Babel

by R.F. Kuang

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.

Robin had never been taught the fundamentals of grammar – he knew what worked in English because it sounded right – and so in learning Latin, he learned the basic parts of language itself.

Ramy gesticulated wildly as he spoke. It was clear he wasn’t truly angry, just passionate and clearly brilliant, so invested in the truth he needed the whole world to know.

live interpretation isn’t considered all that glamorous, because all that really matters is that you get your basic points across without offending anyone. You don’t get to play around with the intricacies of language, which is of course where the real fun is.’

He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

It was all such frippery, fluff, trivial distractions built over a foundation of ongoing, unimaginable cruelty.

She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges. She approached language with a determined, mathematical rigour, and she broke down the thorniest of Latin constructions through sheer force of will.

‘I want to believe in the future we’re fighting for, but it’s not there, it’s just not there, and I can’t take things day by day when I’m too horrified by the thought of tomorrow. I’m underwater. And I’ve been underwater for so long, and I wanted a way out, but couldn’t find one that didn’t feel like some – some great abdication of responsibility. But this – this is my way out.’

‘I want to live,’ she repeated, ‘and live, and thrive, and survive them. I want a future. I don’t think death is a reprieve. I think it’s – it’s just the end. It forecloses everything – a future where I might be happy, and free. And it’s not about being brave. It’s about wanting another chance. Even if all I did was run away, even if I never lifted a finger to help anyone else as long as I lived – at least I would get to be happy. At least the world might be all right, just for a day, just for me. Is that selfish?’

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.

‘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.’

But survival demands severing the cord. Survival demands she look only to the future. Who knows what will happen now? What happened in Oxford today is unthinkable, its ramifications unimaginable. There is no historical precedent for this. The juncture is shot. History, for once, is fluid.

Victoire had grown up in the great contradiction of France, whose citizens in 1789 had issued a declaration of the rights of man but had not abolished slavery, and had preserved the right to property including chattel.