Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Upon closer inspection, he and Robin were not so alike after all. He was several years older, and his face bore a hard maturity that Robin’s hadn’t yet acquired. His voice was deeper, less forgiving, more assertive. He was several inches taller than Robin, though he was also much thinner; indeed, he appeared composed entirely of sharp edges and angles. His hair was darker, his skin paler. He looked like a print illustration of Robin, the lighting contrasts amplified and the colour blanched out. He’s even more of your spitting image than the last. ‘Lovell,’ Robin repeated, trying to find his bearings. ‘Then you’re—?’ ‘He’ll never admit it,’ said Griffin. ‘But he won’t with you either, will he? Do you know he’s got a wife and children?’ Robin choked. ‘What?’ ‘It’s true. A girl and a boy, seven and three. Darling Philippa and little Dick.

I’ve got questions too. What do you call yourself?’ ‘Robin Swift,’ said Robin, puzzled. ‘You know that.’ ‘But that’s the name you prefer?’ Robin was not sure what he meant by this. ‘I mean, there’s my first – I mean, my Chinese name, but no one – I don’t—’ ‘Fine,’ said Griffin. ‘Swift. Nice name. How’d you come up with that?’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ Robin admitted. It sounded very silly when he said it out loud. Everything about Griffin made him feel like a child in contrast. ‘It – it’s one of my favourite books. Professor Lovell said to pick whatever I liked, and that was the first name that came to mind.’ Griffin’s lip curled. ‘He’s softened a bit, then. Me, he took to a street corner before we signed the papers and told me foundlings were often named after the places they’d been abandoned. Said I could walk the city until I found a word that didn’t sound too ridiculous.’

‘Why did your mother die?’ ‘Cholera,’ Robin said after a pause. ‘There was an outbreak—’ ‘I didn’t ask how,’ said Griffin. ‘I asked why.’ I don’t know why, Robin wanted to say, but he did. He’d always known, he’d just forced himself not to dwell on it. In all this time, he had never let himself ask this particular formulation of the question. Oh, two weeks and some change, said Mrs Piper. They’d been in China for over two weeks.

‘Anyhow,’ Griffin said when Robin emerged. ‘How would you like to steal for us?’ ‘Steal?’ They were strolling at an absurd pace again. ‘You mean from Babel?’ ‘Obviously, yes. Keep up.’ ‘But why do you need me?’ ‘Because you’re a part of the institution and we’re not. Your blood’s in the tower, which means there are doors you can open that we can’t.’ ‘But why . . .’ Robin’s tongue kept tripping over a flood of questions. ‘What for? What do you do with what you steal?’ ‘Just what I told you. We redistribute it. We’re Robin Hood. Ha, ha. Robin. No? All right. We send bars and silver-working materials all over the world to people who need them – people who don’t have the luxury of being rich and British. People like your mother. See, Babel’s a dazzling place, but it’s only dazzling because it sells its match-pairs to a very limited customer base.’ Griffin glanced over his shoulder. There was no one around them save a washerwoman lugging a basket down the other end of the street, but he quickened his pace regardless. ‘So are you in?’

‘The Hermes Society,’ Griffin said promptly. ‘Just Hermes, if you like.’ ‘The Hermes Society.’ Robin turned that name over in his mouth. ‘Why—’ ‘It’s a joke. Silver and mercury, Mercury and Hermes, Hermes and hermeneutics. I don’t know who came up with it.’ ‘And you’re a clandestine society? No one knows about you?’ ‘Certainly Babel does. We’ve had a – well, it’s been quite back and forth, shall we say? But they don’t know much, and certainly not as much as they’d like to. We’re very good at staying in the shadows.’ Not that good, Robin thought, thinking of curses in the dark, silver scattered across cobblestones. He said instead, ‘How many of you are there?’ ‘Can’t tell you.’ ‘Do you have a headquarters?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Will you show me where it is?’ Griffin laughed. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Last night.’ Griffin cast him a sideways look. ‘You helped us, without question. You didn’t even hesitate. Why?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Robin said truthfully. He’d asked himself this a thousand times. Why had he activated that bar? It wasn’t merely because the whole situation – the midnight hour, the moonlight glow – had been so dreamlike that rules and consequences seemed to disappear, or because the sight of his doppelgänger had made him doubt reality itself. He’d felt some deeper compulsion he couldn’t explain. ‘It just seemed right.’ ‘What, you didn’t realize you were helping a ring of thieves?’ ‘I knew you were thieves,’ Robin said. ‘I just . . . I didn’t think you were doing anything wrong.’ ‘I’d trust your instinct on that,’ said Griffin. ‘Trust me. Trust that we’re doing the right thing.’ ‘And what is the right thing?’ Robin asked. ‘In your view? What’s all this for?’ Griffin smiled. It was a peculiar, condescending smile, a mask of amusement that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Now you’re asking the right questions.’

‘Do you know what the majority of bars are used for in this country?’ Robin took a wild guess. ‘Doctors’ practices?’ ‘Ha. Adorable. No, they’re used for sitting room decorations. That’s right – alarm clocks that sound like real roosters, lights that dim and brighten on vocal demand, curtains that change colour throughout the day, that sort of thing. Because they’re fun, and because the British upper class can afford them, and whatever rich Britons want, they get.’ ‘Fine,’ said Robin. ‘But just because Babel sells bars to meet popular demand—’ Griffin cut him off. ‘Would you like to know the second and third largest sources of income at Babel?’ ‘Legal?’ ‘No. Militaries, both state and private,’ said Griffin. ‘And then slave traders. Legal makes pennies in comparison.’ ‘That’s . . . that’s impossible.’ ‘No, that’s just how the world works. Let me paint you a picture, brother. You’ve noticed by now that London sits at the centre of a vast empire that won’t stop growing. The single most important enabler of this growth is Babel. Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent the same way it hoards silver and uses them to produce translation magic that benefits England and England only. The vast majority of all silver bars in use in the world are in London. The newest, most powerful bars in use rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic to work, but you’ll count less than a thousand bars in the countries where those languages are widely spoken, and then only in the homes of the...

‘But how does this happen?’ he continued. ‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism. Ask yourself why the Literature Department only translates works into English and not the other way around, or what the interpreters are being sent abroad to do. Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire. Consider – Sir Horace Wilson, who’s the first endowed chair in Sanskrit in Oxford history, spends half his time conducting tutorials for Christian missionaries. ‘The point of it all is to keep amassing silver. We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward. And we enforce those trade deals with the very same silver bars, now inscribed with Babel’s work, that make our ships faster, our soldiers hardier, and our guns more deadly. It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world. ‘We are that outside force. Hermes. We funnel silver away to people, communities, and movements that deserve it. We aid slave revo...

‘That’s the thing about secret societies,’ said Griffin. ‘They’re easy to romanticize. You think it’s this long courting process – that you’ll be inducted, shown a whole new world, shown all the levers and people at play. If you’ve formed your only impression of secret societies from novels and penny dreadfuls, then you might expect rituals and passwords and secret meetings in abandoned warehouses. ‘But that’s not how things work, brother. This is not a penny dreadful. Real life is messy, scary, and uncertain.’ Griffin’s tone softened. ‘You should understand, what I’m asking you to do is very dangerous. People die over these bars – I’ve watched friends die over these bars. Babel would like to crush the life out of us, and you don’t want to know what happens to the Hermes members they catch. We exist because we’re decentralized. We don’t put all of our information in one place. So I can’t ask you to take your time reviewing all the information. I’m asking you to take a chance on a conviction.’ For the first time, Robin registered that Griffin was not as confident, not as intimidating as his rapid-fire speech made him sound. He stood, hands wedged in his pockets, shoulders hunched and shivering against the biting autumn wind. And he was so visibly nervous. He was twitching, fidgeting; his eyes darted over his shoulder every time he finished a sentence. Robin was confused, distressed, but Griffin was scared. ‘It’s got to be like this,’ Griffin insisted. ‘Minimal information. ...

He knew this would frustrate Griffin. But Robin was terrified. He felt he’d been led to the edge of a precipice and told, with no assurances, to jump. He felt as he had seven years ago, when Professor Lovell had slid a contract before him and calmly asked that he sign away his future. Only then he’d had nothing, so there had been nothing to lose. This time he had everything – food, clothing, shelter – and no guarantee of survival at the other end.

‘You get five days. There’s a lone birch in the Merton College gardens – you’ll know it when you see it. Scratch a cross in the trunk by Saturday if it’s a yes. Don’t bother if it’s a no.’

Robin found himself searching Professor Playfair’s face as he spoke. He was not sure what he was looking for. Some evidence of evil, perhaps. The cruel, selfish, lurking monster Griffin had sketched. But Professor Playfair seemed only a cheerful, beaming scholar, enamoured by the beauty of words. Indeed, in daylight, in the classroom, his brother’s grand conspiracies felt quite ridiculous.

‘Language does not exist as a nomenclature for a set of universal concepts,’ Professor Playfair went on. ‘If it did, then translation would not be a highly skilled profession – we would simply sit a class full of dewy-eyed freshers down with dictionaries and have the completed works of the Buddha on our shelves in no time. Instead, we have to learn to dance between that age-old dichotomy, helpfully elucidated by Cicero and Hieronymus: verbum e verbo and sensum e sensu. Can anyone—’ ‘Word for word,’ Letty said promptly. ‘And sense for sense.’ ‘Good,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘That is the dilemma. Do we take words as our unit of translation, or do we subordinate accuracy of individual words to the overall spirit of the text?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ said Letty. ‘Shouldn’t a faithful translation of individual words produce an equally faithful text?’ ‘It would,’ said Professor Playfair, ‘if, again, words existed in relation to each other in the same way in every language. But they do not. The words schlecht and schlimm both mean “bad” in German, but how do you know when to use one or the other? When do we use fleuve or rivière in French? How do we render the French esprit into English? We ought not merely translate each word on its own, but must rather evoke the sense of how they fit the whole of the passage. But how can that be done, if languages are indeed so different? These differences aren’t trivial, mind you – Erasmus wrote an entire treatise on why he rendered the Greek l...

Essay on Principles of Translation by Lord Alexander Fraser Tytler Woodhouselee

‘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.’ She spoke with such confident precision, Robin thought she must have been reading from the text. He was very impressed when he glanced over and saw her consulting nothing but blank space. Ramy, too, had this talent for perfect recall – Robin was beginning to feel a bit intimidated by his cohort. ‘Very good,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘This sounds basic enough. But what do we mean by the “style and manner” of the original? What does it mean for a composition to read “easily”? What audience do we have in mind when we make these claims? These are the questions we will tackle this term, and such fascinating questions they are.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘Allow me again to descend into theatrics by discussing our namesake, Babel – yes, dear students, I can’t quite escape the romanticism of this institution. Indulge me, please.’ His tone conveyed no regret at all. Professor Playfair loved this dramatic mysticism, these monologues that must have been rehearsed and perfected over years of teaching. But no one complained. They loved it too.

‘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. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some think French fulfils this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, might.’ ‘Oh, no, this one is easy,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s Syriac.’ ‘Very funny, Mr Mirza.’ Robin did not know if Ramy was indeed joking, but no one else made a comment. Professor Playfair ploughed ahead. ‘For me, however, it matters not what the Adamic language was, for it’s clear we have lost any access to it. We will never speak the divine language. But by amassing all the world’s languages under this roof, by collecting the full range of human expressions, or as near to it as we can get, we can try. We will never touch heaven from this mortal plane, but our confusion is not infinite. We can, through perfecting the arts of translation, achieve what humanity lost at Babel.’ Professor Playfair sighed, moved by his own performance. Robin thought he saw actual tears form in the corners of his eyes. ‘Magic.’ Professor Playfair pressed a hand against his chest. ‘What we are doing is magic. It won’t always feel that way – indeed, when you do tonight’s exercise, it’ll feel more like folding laundry than...

‘Professor, I was wondering if I could speak with you for—’ Professor Craft rose. ‘Class is over, Miss Price.’ ‘I know, but I wanted to ask you for a moment – if you have spare time – I mean, just as a woman at Oxford, I mean, there aren’t so many of us, and I hoped to hear your advice—’ Robin felt then he should stop listening, out of some vague sense of chivalry, but Professor Craft’s chilly voice cut through the air before he could reach the stairs. ‘Babel hardly discriminates against women. It’s simply that so few of our sex are interested in languages.’ ‘But you’re the only woman professor at Babel, and we all – that is, all the girls here and I – we think that’s quite admirable, so I wanted—’ ‘To know how it’s done? Hard work and innate brilliance. You know that already.’ ‘It’s different for women, though, and surely you’ve experienced—’ ‘When I have relevant topics for discussion, I will bring them up in class, Miss Price. But class is over. And you’re now infringing on my time.’

Professor Chakravarti began with questions so basic that Robin at first couldn’t see how they were worth answering, until he picked apart their implications and realized they were far beyond his scope of understanding. What was a word? What was the smallest possible unit of meaning, and why was that different from a word? Was a word different from a character? In what ways was Chinese speech different from Chinese writing? It was an odd exercise to analyse and dismantle a language he thought he knew like the back of his hand, to learn to classify words by ideogram or pictogram, and to memorize an entire vocabulary of new terms, most having to do with morphology or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him. Then came the harder questions. Which Chinese words could be traced back to recognizable pictures? Which couldn’t? Why was the character for ‘woman’ – 女 – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’? ‘I don’t know,’ Robin admitted. ‘Why is it? Are slavery and goodness both innately feminine?’ Professor Chakravarti shrugged. ‘I don’t know either. These are questions Richard and I are still trying to answer. We’re far from a satisfactory edition of the Chinese Grammatica, you see. When I was studying Chinese, I had no good Chinese-English resources – I had to make do with Abel-Rémusat’s Elémens de la grammaire chinoise and...

discursive

Professor Chakravarti’s fingers quickened against the wood. ‘Well, yes. But first there’s the matter of national loyalties. It’s no good recruiting scholars who might run home to the Qing government at any moment, you know. Second, Richard is of the opinion that . . . well. One requires a certain upbringing.’ ‘Like mine?’ ‘Like yours. Otherwise, Richard thinks . . .’ Professor Chakravarti was using this construction quite a lot, Robin noticed, ‘that the Chinese tend towards certain natural inclinations. Which is to say, he doesn’t think Chinese students would acclimatize well here.’ Lowly, uncivilized stock. ‘I see.’ ‘But that doesn’t mean you,’ Professor Chakravarti said quickly. ‘You’re raised properly, and all that. Wonderfully diligent, I don’t expect that will be a problem.’ ‘Yes.’ Robin swallowed. His throat felt very tight. ‘I’ve been very lucky.’

‘Who knows, except that Herodotus tells us so,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘There’s another good Herodotus story, again about Psammetichus. Psammetichus wanted to determine which language was the foundation of all earthly languages, so he gave two newborn infants to a shepherd with the instructions that they should not be allowed to hear human speech. For a while all they did was babble, as infants do. Then one day one of the infants stretched out his little hands to the shepherd and exclaimed bekos, which is the Phrygian word for bread. And so Psammetichus decided the Phrygians must have been the first race on earth, and Phrygian the first language. Pretty story, isn’t it?’

‘The issue is it’s impossible to isolate infants from an environment with language if you want them to develop as infants should. Might be interesting to buy a child and see – but, well, no.’ Professor Lovell tilted his head. ‘It’s fun to entertain the possibility of an original language, though.’

‘The Adamic language.’ Professor Lovell made a face. ‘I don’t know why he fills your minds with that stuff. It’s a pretty metaphor, certainly, but every few years we get an undergraduate who’s determined to discover the Adamic language in Proto-Indo-European, or otherwise wholly invent it on his own, and it always takes either a stern talking-to or a few weeks of failure for him to come back to his senses.’ ‘You don’t think that an original language exists?’ Robin asked. ‘Of course I don’t. The most devout Christians think it does, but you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’ He shook his head. ‘There are those who think that the Adamic language might be English – might become English – purely because the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors, but then we must also remember that it was barely a century ago that Voltaire declared that French was the universal language. That was, of course, before Waterloo. Webb and Leibniz once speculated that Chinese might, in fact, have once been universally intelligible due to its ideogrammatic nature, but Percy debunks this by arguing Chinese is a derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphs. My point being, these things are contingent. Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually....

‘Where do all those bars go? I mean, who buys them?’ Professor Lovell gave him a curious look. ‘To those who can afford them, of course.’ ‘But Britain is the only place where I’ve ever seen silver bars in wide use,’ said Robin. ‘They’re not nearly so popular in Canton, or, I’ve heard, in Calcutta. And it strikes me – I don’t know, it seems a bit strange that the British are the only ones who get to use them when the Chinese and Indians are contributing the crucial components of their functioning.’ ‘But that’s simple economics,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It takes a great deal of cash to purchase what we create. The British happen to be able to afford it. We have deals with Chinese and Indian merchants too, but they’re often less able to pay the export fees.’

‘Well, we can’t expend energy researching any frivolous application,’ Professor Lovell scoffed.

‘But language,’ said Professor Lovell, ‘is not like a commercial good, like tea or silks, to be bought and paid for. Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’ There was some logic in this, but the conclusion still made Robin uncomfortable. Surely things were not so simple; surely this still masked some unfair coercion or exploitation. But he could not formulate an objection, could not figure out where the fault in the argument lay. ‘The Qing Emperor has one of the largest silver reserves in the world,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘He has plenty of scholars. He even has linguists who understand English. So why doesn’t he fill his court with silver bars? Why is it that the Chinese, rich as their language is, have no grammars of their own?’ ‘It could be they don’t have the resources to get started,’ said Robin. ‘Then why should we just hand them to them?’ ‘But that’s not the point – the point is that they need it, so why doesn’t Babel send scholars abroad on exchange programmes? Why don’t we teach them how it’s done?’ ‘Could be that all nations hoard their most precious resources.’ ‘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 Trans...

‘This is waterlogged. I hope you didn’t pay him in full—’ ‘I paid nothing, Dick, do you think me a fool?’ ‘Well, after Macau—’ They fell into a heated discussion. Robin was entirely forgotten.

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. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to sort through them. But we haven’t finished, he wanted to tell his father. We were discussing my mother.

Then a patch of white caught his eye – a pale tree, surrounded by a cluster of mulberry bushes, trimmed to curl slightly upwards as if in adulation. A knob protruded from the white tree’s trunk; in the moonlight, it looked like a bald head. A crystal ball. As good a guess as any, Robin thought. He thought of his brother in his flapping raven’s cloak, brushing his fingers over this pale wood by moonlight. Griffin did love his theatrics. He wondered at the hot coil in his chest. The long, sobering walk had not dimmed his anger. He still felt ready to scream. Had dinner with his father infuriated him so? Was this the righteous indignation that Griffin spoke of? But what he felt was not as simple as revolutionary flame. What he felt in his heart was not conviction so much as doubt, resentment, and a deep confusion. 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. One nasty thought crept into his mind – It’s because you’re a wounded little boy, and you wish they had paid you more attention – but he pushed this away. Surely he could not be so petty; surely he was not merely lashing out at his father because he felt dismissed. He had seen and heard enough. He knew what Babel was at its roots, and he knew enough to trust his gut. He ran his finger over the wood. His nails would not do. A knife would have ...

Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet. The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth. CHARLES V

The note was in Chinese. Robin read it twice, then backwards, then forwards again, perplexed. Griffin seemed to have strung together characters utterly at random and the sentences did not make sense – no, they could not even be described as sentences, for although there was punctuation, the characters were arranged without care for grammar or syntax. This was a cipher, surely, but Griffin had not given Robin a key, and Robin could think of no literary allusions or subtle hints Griffin might have dropped to help him decode this nonsense. At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English. He ripped a sheet of paper from his diary, placed it next to Griffin’s note, and wrote out the romanization of each character. Some of the words took guesswork, since romanized Chinese words had very different spelling patterns to English words, but in the end, through working out several common change patterns – tè always meant ‘the’, ü was oo – Robin broke the code. The next rainy night. Open the door at precisely midnight, wait inside the foyer, then walk back out at five past. Speak to no one. Go straight home after. Do not deviate from my instructions. Memorize, then burn. Curt, direct, and minimally informative – just like Griffin. It rained constantly at Oxford. The next rainy night could be tomorrow. Robin read the note again and again until he’d committed th...

By half past eleven, the rain had announced its permanence. It was the kind of rain that sounded cold; even in the absence of vicious winds, snow, or hail, the very pattering against cobblestones felt like cubes of ice hammering against one’s skin. Robin saw now the reasoning behind Griffin’s instructions – on a night like this, you couldn’t see more than a few feet past your own nose, and even if you could, you wouldn’t care to look. Rain like this made you walk with your head down, shoulders hunched, indifferent to the world until you got to somewhere warm.

The punishing rainfall made the ten-minute walk up High Street feel like an eternity. Babel shone in the distance like a warm candle, each floor still fully lit as if it were the middle of the afternoon, though hardly any silhouettes were visible through the windows. Babel’s scholars worked round the clock, but most took their books home with them by nine or ten, and anyone still there at midnight was not likely to leave the tower until morning. When he reached the green, he paused and peered around. He saw no one. Griffin’s letter had been so vague; he didn’t know if he should wait until he glimpsed one of the Hermes operatives, or if he should go ahead and follow his orders precisely. Do not deviate from my instructions. The bells rang for midnight. He hurried up to the entrance, mouth dry, breathless. When he reached the stone steps, two figures materialized from the darkness – both black-clad youths whose faces he could not make out in the rain. ‘Go on,’ one of them whispered. ‘Hurry.’ Robin stepped up to the door. ‘Robin Swift,’ he said, softly but clearly. The wards recognized his blood. The lock clicked. Robin pulled the door open and paused for the briefest moment on the doorstep, just long enough for the figures behind him to slink into the tower. He never saw their faces. They dashed up the staircase like wraiths, quick and silent. Robin stood in the foyer, shivering as rain dripped down his forehead, watching the clock as the seconds ticked towards the five-minu...

gaol,

The study meeting turned out much livelier than expected. Robin, who was used to reading his translations out loud to Mr Chester, who drolly corrected him as he went, was not anticipating such hearty debate over turns of phrase, punctuation, or how much repetition was too much. It quickly became apparent they had drastically different translation styles. Letty, who was a stickler for grammatical structures that adhered to the Latin as much as possible, seemed ready to forgive the most astoundingly awkward manipulations of prose, while Ramy, her polar opposite, was always ready to abandon technical accuracy for rhetorical flourishes he insisted would better deliver the point, even when this meant insertion of completely novel clauses. Victoire seemed constantly frustrated with the limits of English – ‘It’s so awkward, French would suit this better’ – and Letty always vehemently agreed, which made Ramy snort, at which point the topic of Ovid was abandoned for a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars.

‘Feeling better?’ Ramy asked Robin when they adjourned. He was, actually. It felt good to sink into the refuge of a dead language, to fight a rhetorical war whose stakes could not really touch him. He was astonished by how ordinary the rest of the day felt, how calmly he could sit among his cohort as Professor Playfair lectured and pretend that Tytler was the foremost subject on his mind. In the light of day, the exploits of last night seemed a faraway dream. The tangible and solid consisted of Oxford, of coursework and professors and freshly baked scones and clotted cream. Still, he could not erase the lurking dread that this was all a cruel joke, that the curtains would come down any minute on this charade. For how could there not be some consequence? Such an act of betrayal – of stealing from Babel itself, the institution to which he’d literally given his blood – should surely have made this life impossible.

A new note awaited him under the windowsill when he returned home that night. He unfolded it with shaking hands. The message scrawled within was very brief, and this time Robin managed to decode it in his head. Await further contact. His disappointment confused him. Hadn’t he spent the day wishing he’d never been ensnared in this nightmare? He could just imagine Griffin’s mocking voice – What, did you want a pat on the back? A biscuit for a job well done? He now found himself hoping for more. But he had no way of knowing when he might hear from Griffin again. Griffin had warned Robin their contact would be sporadic, that entire terms might pass before he was in touch again. Robin would be summoned when he was needed, and no sooner. He found no note at his windowsill the next evening, or the evening after that. Days passed, and then weeks. You’re still a Babel student, Griffin had told him. Act like one. It turned out this was very easy to do. As the memories of Griffin and Hermes receded into the back of his mind, into nightmares and the dark, his life at Oxford and at Babel rose to the forefront in glaring, dazzling colour.

Robin discovered he and Victoire shared the same unabashed love of literature of all kinds from Gothic horrors to romances, and they took great pleasure in swapping and discussing the latest batch of penny dreadfuls brought in from London. And Letty, once she’d been persuaded the boys were indeed not too stupid to be at Oxford, became a great deal more tolerable. She turned out to possess both an acerbic wit and a keen understanding of the British class structure by virtue of her upbringing, which made for infinitely amusing commentary when it wasn’t aimed at either of them.

So it was Ramy, Letty, and Victoire who became such constant interlocutors that Robin started seeing Oxford through their eyes. Ramy would adore that purple scarf hanging in the window of Ede & Ravenscroft; Letty would laugh herself silly at the puppy-eyed young man sitting outside Queen’s Lane Coffeehouse with a book of sonnets; Victoire would be so excited that a new batch of scones had just been put out at Vaults & Garden but because she would be stuck in her French tutorial until noon, Robin absolutely had to buy one, wrap it up in his pocket, and save it for her for when class was let out. Even his course readings became more exciting when he began seeing them as source material for cutting observations, complaining or humorous, to be shared later with the group. They were not without their rifts. They argued endlessly, the way bright young people with well-fed egos and too many opinions do. Robin and Victoire had a long-running debate over the superiority of English versus French literature, wherein both were oddly, fiercely loyal to their adopted countries. Victoire insisted that England’s best theorists could not hold a candle to Voltaire or Diderot, and Robin would have given her the benefit of the doubt if only she didn’t keep scoffing at the translations he took out from the Bodleian on the grounds that ‘They’re nothing compared to the original, you might as well not read it at all.’ Victoire and Letty, though normally quite close, seemed to always get snippy on...

That night they were playing cards, not studying, because Professor Craft was in London for a conference, which meant they had the evening off. But the cards were soon forgotten because an intense stench of ripe pears suddenly pervaded the room and none of them could figure out what it was, because they hadn’t been eating pears, and because Victoire swore she didn’t have any stashed away in her room. Then Victoire was rolling on the ground, both laughing and shrieking because Letty kept screaming, ‘Where is the pear? Where is it, Victoire? Where is the pear?’ Ramy made a joke about the Spanish Inquisition, so Letty, playing along, ordered Victoire to turn out all her coat pockets to prove none of them concealed the core. Victoire obeyed but turned up nothing, which sent them into further shrieks of hysterics. And Robin sat at the table, watching them, smiling as he waited for the card game to resume until he realized that it wouldn’t because they were all laughing too much and, besides, Ramy’s cards were splayed across the floor face-up, so continuing was pointless. 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. A family. He felt a crush of guilt then for loving them, and Oxford, as much as he did. H...

All he knew was that Griffin had said his contribution aided a vaguely defined fight against empire, and all he could do was trust Griffin’s word.

‘Is he making you compare translations in class?’ Cathy asked. ‘Once he interrogated me for nearly half an hour over my word choice of red instead of apple-like. I’d nearly sweated through my shirt by the end.’

A week into Hilary term, Griffin had finally deigned to meet Robin again in person. Once more they strode briskly around Oxford, this time following the Thames down south towards Kennington. 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 I’m doing a good job?’ ‘You’re doing very well. I’m quite pleased.’ ‘So you’ll tell me more about Hermes now?’ Robin asked. ‘Or at least tell me where the bars are going? What you’re doing with them?’ Griffin chuckled. ‘Patience.’ They walked in silence for a stretch. There had been a storm just that morning. The Isis flowed fast and loud under a misty, darkening sky. It was the kind of evening when the world seemed drained of colour, a painting in progress, a sketch really, existing in greys and shadows only.

Robin was not sure how to feel about this. He often lulled himself into the fantasy of the post-Babel life – a cushy fellowship, if he wanted it; a guarantee of more fully funded years of study in those gorgeous libraries, living in comfortable college housing and tutoring rich undergraduates in Latin if he wanted extra pocket money; or an exciting career travelling overseas with the book buyers and simultaneous interpreters. In the Zhuangzi, which he’d just translated with Professor Chakravarti, 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. ‘You’ll remain at Babel as long as you’re able,’ said Griffin. ‘I mean, you ought to – heaven knows, we need more people on the inside. But it gets harder and harder, you see. You’ll find you can’t reconcile your sense of ethics with what they ask you to do. What happens when they direct you to military research? When they send you to the frontier in New Zealand, or the Cape Colony?’ ‘You can’t just avoid those assignments?’ Griffin laughed. ‘Military contracts compose over half of the work orders. They’re a necessary part of the tenure application. And they pay well too – most of the senior faculty got rich fighting Napoleon. How do you think dear old Dad’s able to maintain three houses? It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.’ ‘So then what?’ Robin asked. ‘How do I le...

‘Do you know how the Romans fattened up their dormice?’ Griffin asked. Robin sighed. ‘Griffin.’ ‘Your tutors had you read Varro, didn’t they? He describes a glirarium in the Res Rustica.* It’s quite an elegant contraption. You make a jar, only it’s perforated with holes so the dormice can breathe, and the surfaces are polished so smooth that escape is impossible. You put food in the hollows, and you make sure there are some ledges and walkways so the dormice don’t get too bored. Most importantly, you keep it dark, so the dormice always think it’s time to hibernate. All they do is sleep and fatten themselves up.’ ‘All right,’ Robin said impatiently. ‘All right. I get the picture.’ ‘I know it’s difficult,’ said Griffin. ‘It’s hard to give up the trappings of your station. You still love your stipend and scholar’s gowns and wine parties, I’m sure—’

‘No one’s asking you to leave Oxford. It’s not prudent, strategically speaking. See, I’m free, and I’m happy on the outside, but I also can’t get into the tower. We’re trapped in a symbiotic relationship with the levers of power. We need their silver. We need their tools. And, loath as we are to admit it, we benefit from their research.’ He gave Robin a shove. It was meant as a fraternal gesture, but neither of them was very practised at those, and it came off as more threatening than perhaps Griffin intended. ‘You do your reading and you stay on the inside. Don’t you worry about the contradiction. Your guilt is assuaged, for now. Enjoy your glirarium, little dormouse.’ Griffin left him at the corner of Woodstock. Robin watched his narrow frame disappear into the streets, his coat flapping around him like the wings of a giant bird, and wondered at how he could both admire and resent someone so much at the same time.

In Classical Chinese, the characters 二心 referred to disloyal or traitorous intentions; literally, they translated as ‘two hearts’. And Robin found himself in the impossible position of loving that which he betrayed, twice.

It was very nice to be among the Babblers, who were in many ways the most privileged group of students there. If they flaunted their Babel affiliation, they were allowed in any of the college libraries, including the absurdly gorgeous Codrington, which didn’t actually hold any reference materials they needed, but which they haunted regardless because its high walls and marble floors made them feel so very grand. All their living expenses were taken care of. Unlike the other servitors, they never had to serve food in hall or clean tutors’ rooms. Their room, board, and tuition were paid directly by Babel, so they never even saw the bill – on top of that, they received their stipend of twenty shillings a month, and were also given access to a discretionary fund they could use to purchase whatever course materials they liked. If they could make even the flimsiest case that a gold-capped fountain pen would aid their studies, then Babel paid for it.

Not only was Babel very rich, it was also respected. Theirs was by far the most prestigious faculty at Oxford. It was Babel that new undergraduates bragged about when showing their visiting relatives around campus.

They took much amusement in how visiting scholars, who either condescended to or ignored them in hall, started fawning and shaking their hands when they revealed they studied translation.