Babel

by R.F. Kuang

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

‘Every language is complex in its own way.

‘Languages are easier to forget than you imagine,’ he said. ‘Once you stop living in the world of Chinese, you stop thinking in Chinese.’

That marked the difference between them. Ever since his arrival in London, Robin had tried to keep his head down and assimilate, to play down his otherness. He thought the more unremarkable he seemed, the less attention he would draw. But Ramy, who had no choice but to stand out, had decided he might as well dazzle.

By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them.

‘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.

So you see, 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

author’s ideology and biases. After all, the Latin translatio means “to carry across”. Translation involves a spatial dimension – a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered like spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tearooms of today’s Britain.

But never forget the audacity of what you are attempting. Never forget that you are defying a curse laid by God.’

The language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable, and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more. But what do we know of thought and feeling except as expressed through language?’

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.

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?’

Robin and his cohort, though, did what scholars always did, which was to bend their heads over their books and focus solely on their research.

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

Pamphlets. They’d thought they could win this with pamphlets. He almost laughed at the absurdity. Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus

great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. But I don’t want to die, Robin.’ Her throat hitched.

The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.

For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.’ ‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘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.’