Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘I know you have English.’ Professor Lovell’s voice sounded like a warning. ‘Use it.’

Lovell insinuates that English is something to have rather than to learn or know. Subtle commentary on ownership through language and ties into the theme of power gained through translation and narrative.

‘I have a name,’ said the boy. ‘It’s—’ ‘No, that won’t do. No Englishman can pronounce that.

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

This all hinged on him, Robin realized. The choice was his. Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.

The labourer gaped at him. A thousand emotions worked through that weathered face – indignation, frustration, and finally, resignation. Robin had been afraid the labourer might argue, might fight, but quickly it became clear that for this man, such treatment was nothing new.

Robin might have been unaware but this opened the Pandora's box into betraying the Chinese in exchange for his own comfort and advancement. Maybe he had wished for the laborer to fight back, but I think the laborer's resignation lead Robin to justify his decision.

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.

Robin did not yet fully understand the rules of this world he was about to enter, but he understood the necessity of gratitude. Of deference. One did not spite one’s saviours.

He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive.

Robin saw immediately that London was, like Canton, a city of contradictions and multitudes, as was any city that acted as a mouth to the world.

London was voracious, was growing fat on its spoils and still, somehow, starved. London was both unimaginably rich and wretchedly poor. London – lovely, ugly, sprawling, cramped, belching, sniffing, virtuous, hypocritical, silver-gilded London – was near to a reckoning, for the day would come when it either devoured itself from inside or cast outwards for new delicacies, labour, capital, and culture on which to feed.

Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.

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.

Some other child suited to better, kinder treatment might have realized that such nonchalance on the part of adults like Mrs Piper, Mr Felton, and Mr Chester to a badly bruised eleven-year-old was frightfully wrong. But Robin was so grateful for this return to equilibrium that he couldn’t find it in himself to even resent what had happened.

Robin processed that era through the myopic world of Lovell Manor. Reforms, colonial uprisings, slave revolts, women’s suffrage, and the latest Parliamentary debates all meant nothing to him.

It was clear he wasn’t truly angry, just passionate and clearly brilliant, so invested in the truth he needed the whole world to know.

Oxford in 1836 was in an era of becoming, an insatiable creature feeding on the wealth which it bred.

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.

See, the sad thing is, they could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they’re the ones who really understand languages – know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase.

‘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.

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.

One thing united them all – without Babel, they had nowhere in this country to go. They’d been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand, and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment.

‘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.

We will never touch heaven from this mortal plane, but our confusion is not infinite.

‘Well, of course. Such is the project of empire – and why, therefore, we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.’

Professor Playfair's romantacized perception of the empire and colonization of other groups in the name of bringing people together. He is not concerned with the consent and either has blind faith that this will benefit all groups involved or is simply niave to the implications of their actions.

But I also think that as languages evolve, as their speakers become more worldly and sophisticated, as they gorge on other concepts and swell and morph to encompass more over time – we approach something close to that language. There’s less room for misunderstanding.

Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – 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.

because he himself could not resolve the contradiction of his willingness to thrive at Babel even as it became clearer, day by day, how obviously unjust were the foundations of its fortunes. The only way he could justify his happiness here, to keep dancing on the edges of two worlds, was to continue awaiting Griffin’s correspondence at night – a hidden, silent rebellion whose main purpose was to assuage his guilt over the fact that all this gold and glitter had to come at a cost.

It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.’

Babel represented more than material comforts. Babel was the reason he belonged in England, why he was not begging on the streets of Canton. Babel was the only place where his talents mattered. Babel was security. And perhaps all that was morally compromised, yes – but was it so wrong to want to survive?

They would never change the fabric of the world by simply wishing it.

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.’

‘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?’

Even if its meaning can be partially captured in several words or sentences, something is still lost – something that falls into semantic gaps which are, of course, created by cultural differences in lived experience.

‘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.’

Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.

They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.

They became what they’d aspired to be since their first year – aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

He felt a fresh wave of disappointment. He didn’t know what he wanted from Griffin, or indeed if Griffin was capable of giving it, but still he’d hoped for more than this.

Robin is looking to fill a certain gap in his life. By doing these runs for Griffin, he might have been hoping to enforce some type of familial bond with someone else who is Chinese. He has found family with his cohort but is probably looking for connection to his roots/past.

He didn’t want to dwell on all the things they represented – the fact that for all of his professed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and to helping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all.

‘The following candidate failed their qualifying exams, and will not be asked to return to the Royal Institute of Translation for a postgraduate fellowship, nor will they be awarded a degree.

They have been offered lenience an accomodation during their time at Babel but, ultimately, they are an asset to the school.

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

They were all presently suffering the peculiar madness of the very scared and very determined, the madness that made academia feel as dangerous as the battlefield.

Languages had to be lived to be understood, and Oxford was, after all, the opposite of real life.

But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

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.

he had not requested these privileges of Oxford, had not chosen to be spirited out of Canton at all, that the generosities of the university should not demand his constant, unswerving loyalty to the Crown and its colonial projects, and if it did, then that was a peculiar form of bondage he had never agreed to. That he had not wished for this fate until it was thrust upon him, decided for him. That he didn’t know what life he would have chosen – this one, or a life in which he’d grown up in Canton, among people who looked and spoke like him.

For he understood now why his father had smiled that day in the sitting room – not out of weakness or submission, and not out of fear of reprisal. He’d been playing a part.

I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion,

‘I’m not a foreigner. I was born here.’

He thought of his mother reminiscing bitterly about the gardens she used to tend and the dresses she used to wear before his uncle frittered their family fortune away in an opium den like this. He imagined his mother, young and desperate, eager to do anything for the foreign man who promised her coin, who used and abused her and left her with an English maid and a bewildering set of instructions to raise their child, her child, in a language she couldn’t speak herself. Robin was birthed by choices produced from poverty, poverty produced from this.