Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Old English would be a silver-worker’s dream – we’ve got such extensive dictionaries and we can trace the etymology quite clearly, so the bars would be wonderfully exact. But nobody thinks in Old English. Nobody lives and breathes in Old English. It’s partly for this reason that the Classics education at Oxford is so rigorous.

Languages affect each other; they inject new meaning into each other, and like water rushing out of a dam, the more porous the barriers are, the weaker the force. Most of the silver bars that power London are translations from Latin, French, and German. But those bars are losing their efficacy. As linguistic flow spreads across continents – as words like saute and gratin become a standard part of the English lexicon – the semantic warp loses its potency.’

‘So much has been translated from other European languages to English and vice versa in this century. We seem unable to kick our addiction to the Germans and their philosophers, or to the Italians and their poets. So, Romance Languages is really the most threatened branch of the faculty, as much as they’d like to pretend they own the building. The Classics are getting less promising as well. Latin and Greek will hang on for a bit, since fluency in either is still the purview of the elites, but Latin, at least, is getting more colloquial than you’d think.

‘Well, certainly. Language is a resource just like gold and silver. People have fought and died over those Grammaticas.’

‘Do you know the official punishment in China for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner is death?’

‘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.’

‘Words tell stories.’

‘Specifically, the history of those words – how they came into use, and how their meanings morphed into what they mean today – tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact.

Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics. When we invoke words in silver, we call to mind that changing history.’

‘Historical research is well and fine,’

‘All you have to do is look at artefacts, documents, and the like. But how do you research the history of words? How do you determine how far they’ve travelled?’

‘Read...

‘There is no other way around it. You compile all the sources you can get your hands on, and then you sit down to solve puzzles. You ...

Etymology is detective work across centuries, and it’s devilishly hard work, like finding a needle in a haystack. But our particular needles, I’d say, are quite worth the search.’

They dug through languages like they were mines, searching for valuable veins of common heritage and distorted meaning. It changed the way they spoke. Constantly they trailed off in the middle of sentences. They could not utter even common phrases and aphorisms without pausing to wonder where those words came from. Such interrogations infiltrated all their conversations, became the default way they made sense of each other and everything else.* They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought.

The curious thing about etymology, they soon learned, was that anything could influence a language, from the consumption habits of the rich and worldly to the so-called vulgar utterances of the poor and wretched.

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.

‘It’s no good for you to stay cooped up in the library all the time,’

‘One needs to stretch one’s muscles for the brain to work properly. Get the blood flowing. Try it, it’ll be good for you.’

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

‘Because I don’t dream in Chinese.’

‘I’m your failed predecessor, you see. Dear old Papa took me out of the country too early. I’ve got a natural ear for tones, but that’s it. My fluency is largely artificial. I don’t have memories in Chinese. I don’t dream in it. I’ve got the recall, I’ve got the language skills, but I can’t reliably make the bars work. Half the time they do nothing at all.’

‘Our father got it right with you. He left you to ferment until you were literate. But he brought me here before I’d formed enough connections, enough memories. What’s more, he was the only person I ever spoke Mandarin with, when my Cantonese was far better to begin with. And that’s lost now. I don’t think in it, and I certainly don’t dream in it.’

How awful it would have felt to reach for flimsy Chinese from a barely remembered life, knowing full well that it was the only thing that gave him value here. Small wonder Griffin was furious. Small wonder he hated Babel with such vehemence. Griffin had been robbed of everything – a mother tongue, a motherland, a family.

‘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.’

I am where I am because I believe in knowledge and scientific progress, and I have used them to my advantage. They are where they are because they have stubbornly refused to move forward with the future. Men like that don’t scare me. Men like that make me laugh.’

They had never witnessed a failure before. They could not tear their eyes away.

‘The risks? I’m the one taking risks, I’m putting my entire future on the line—’

‘Funny,’

‘And here I thought the Hermes Society wa...

‘Yes, it’s quite clear.’ Griffin’s lip curled. He looked very much like their father just then. ‘You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It’s shackling you. You’ve identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you. When are you going to realize you can’t be one of them?’

‘Really, Griffin, what on earth have you ever done? The Empire’s still standing. Babel’s still there. The sun rises, and Britain’s still got her claws everywhere in the world, and silver keeps flowing in without end. None of this matters.’

‘No, I just—’

‘I just can’t see what any of this achieves. And you’re asking me to give up so much in return. I want to help you, Griffin. But I also want to survive.’

‘You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’

‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. 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.’

‘That’s not how this works,’

‘You’re in or you’re not. Afghanistan isn’t waiting.’

‘You’re lost, brother. You’re a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It’s gone.’

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

If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, thought Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come – not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations. For simple ink on paper was not enough to describe this golden afternoon; the warmth of uncomplicated friendship, all fights forgotten, all sins forgiven; the sunlight melting away the memory of the classroom chill; the sticky taste of lemon on their tongues and their startled, delighted relief.

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

‘One does not appreciate heaven until one has known hell,’

What Letty wanted then was not honest counsel, but someone to comfort and love her and give her, if not the attention she craved, then some facsimile of it. So he let her sob against him, soaking the front of his shirt in tears, and rubbed circles in her back as he murmured mindlessly that he didn’t understand – was Ramy a fool? What wasn’t to love about her? She was gorgeous, gorgeous, she made Aphrodite herself jealous – indeed, he intoned, she ought to feel lucky she hadn’t been turned into a mayfly already.

Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.

‘I have done more for you than you could ever imagine. You were a dock boy in Canton. Your mother was an outcast. Even if your father had been Chinese,’ Professor Lovell’s throat pulsed then, and this was as much of an admission as he would ever make, Robin knew, ‘your station would have been the same. You would have scraped along for pennies your entire life. You never would have seen the shores of England. You never would have read Horace, Homer, or Thucydides – you never would have opened a book, for that matter. You would have lived and died in squalor and ignorance, never imagining the world of opportunities that I have afforded you. I lifted you from destitution. I gifted you the world.’

‘How dare you? How dare you spit in the face of all you were given?’

‘Do you know how privileged you’ve been by th...

‘Do you know how much most households pay to send their sons to Oxford? You enjoy rooms and lodging at no cost. You’re blessed with a monthly allowance. You have access to the largest stores of knowledge in the world. Did you think your situation was common?’