Babel

by R.F. Kuang

London existed to him like Lilliput did: a faraway, imaginary, fantasy place where no one looked, dressed, or spoke remotely like him.

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

‘The English reinvent their names all the time,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The only families who keep theirs do it because they have titles to hold on to, and you certainly haven’t got any. You only need a handle to introduce yourself by. Any name will do.’

‘Spēs,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It’s Latin. It’s the root word of the English speed, and it means a nexus of things involving hope, fortune, success, and reaching one’s goal. Makes the carriages run a bit more safely and quickly.’

Mr Felton rapped the table with his knuckles. ‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades Eve to eat. But in Latin, malum means “bad” and mālum,’ he wrote the words out for Robin, emphasizing the macron with force, ‘means “apple”. It was a short leap from there to blaming the apple for the original sin. But for all we know, the real culprit could be a persimmon.’

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.’

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

As long as Professor Lovell did not accept him as a son, Robin would not attempt to claim him as a father. A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers.

In the years to come, Robin would return so many times to this night. He was forever astonished by its mysterious alchemy, by how easily two badly socialized, restrictively raised strangers had transformed into kindred spirits in the span of minutes.

If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage.

books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless,

you’re giving me nothing, and asking me for everything.’ ‘Yes, brother, that’s really how secret societies with any degree of competence work. I don’t know what sort of person you are, and I’d be a fool to tell you more.’

Real life is messy, scary, and uncertain.’

say we are translating from Italian into English. In Italian, ciao can be used upon greeting or upon parting – it does not specify either, it simply marks etiquette at the point of contact. It is derived from the Venetian s-ciào vostro, meaning something akin to “your obedient servant”.

‘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.

translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases.

If translation were only a matter of finding the right themes, the right general ideas, then theoretically we could eventually make our meaning clear, couldn’t we? But something gets in the way – syntax, grammar, morphology and orthography, all the things that form the bones of a language.

‘It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth.

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

‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization.

you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations.

The Chinese don’t need anything we’re selling; they can produce everything they want on their own.

the talent will go where the work is; it always does.

Stress had the unique ability to wipe students’ minds clear of things they had been studying for years.

in looking for cognates, one had to be wary of false friends – words which seemed like cognates but had utterly different origins and meanings. The English have did not come from the Latin habere (‘to hold, to possess’), for example, but from the Latin capere (‘to seek’). And the Italian cognato did not mean ‘cognate’ like one might hope, but rather ‘brother-in-law’.

Languages had to be lived to be understood,

he hadn’t the faintest clue whether he’d done the right thing, what right and wrong meant at all, or how the pieces might now fall.

He hadn’t packed much; he would outgrow any clothes he brought in half a year.

He felt very hot and agitated, as if a thousand ants were crawling around under his clothes.

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.

You must know the barbarians to control the barbarians, don’t you think?’

The four of them took turns losing their minds. There was an unspoken rule to this game: one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.

Let the pain slide off you like raindrops, without acknowledgment, without reaction, because to pretend it is not happening is the only way to survive.

‘We’re dead men walking.’ ‘But that’s what makes us frightening.’ She set the lamp down between them. ‘We’ve nothing left to lose.’

‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’

In theory they would be martyrs, heroes, the ones who’d pushed history off its path. But none of that was a comfort. In the moment, all that mattered was that death was painful and frightening and permanent, and none of them wanted to die.

‘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.’

revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential.

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.