Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘But you don’t really believe that about Babel,’ Letty whispered. ‘Do you? It’s just not the same – they weren’t enslaving you –

‘Welcome to the Old Library.’ Anthony helped them out of the tunnel. ‘Durham College built this place in the fourteenth century as an overflow room for old books, then forgot about it when they secured funding to build a new library closer to the centre of town.’

Like Babel, the Old Library was much larger on the inside than its exterior suggested. From the outside, it looked as if it could contain a single lecture hall at most. Its interior, meanwhile, could have been the ground floor of the Radcliffe Library. Wooden bookshelves radiated from the centre, and more lined walls which looked, magically and contradictorily, circular. All the shelves were meticulously labelled, and a long yellowed parchment listing the classification system hung from the opposite wall. Near the front was a shelf boasting new arrivals, on which Robin recognized a few of the titles he’d snuck out for Griffin over the past few years.

‘We do security like Babel does. Everyone devises their own traps, and we don’t tell the others how it’s done. The best thing we have set up is the glamour – it keeps sound from escaping the building, which means no passerby can eavesdrop on our conversations.’

‘But this place is massive,’ said Ramy. ‘I mean, you’re not invisible – how on earth do you stay hidden?’ ‘Oldest trick in the world. We’re hidden in plain sight.’

The only things listed in that library on the catalogue were materials no one had used for decades, and which have more accessible duplicates in the Bodleian. So now we live on the edge of bureaucracy – everyone who walks past knows this is a storage library, but everyone assumes it belongs to some other, poorer college. These colleges are all too rich, you see. It makes them lose track of their holdings.’

The Hermes Society was not only a hotbed of Robin Hoods, as Griffin had led Robin to believe; it was also a research centre in its own right, though its projects had to be done in secret, with scant and stolen resources.*

‘What are you going to do with all this?’ asked Victoire. ‘You can’t publish, surely.’ ‘We’ve got partners at a few other translation centres,’ said Vimal. ‘We ship them work for review, sometimes.’

‘There are other translation centres?’ asked Robin. ‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s only recently that Babel achieved pre-eminence in linguistics and philology. It was the French who ran the show for most of the eighteenth century, and then the German Romanticists had their heyday for ...

A great extinction event began the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World. Spanish, Portuguese, French, English – they’ve been edging out regional languages and dialects like cuckoo chicks. I think it’s not inconceivable that one day, most of the world will speak only English.’ She sighed, looking up at the map.

‘But that would destroy silver-working,’ said Robin. ‘Wouldn’t it? It’d collapse the linguistic landscape. There would be nothing to translate. No differences to distort.’

‘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.’

Jardine & Matheson, meanwhile, have taken those hostilities as justification for war. They’re saying England must act now to defend her honour, or face humiliation in the East forever. Nice way to ruffle some nationalist feathers.

The lords of Parliament were still hesitant, uncertain about throwing the country’s resources at such a distant and unprecedented endeavour. The issue at hand, however, was silver. Defeating China would give the British Empire access to the greatest reserve of silver in the world, silver that would make their warships sail faster, their guns shoot further and more precisely. If Parliament did choose war, the future of the colonized world was unimaginable. Britain, flush with China’s riches, could enact any number of agendas towards Africa, Asia, and South America that until now had remained pipe dreams.

There’s a strong antiwar faction, headed by Sir James Graham, Viscount Mahon, and William Gladstone. And Gladstone’s a very good man to have on our side – he hates opium more than anyone; he’s got a sister who’s addicted to laudanum, I think.’

‘But there are internal politics at play too,’ Cathy explained. ‘The Melbourne ministry’s facing a political crisis at home. The Whigs have just barely survived a vote of no confidence, so now they’re walking an impossible tightrope between the Conservatives and Radicals, exacerbated by the fact that they’ve been weak in foreign trade in Mexico, Argentina, and Arabia—’

‘The bottom line is, the Radicals and their northern constituencies need a healthy overseas trade, and the Whigs need to keep their support to counterbalance the Tories. A show of force regarding the Opium Crisis is precisely the way to do that.

‘Our mission now, then, is to swing enough votes that the war proposal’s shot down.’

‘The lords are the decision-makers, yes, but a certain amount of pressure from the press and public can sway those still on the fence.

The trick is how to get the average Londoner worked up over a war they’re not likely to have ever heard of.’ ‘Appeal to their human nature and sympathy for the oppressed,’ said Letty.

‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’* said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’

In Chinese, the phrase huǒyàowèi* meant literally ‘the taste of gunpowder’; figuratively, ‘belligerence, combativeness’. His brother smelled of gunpowder.

‘Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’

She translated gökatta to “rising at dawn”, only in Swedish, gökatta has the particular meaning of waking up early to listen to the birds sing. There’s some music box mechanism inside, but the silver really imitates true birdsong.

‘There’s a Chinese idiom that catches the gist,’ said Robin. ‘Tùsĭhúbēi.* The rabbit dies, and the fox grieves, for they’re animals of a kind.’

The bar was inscribed with a classic Greek to Latin to English daisy-chain.

The Greek epitaphion meant ‘a funeral oration’ – something spoken, something meant to be heard; the Latin epitaphium, similarly, referred to a eulogy.

was only the modern English epitaph that referred to something written and silent. The distorted translat...

The Greek agōnia means a contest – originally, a sports gathering between athletes. It gained the connotation of suffering much later. But I’m translating from English back into the Greek, so the bar knows to induce suffering, not remove it.

‘Xiū,’ he whispered. ‘Heal.’ 修. To fix. Not merely to heal, but to repair, to patch over the damage; undo the wound with brute, mechanical reparation. The distortion was subtle, but it was there, it could work.

He found himself remembering in detail how Professor Craft had questioned why they kept translating χλωρός as ‘green’, when Homer had also applied it to fresh twigs, to honey, to faces pale with fright.

‘Wúxíng,’ he whispered. ‘Invisible.’

Letitia Price was not a wicked person. Harsh, perhaps. Cold, blunt, severe: all the words one might use to describe a girl who demanded from the world the same things a man would. But only because severity was the only way to make people take her seriously, because it was better to be feared and disliked than to be considered a sweet, pretty, stupid pet; and because academia respected steel, could tolerate cruelty, but could never accept weakness.

He turned it over, squinting. 燎. Liáo. Griffin had made this. Liáo, in Mandarin, could mean ‘to burn’ or ‘to illuminate’. It could also refer to a signal lamp. There was a second, smaller silver bar inscribed above the first. Bēacen, it read. It looked like Latin, but Robin, raking his memory, couldn’t come up with its precise meaning or origin.

‘You know, there’s a Chinese idiom that goes sǐ zhū bú pà kāi shuǐ tàng.* Dead pigs don’t fear scalding water.’

‘But madness is incoherent.’ Professor Craft frowned, glancing back and forth between the two of them. ‘And lies are self-serving. This story – it benefits no one, certainly not these two,’ she said, pointing at Robin and Victoire, ‘and it is coherent.’

the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo.

‘Polemikós,’ she murmured, holding a bar over the stack. ‘Polemic. Discutere. Discuss.’

‘The Combination of Workmen Act of 1825 suppresses the right to strike by trade unions and guilds.’ ‘We’re not a guild, though,’ said Robin. ‘Actually, we are,’ said Yusuf, who worked in Legal. ‘It’s in the founding documents. Babel alums and students comprise the Translators’ Guild by virtue of their institutional affiliation, so by holding a strike we are in violation of the law, if you want to get technical about it.’

‘What is resonance?’ Victoire demanded. ‘Up on the eighth floor,’ said Robin. ‘Let’s go, I’ll show you. It’s how the distant bars are maintained, the ones that aren’t made for endurance. The centre to the periphery. If we remove the centre, then surely they’ll begin to fail,

‘This is how Babel was designed to work,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘We made the city as reliant on the Institute as possible. We designed bars to last for only several weeks instead of months, because maintenance appointments bring in money. This is the cost of inflating prices and artificially creating demand. It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.’

The word speed in modern English was specific to a sense of rapidity, but as a number of common phrases – Godspeed, good speed to you – proved, the root meaning, deriving with the Latin spēs, meaning ‘to hope’, was associated with good fortune and success, with the broader sense of seeking one’s destination, of crossing great distances to reach one’s goal. Speed-based match-pairs using Latin, or in rare cases Old Slavic, allowed carriages to travel more quickly without risk of accident.

For years, Royal Mail couriers with particularly heavy loads had been using bars engraved with the French-English match-pair parcelle-parcel. Both French and English had once used parcel to refer to pieces of land that made up an estate, but when it evolved to imply an item of business in both, it retained its connotation of small fragmentariness in French, whereas in English it simply meant a package. Fixing this bar to the postal carriage made the parcels seem a fraction of their true weight.

Professor Chakravarti came panting down the stairs, bearing a silver bar that read विभाजित.* ‘Sanskrit,’ he explained. ‘It’ll split them.’

the Chinese character 利 (lì) could mean to sharpen one’s weapon, though it also carried connotations of profit and advantage, and its logogram represented grain being cut with a knife. Knives sharpened with the 利-sharp match-pair had frightfully thin blades, and unerringly found their targets.

Silver afforded London all of its modern conveniences. Silver powered the ice-making machines in the kitchens of London’s rich.

Silver powered the engines of the breweries which supplied London’s pubs, and the mills which produced London’s flour.

Without silver, the locomotives would cease to run. No new railways could be built. The water would run foul; the air would thicken with grime. When all the machines that mechanized the processes of spinning, weaving, carding, and roving ground to a halt, Britain’s textile industry would wholly collapse. The entire country faced possible starvation, for there was silver in the p...

The architect Augustus Pugin was a frequent collaborator of Babel’s faculty, and had made great use of silver bars in his recent projects – Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, the Alton Towers renovation, and most notably, the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire. According to the work-order ledgers, all these buildings would fail by the end of the year. Sooner, if the right rods were pulled away.

A dozen carriages in London’s richer neighbourhoods had made use of a match-pair by Professor Lovell that played on the Chinese character 輔 (fǔ), which meant ‘to help’ or ‘to assist’. The character had originally referred to the protective sidebars on a carriage.