Babel

by R.F. Kuang

The boy stared, fascinated by this foreigner’s long face and pale grey eyes. If he let his gaze drift out of focus, the foreigner morphed into a giant bird. A crow. No, a raptor. Something vicious and strong.

‘To accept without thinking.’

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.

tales of decline in Qing dynasty China did: an aging patriarch, a profligate son, malicious and manipulative friends, and a helpless daughter whom, for some mysterious reason, no one would marry. Once, he’d been told, he’d slept in a lacquered crib. Once, they’d enjoyed a dozen servants and a chef who cooked rare delicacies imported from northern markets. Once, they’d lived in an estate that could have housed five families, with peacocks roaming about the yard. But all Robin had ever known was the little house on the river.

But then the professor asked him whether it felt good to hold the new book in his hands. Robin enthusiastically agreed and, for the first time he could remember, they traded smiles.

He couldn’t read Professor Lovell’s expression at all. That scared him. That inscrutable wall, that inhuman blankness, was infinitely more frightening than fury would have been.

‘Do you think it matters what that infernal book is about?’ In years to come, whenever Robin looked back on that memory, he was appalled by how brazenly he had acted next. He must have been panicked out of his mind, because it was absurdly foolish, in retrospect, how he had simply closed the Marryat book and headed for the door, as if he could merely hurry down to class, as if a fault of this magnitude could be so easily forgotten.

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

Exeter was genteel but unintellectual; Brasenose was rowdy and lush with wine. Their neighbouring Queen’s and Merton were safely ignored. Balliol boys, who paid near the highest tuitions at the University, next to Oriel, were better known for running up the tab than for showing up for their tutorials.

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.’

Later, when everything went sideways and the world broke in half, Robin would think back to this day, to this hour at this table, and wonder why they had been so quick, so carelessly eager to trust one another.

‘First, that the translation conveys a complete and accurate idea of the original,’ said Victoire. ‘Second, that the translation mirrors the style and manner of writing of the original. And third, that the translation should read with all the ease of the original composition.’

‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content.

his instructor turned out to be Professor Anand Chakravarti, a genial and understated man who spoke English with such a pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent that he might have been raised in Kensington.

But I do think there is a pure realm of meaning – a language in between, where all concepts are perfectly expressed, which we have not been able to approximate. There is a sense, a feeling of when we have got it right.’

It felt good to sink into the refuge of a dead language, to fight a rhetorical war whose stakes could not really touch him.

the phrase tǎntú* literally meant ‘a flat road’, metaphorically, ‘a tranquil life’. This was what he wanted: a smooth, even path to a future with no surprises. The only obstacle, of course, was his conscience.

How could he explain it? 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?

But there were also significant ways in which they did not belong. No one would serve Ramy at any of their favourite pubs if he was the first to arrive. Letty and Victoire could not take books out of the library without a male student present to vouch for them. Victoire was assumed by shopkeepers to be Letty or Robin’s maid. Porters regularly asked all four of them if they could please not step on the green for it was off limits, while the other boys trampled over the so-called delicate grass all around them.

He felt a profuse pity for them – these boys who considered themselves aesthetes, who thought their lives were as rarefied as the examined life could be. But they would never engrave a word in a silver bar and feel the weight of its meaning reverberate in their fingers. They would never change the fabric of the world by simply wishing it.

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.

Even words that diverge in meaning still have quite a close relationship with each other. This limits the magnitude of change the bars can effect. For example, you can’t use them to bring back the dead, because we haven’t found a good match-pair in a language where life and death are not in opposition to each other.

For Robin, such abstract reasoning was a reason to divest from the world, to retreat into the safety of dead languages and books. For Griffin, it was a rallying call.

‘Well, it’s a particular kind of mental state. 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.

Something pulsed in the silver – something alive, something forceful and bold; a gale of wind, a crashing wave; and in that fraction of a second Robin felt the source of its power, that sublime, unnameable place where meaning was created, that place which words approximated but could not, could never pin down; the place which could only be invoked, imperfectly, but even so would make its presence felt.

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.

And that was the heart of it all, wasn’t it? 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.

There was something wrong with this argument, but once again, he could not figure out what. Free trade, open borders, equal access to the same knowledge – it all sounded so fine in theory. But if the playing field really was so even, why had all the profits accumulated in Britain? Were the British really so much more clever and industrious? Had they simply played the game, fair and square, and won?

It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

Robin had expected only violence, not solidarity, and he wasn’t sure what to do with this show of support. It defied what he had come to expect of the world. He was scared to let it make him hope.

He kept waiting for someone to interrupt him; for Victoire to intervene, to tell him he was wrong, but no one spoke. He took this silence as tacit approval.