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.

what a pleasure it was to hold the weight of an entire, finished story in his hands.

it was difficult to disdain a man who so clearly adored the accumulation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

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,

‘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?’

‘We get the word etymology from the Greek étymon,’ continued Professor Lovell. ‘The true sense of a word, from étumos, the “true or actual”. So we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’

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.’

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.

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.

‘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.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.

The bar was inscribed with a classic Greek to Latin to English daisy-chain. The Greek epitaphion meant ‘a funeral oration’ – something spoken, something meant to be heard; the Latin epitaphium, similarly, referred to a eulogy. It was only the modern English epitaph that referred to something written and silent. The distorted translation gave voices to the written. He was surrounded by the confessions of the dead.

They both thought this was a matter of individual fortunes instead of systematic oppression, and neither could see outside the perspective of people who looked and spoke just like them.

Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?

None of this came as a surprise. She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb.

‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’