Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

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

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.

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.

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’.

He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.

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.

He was one of the handsomest men Robin had ever encountered, a Byronic hero incarnate.

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.’

‘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?’

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.

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.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.*

Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

Suppose they convinced the British public that the country China did not actually exist and was in fact an elaborate hoax by Marco Polo.

‘But I’m a sceptic. I think decolonization must be a violent process.’

‘Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’ Griffin pointed at the middle birch. ‘Pull the trigger, kid.’

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

But just then, all he knew was red blurring out the edges of his vision, crowding out everything but Letty. He knew now how it felt to truly want a person dead, to want to tear them apart limb by limb, to hear them scream, to make them hurt. He understood now how murder felt, how rage felt, for this was it, the intent to kill he ought to have felt when he killed his father.

‘Mande mwen yon ti kou ankò ma di ou,’