramy, who had no choice but to stand out, had decided he might as well dazzle. He was bold to the extreme. Robin found him incredible and a little bit terrifying.

books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless,

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.

which labelled girls ‘gentle, inoffensive, delicate, and passively amiable’. As far as Robin was concerned, 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.’

‘Your languages determine how interesting you are. Orientalists are fascinating. Classicists are dull. Anyhow, welcome to the best floor in the tower.’

We accept you not despite, but because of your foreign backgrounds.’ Professor Playfair emphasized this last part as if it was a matter of great pride. ‘Because of your origins, you have the gift of languages those born in England cannot imitate.

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

This was, Robin thought, the kindest thing anyone had ever had to say about his being foreign-born.

Soon it became apparent that no topics were off limits. They could talk about anything, share all the indescribable humiliations they felt being in a place they were not supposed to be, all the lurking unease that until now they’d kept to themselves. They offered up everything about themselves because they had, at last, found the only group of people for whom their experiences were not so unique or baffling.

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.

But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.

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.

it’s just that the best way to avoid being overheard is to always be on the move.’ Griffin pivoted down Canterbury Road. ‘If you’re standing still, then your tail can hide and catch the whole conversation, but it makes things harder for them when you’re weaving about.’

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.

‘But that’s not how things work, brother. This is not a penny dreadful. Real life is messy, scary, and uncertain.’

We exist because we’re decentralized. We don’t put all of our information in one place. So I can’t ask you to take your time reviewing all the information. I’m asking you to take a chance on a conviction.’

‘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.

Language is not like maths. And even maths differs depending on the language*

It was an odd exercise to analyse and dismantle a language he thought he knew like the back of his hand, to learn to classify words by ideogram or pictogram, and to memorize an entire vocabulary of new terms, most having to do with morphology or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him.

And he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that still he wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks. It was a very strange mix of emotions. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to sort through them.

that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them. A family. He felt a crush of guilt then for loving

them, and Oxford, as much as he did.

He adored it here; he really did. For all the daily slights he suffered, walking through campus delighted him. He simply could not maintain, as Griffin did, an attitude of constant suspicion or rebellio...

‘You’ve got to live and breathe a language, not just muddle through a text now and then. Do you dream in languages other than English?’

‘I don’t think you two quite understand how hard it is to be a woman here,’

‘They’re liberal on paper, certainly. But they think so very little of us. Our landlady roots through our things when we’re out as if she’s searching for evidence that we’ve taken lovers. Every weakness we display is a testament to the worst theories about us, which is that we’re fragile, we’re hysterical, and we’re too naturally weak-minded to handle the kind of work we’re set to do.’

‘She’s unbearable sometimes, yes. But she’s not trying to be cruel. She’s scared she isn’t supposed to be here. She’s scared everyone wishes she were her brother, and she’s scared she’ll be sent home if she steps even slightly out of line. Above all, she’s scared that either of you might go down Lincoln’s path. Go easy on her, you two. You don’t know how much of her behaviour is dictated by fear.’

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’

‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’

‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’

‘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?’

Translators are of the same faithless and stolid race that they have ever been: the particle of gold they bring us over is hidden from all but the most patient eye, among shiploads of yellow sand and sulphur.

‘No translation can perfectly carry over the meaning of the original. But what is meaning? Does meaning refer to something that supersedes the words we use to describe our world? I think, intuitively, yes. Otherwise we would have no basis for critiquing a translation as accurate or inaccurate, not without some unspeakable sense of what it lacked.

Humboldt,* for instance, argues that words are connected to the concepts they describe by something invisible, intangible

Because translation can never be perfect, the necessary distortions – the meanings lost or warped in the journey – are caught, and then manifested by the silver. And that, dear students, is as close to magic as anything within the realm of natural science.’

‘Words have no meaning unless there is someone present who can understand them. And it can’t be a shallow level of understanding – you can’t simply tell a farmer what triacle means in French and expect that the bar will work. 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.