Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Promptly he stood and brushed at his knees before he left, though the boy could scarcely see how any dust could have accumulated in the few minutes in which he’d been sitting down.

But a dozen books were hardly enough to last six months; he always read each one so many times over he’d nearly memorized them by the time the next shipment came.

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

But he’d never seen one of his elders turn to him with such total helplessness. Guilt twisted his gut. Words collected on his tongue, cruel and terrible words, but he could not turn them into a sentence.

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.

Occasionally he struck up a conversation with the other passengers, who always seemed delighted to hear a near pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent out of the mouth of this little Oriental boy.

He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive. He pulled on his English accent like a new coat, adjusted everything he could about himself to make it fit, and, within weeks, wore it with comfort. In weeks, no one was asking him to speak a few words in Chinese for their entertainment. In weeks, no one seemed to remember he was Chinese at all.

‘But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’

‘Languages are easier to forget than you imagine,’ he said. ‘Once you stop living in the world of Chinese, you stop thinking in Chinese.’

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

He reached into his memory to recall how Chinese conversations felt, how Mandarin sounded when it rolled naturally off his tongue, when he didn’t have to pause to remember the tones of the next word he uttered. But he was forgetting. That terrified him. Sometimes, during practice conversations, he found himself blanking on a word he used to toss around constantly.

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.

He stumbled on a series called The Pickwick Papers by someone named Charles Dickens, who was very funny but seemed to hate very much anyone who was not white.

The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.

Platonic forms,

He greatly enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he could not say the same of the poems by her less talented husband, whom he found overly dramatic.

’ Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.

’ Pick one? Just one, of all these treasures? Robin didn’t know the first title from the second, and he was too dazzled by the sheer amount of text to flip through and decide.

If he didn’t decide now, he knew, he’d never leave. He was like a starved man in a pastry shop, dazzled by his options, but he did not want to try the professor’s patience.

His mind drifted to his own voyage from Canton, and he reframed those memories in the context of the novel, imagined himself battling pirates, building rafts, winning medals for courage and valour—

He was so overcome with pain then that he could not breathe, and still it seemed the most important thing was to display no hint of suffering at all. He had never felt so wretched in his life. He wanted to die.

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.

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.

‘Oh.’ She chuckled, then glanced at Robin. ‘He’d like to know if you can see.’

’ ‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.) ‘With your eyes like that – can you see everything? Or is it only in little slits?’ ‘I can see perfectly well,’ Robin said quietly.

’ Ramy gesticulated wildly as he spoke. 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.

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.’

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 his frankness alarming. He’d got so used to ignoring the issue that it was odd to hear it described in such blunt terms.

Whatever esteemed company the Sharps were seeking at Oxford, they had clearly not found it here.

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.

It was so much easier to pretend; to keep spinning the fantasy for as long as they could.

This was a pattern, Robin noticed – the initial authors all tended to be white British men rather than native speakers of those languages. ‘It’s

He put the volume down, struck with the unsettling realization that Professor Lovell – a foreigner – knew more about his mother tongue than he did. ‘Why

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. And though the story made his gut squirm – for he had read the relevant passage of Herodotus, and recalled that the Egyptian boys were nevertheless slaves – he felt also a thrum of excitement at the thought that perhaps his unbelonging did not doom him to existing forever on the margins, that perhaps, instead, it made him special. Next,

No, the power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing – the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.’ He

It was another thing to witness with their own eyes the warping of reality, the way words seized what no words could describe and invoked a physical effect that should not be. Victoire

He liked listening to her speak; every sentence felt like she was pulling laughter out from inside him.

Robin suspected this was not the full extent of this story, but he, too, was practised in the art of papering over pain, and he did not pry. One

Why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side? But

table

‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources.

It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world. ‘We

‘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.

Consider the Heinrich Heine poem “Ein Fichtenbaum”. It’s short, and its message is quite easy to grasp. A pine tree, longing for a palm tree, represents a man’s desire for a woman. Yet translating it into English has been devilishly tricky, because English doesn’t have genders like German does. So there’s no way to convey the binary opposition between the masculine ein Fichtenbaum and the feminine einer Palme. You see? So we must proceed from the starting assumption that distortion is inevitable. The question is how to distort with deliberation.’ He

We will never speak the divine language. But by amassing all the world’s languages under this roof, by collecting the full range of human expressions, or as near to it as we can get, we can try. We will never touch heaven from this mortal plane, but our confusion is not infinite. We can, through perfecting the arts of translation, achieve what humanity lost at Babel.’

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. Then

Classical Chinese was to vernacular Mandarin what Latin was to English; one could guess at the gist of a phrase, but the rules of grammar were unintuitive and impossible to grasp without rigorous reading practice.

the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors,