Babel

by R.F. Kuang

The lifeblood of London carried a sharp, tinny timbre wholly unlike the rickety, clacking bamboo that underwrote Canton. It was artificial, metallic – the sound of a knife screeching across a sharpening steel; it was the monstrous industrial labyrinth of William Blake’s ‘cruel Works / Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other’.*

London had accumulated the lion’s share of both the world’s silver ore and the world’s languages, and the result was a city that was bigger, heavier, faster, and brighter than nature allowed. London was voracious, was growing fat on its spoils and still, somehow, starved.

what do I need Latin and Greek for?’ Professor Lovell chuckled. ‘To understand English.’ ‘But I know English.’ ‘Not as well as you think you do. Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.

I think the Literature Department are an indulgent lot, as Vimal knows. See, the sad thing is, they could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they’re the ones who really understand languages – know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase. But they’re too obsessed fiddling with their lovely images to bother with how all that living energy might be channelled into something far more powerful. I mean, of course, silver.’

I like to think that it was blessed by the gods – it’s refined with mercury, after all, and Mercury is the messenger god, no? Mercury, Hermes. Does silver not then have an inextricable link to hermeneutics? But let’s not get too romantic. No, the power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing – the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.’

Consider the Heinrich Heine poem “Ein Fichtenbaum”. It’s short, and its message is quite easy to grasp. A pine tree, longing for a palm tree, represents a man’s desire for a woman. Yet translating it into English has been devilishly tricky, because English doesn’t have genders like German does. So there’s no way to convey the binary opposition between the masculine ein Fichtenbaum and the feminine einer Palme. You see? So we must proceed from the starting assumption that distortion is inevitable. The question is how to distort with deliberation.’

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

But I also think that as languages evolve, as their speakers become more worldly and sophisticated, as they gorge on other concepts and swell and morph to encompass more over time – we approach something close to that language. There’s less room for misunderstanding.

Is it more complete or more distorted? "engorged. swelling. morphing." Sounds like deformation, a loss of meaning and boundary and beauty.

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.

He didn’t care for any of these boys’ approval at all. The truth of this encounter hit him with such clarity that he nearly laughed out loud. They were not appraising him for membership. They were trying to impress him – and by impressing him, to display their own superiority, to prove that to be a Babbler was not as good as being one of Elton Pendennis’s friends. But Robin was not impressed. Was this the pinnacle of Oxford society? This? He felt a profuse pity for them – these boys who considered themselves aesthetes, who thought their lives were as rarefied as the examined life could be. But they would never engrave a word in a silver bar and feel the weight of its meaning reverberate in their fingers. They would never change the fabric of the world by simply wishing it.

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’ ‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’ ‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’ ‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly. ‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘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?’

‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’