Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘We take their languages, their ways of seeing and describing the world. We ought to give them something in return.’ ‘But

‘Or that you’re hoarding knowledge that should be freely shared,’ said Robin. ‘Because if language is free, if knowledge is free, then why are all the Grammaticas under lock and key in the tower? Why don’t we ever host foreign scholars, or send scholars to help open translation centres elsewhere in the world?’ ‘Because as the Royal Institute of Translation, we serve the interests of the Crown.’ ‘That seems fundamentally unjust.’ ‘Is

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.

They argued endlessly, the way bright young people with well-fed egos and too many opinions do.

And Letty and Ramy bickered most of all, largely over Ramy’s claim that Letty had never stepped foot in the colonies and therefore shouldn’t opine on the supposed benefits of the British presence in India. ‘I do know a thing or two about India,’ Letty would insist. ‘I’ve read all sorts of essays, I’ve read Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah—’ ‘Oh, yes?’ Ramy would ask. ‘The one where India is a lovely Hindu nation, overrun by tyrannical Muslim invaders? That one?’ At

Yet Griffin and the Hermes Society belonged to bad dreams and shadows; his cohort was sun and warmth and laughter, and he could not imagine bringing those worlds together. Only

Not because he was afraid of breaking Griffin’s confidence, but because he could not bear how this confession would shatter the life they’d built for themselves. And 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.

The meeting felt like a midterm progress report with a harsh and rarely available supervisor, and Robin found himself basking in the praise, trying and failing not to come off as a giddy kid brother. ‘So

This was what he wanted: a smooth, even path to a future with no surprises. The only obstacle, of course, was his conscience. ‘You’ll

And he would no longer be the foreigner, second-guessing his pronunciation at every turn, but a native whose belonging could not possibly be questioned or revoked. It

‘All right.’ Pendennis leaned forward, still feigning reluctance, and reached for a stack of papers that Robin realized had been set out for display on the coffee table this entire time.

So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’ By

Schleiermacher argued that translations should be sufficiently unnatural that they clearly present themselves as foreign texts. He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Schleiermacher chose the former. Yet the dominant strain in England now is the latter – to make translations sound so natural to the English reader that they do not read as translations at all. ‘Which

‘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?’ He

‘Words have no meaning unless there is someone present who can understand them.

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.

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.’ That

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

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. In

They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it. And Robin, despite everything, hoped the day Griffin prophesied would never come, that he could live hanging in this balance forever. For he had never been happier than he was now: stretched thin, too preoccupied with the next thing before him to pay any attention to how it all fitted together. In

Robin, too, thought the photograph looked strange, though he did not say so aloud. All of their expressions were artificial, masks of faint discomfort. The camera had distorted and flattened the spirit that bound them, and the invisible warmth and camaraderie between them appeared now like a stilted, forced closeness. Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it. Violets cast into crucibles, indeed.

I’m not saying everything’s good and fixed, and I’m not saying we can fully take the credit for British legislation; I’m sure the abolitionists would take umbrage at that. But I am saying that if you think the 1833 Act passed because of the moral sensibilities of the British, you’re wrong. They passed that bill because they couldn’t keep absorbing the losses.’ He

History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’ ‘You

‘You get it,’ Griffin said, watching him. ‘You know how it feels for your native tongue to slip away. You caught it in time. I didn’t.’ ‘I’m

So then I asked if I might just translate Omar ibn Said’s Arabic essays into English, given that they’ve just been sitting around for a near decade in our collections, but Harding said that was unnecessary because abolition had already passed into law in England, can you believe it?* As if America doesn’t exist?

How do you write a definitive text on the “language and wisdom” of India from Paris?’* Yet

Would you be content to sit hour after hour with a white man as he asks you the story behind every metaphor, every god’s name, so he can pilfer through your people’s beliefs for a match-pair that might make a silver bar glow?’ Letty

‘She’s brought this on herself,’ she complained to Robin. ‘She could make this so much easier if she’d just do the research – I mean, no one’s done a third-year project in Haitian Creole, there’s barely even a Grammatica. She could be the very first!’ There was no debating with Letty when she was in these moods – it was obvious she only wanted an audience to vent to – but Robin tried anyway. ‘Suppose it means more to her than you realize.’ ‘But it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t! She’s not the slightest bit religious; I mean, she’s civilized—’ He whistled. ‘That’s a loaded word, Letty.’ ‘You know what I mean,’ she huffed. ‘She’s not Haitian. She’s French. And I just don’t see why she has to be so difficult.’ Halfway

You do speak the words, but more importantly, you hold two meanings in your head at once. You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine traversing them.

Her distress belied a deeper terror, a terror which Robin felt as well, which was that Anthony had been expendable. That they were all expendable. That this tower – this place where they had for the first time found belonging – treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn’t, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke. No

Unlike Victoire, she was determined to raise the issue at every opportunity; indeed, she was obsessed with Anthony’s death in a way that felt uncomfortably, performatively righteous.

Silver-powered machines of the kind William Blake dubbed ‘dark Satanic Mills’ were rapidly replacing artisanal labour, but rather than bringing prosperity to all, they had instead created an economic recession, had caused a widening gap between the rich and poor that would soon become the stuff of novels by Disraeli and Dickens.

The New Poor Law of 1834, which had been designed to reduce the costs of poverty relief more than anything else, was fundamentally cruel and punitive in design; it withheld financial aid unless applicants moved into a workhouse, and those workhouses were designed to be so miserable no one would want to live in them.

It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away. One

Oxford, and Babel by extension, were, at their roots, ancient religious institutions, and for all their contemporary sophistication, the rituals that comprised university life were still based in medieval mysticism. Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.*

‘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?’ ‘Stop

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. If Letty

He was truly unsure how he’d performed when he walked out of the examination room – his mind had resorted to the funny trick of ceasing to understand what he’d argued as soon as he dotted the last sentence, but the inky lines had looked robust, and he knew he’d at least sounded good. Professor

Then they could maintain the thin veneer of deniability Robin had lived with for years. 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. Ramy

A hundred arguments swam through Robin’s head – that 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. But

Robin had always been willing, in theory, to give up only some things for a revolution he halfway believed in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever. Professor

Robin flinched. Those were precisely the same words Griffin had used; he remembered. And Griffin had said it exactly the same way Professor Lovell did now, cold and imperious, as if he’d already won the argument, as if any response Robin made was bound to be nonsense. And

Lie, Ramiz. This was the lesson, the most important lesson he’d ever been taught. Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them. Hide your faith, hide your prayers, for Allah will still know your heart. And

A dream; this was an impossible dream, this fragile, lovely world in which, for the price of his convictions, he had been allowed to remain. That

To his great surprise, Professor Lovell reached out then and placed a hand on Robin’s shoulder. But the touch felt awkward, forced; the angles off, the pressure too heavy. They stood, strained and baffled, like two actors before a daguerreotype, holding their positions just until the light flashed. ‘I believe

Robin opened his eyes, stared out over the rolling waves until he lost focus, until he was staring at nothing at all, and tried to convince himself that if he was not happy, he was at least content. It was

The truth was embroidered on a cloth tapestry, spread out to display its contents. But Robin, coming clean to his friends at last, had no idea where to start. The image he displayed was a jumbled and confused one, warped no matter how he told it by its complexity. ‘He

‘But that’s just it,’ said Robin. ‘That’s precisely why it was too risky for you—’ ‘And it’s not for you?’ ‘No,’ Robin said, suddenly angry. ‘It wasn’t.’ He didn’t have to say why. Robin, whose father was on the faculty, who could pass for white under the right lighting, at the right angles, was shielded in a way Ramy and Victoire were not. If Ramy or Victoire had faced the police that night, they wouldn’t have been on this ship, they would have been behind bars, or worse. Ramy’s throat pulsed. ‘Damn it, Robin.’ ‘I’m

Under any other circumstances, the voyage would have been a fascinating chance to examine the unique linguistics of nautical environments, which blended the necessary multilingualism brought about by foreign crews and foreign destinations with the highly technical vocabulary of seacraft. What

There was also, Professor Lovell argued, a great pedagogical benefit to learning a wholly new language in a very short amount of time; it forced the mind to stretch and build rapid connections, to contrast unfamiliar language structures with what one already knew. ‘Chinese