Babel

by R.F. Kuang

For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be p...

‘What’s this?’ ‘That’s a bannock, dear,’ said Mrs Piper. ‘Scone,’ corrected Professor Lovell.

‘The scones are the pieces,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The bannock is the entire cake.’

‘Now look here, this is a bannock, and all the itty pieces are bannocks as well. Scones are those dry, crumbly things you English love to shove in your mouths—’

‘Why’s it – why are they – called bannocks?’ Robin asked. The sound of the word made him imagine a monster of the hills, some clawed and gristly thing that wouldn’t be satisfied unless given a sacrifice of bread.

‘Because of Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Bannock comes from panicium, meaning “baked bread”.’

‘Translation is no easy occupation, Robin. It demands focus. Discipline.

Laziness and deceit are common traits among your kind. This is why China remains an indolent and backwards country while her neighbours hurtle towards progress.

You are, by nature, foolish, weak-minded, and disinclined to hard work. You must resist these traits, Robin. You must learn to overcome the pollution of your blood.

Canton meant poverty, insignificance, and ignorance. Canton meant the plague. Canton meant no more books. London meant all the material comforts he could ask for. London meant, someday, Oxford.

In Latin, he read through Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, and Juvenal; in Greek, he tackled Xenophon, Homer, Lysias, and Plato.

In time, he realized he was quite good at languages. His memory was strong, and he had a knack for tones and rhythm. He soon reached a level of fluency in both Greek and Latin that any Oxford undergraduate would have been jealous of.

History, meanwhile, marched on around them. In 1830, King George IV had died and was succeeded by his younger brother, William IV, the eternal compromiser who pleased no one.

In 1831, another cholera epidemic swept through London, leaving thirty thousand dead in its wake. The brunt of its impact fell on the poor and the destitute; those living in close, cramped quarters who could not escape each other’s tainted miasmas.

In 1833, a momentous thing happened – slavery was abolished in England and its colonies, to be replaced by a six-year apprenticeship term as a transition to freedom.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.) ‘With your eyes like that – can you see everything? Or is it only in little slits?’

Back in Calcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim from Bengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He owns property in London.

‘Does Mirza really mean “prince”?’ Robin asked, after he’d overheard Ramy declare this to a shopkeeper for the third time. ‘Sure. Well, really, it’s a title – it’s derived from the Persian Amīrzādeh, but “prince” comes close enough.’

Colin Thornhill, a wide-eyed and effusive solicitor-in-training who talked only in full paragraphs and about himself;

Bill Jameson, an affable redhead studying to be a surgeon who seemed perpetually worried about how much things cost; and at the end of the hall, a pair of twin brothers, Edgar and Edward Sharp, who were second years nominally pursuing an education in the Classics but who, as they loudly proclaimed, were more ‘just interested in the social aspect until we come into our inheritances.’

‘You’re Babblers, aren’t you? I heard all Babblers are on scholarships.’ ‘Babblers?’ Robin repeated. It was the first time he’d heard the term. ‘The Translation Institute,’

They ended the day with a tour of University College by Billings, a senior porter. It turned out that thus far they had seen only a small corner of their new home.

The college, which lay just to the east of the houses on Magpie Lane, boasted two green quadrangle courtyards and an arrangement of stone buildings that resembled castle keeps.

The bas-relief was a memorial to the University College alum and widely recognized genius who in 1786 published a foundational text identifying Proto-Indo-European as a predecessor language linking Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek.

Wúxíng – in Chinese, ‘formless, shapeless, incorporeal’.* The closest English translation was ‘invisible’.

‘Help me,’ he begged. Then in Chinese, ‘Bāngmáng.’

‘Wúxíng,’ Robin said, thinking of the myths his mother had told him, of spirits and ghosts hiding in the dark. Of shapelessness, of nonbeing. ‘Invisible.’

No, disappeared was not quite the word for it. Robin didn’t have the words for it; it was lost in translation, a concept that neither the Chinese nor the English could fully describe. They existed, but in no human form. They were not merely beings that couldn’t be seen. They weren’t beings at all. They were shapeless. They drifted, expanded; they were the air, the brick walls, the cobblestones. Robin had no awareness of his body, where he ended and the bar began – he was the silver, the stones, the night.

It was a magnificent building – a gleaming white edifice built in the neoclassical style, eight storeys tall and ringed with ornamental pillars and high stained-glass windows. It dominated the skyline of High Street, and made the nearby Radcliffe Library and University Church of St Mary the Virgin look quite pathetic in comparison.

‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ Anthony sighed with satisfaction. ‘You never get used to the sight. Welcome to your home for the next four years, believe it or not. We call it Babel.’

‘Babel,’ Robin repeated. ‘Is that why—?’ ‘Why they call us Babblers?’ Anthony nodded. ‘A joke as old as the Institute itself. But some first year at Balliol thinks he conceived it for the first time every September, and so we’ve been doomed to that unwieldy moniker for decades.’

Dominus illuminatio mea, it read. The Lord is my light.

‘Translation agencies have always been indispensable tools of – nay, the centres of – great civilizations. In 1527, Charles V of Spain created the Secretaría de Interpretación de Lenguas, whose employees juggled over a dozen languages in service of governing his empire’s territories.

The Royal Institute of Translation was founded in London in the early seventeenth century, though it didn’t move to its current home in Oxford until 1715 and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, after which the British decided it might be prudent to train young lads to speak the languages of the colonies the Spanish had just lost.

‘There’s eight floors to Babel,’ he said. ‘The Book of Jubilees claims the historical Tower of Babel reached a height of over five thousand cubits – that’s nearly two miles – which is of course impossible, though our Babel is the tallest building in Oxford, and likely all of England, excepting St Paul’s. We’re nearly three hundred feet tall, not counting the basement, which means our total height is twice that of the Radcliffe Library—’

Babel’s exterior was massive, but it still did not appear tall enough to admit the high ceilings and towering shelves of each interior floor.

‘We’re in the lobby now – all business gets conducted here. Local tradesmen ordering bars for their equipment, city officials requesting public works maintenance, that sort of thing. It’s the only area of the tower accessible to civilians, though they don’t interact with scholars much

The second floor was the Legal Department, which was full of dour-faced scholars scratching at paper and flipping through thick, musty reference volumes.

‘International treaties, overseas trade, that sort of thing. The gears of empire, the stuff that makes the world go round. Most Babel students end up here after graduation, as the pay is good and they’re always hiring. They do quite a lot of pro bono work here, too – the whole southwest quadrant is a team working on translating the Code Napoléon into other European languages.* But we charge a pretty penny for the rest. This is the floor that draws the largest income – except silver-working, of course.’

‘Where’s silver-working?’ Victoire asked. ‘Eighth floor. Up at the very top.’ ‘For the view?’ Letty asked. ‘For the fires,’ said Anthony. ‘When fires start you’d rather they be at the to...

‘The third floor is the landing base for the live interpreters.’ He gestured around the largely empty room, which showed few signs of use except for several stained teacups lying askew and the occasional stack of paper on a desk corner.

‘They’re almost never here, but they need a place to prepare briefing files in confidence when they are, so they get this entire space. They accompany dignitaries and foreign service officials on their trips abroad, attending balls in Russia and taking tea with sheikhs in Arabia and whatnot. I’m told all the travel gets quite exhausting, so there aren’t too many career interpreters who come out of Babel. They’re usually natural polyglots who picked up their languages elsewhere – they had missionary parents, or they spent summers with foreign relatives, for example. Babel graduates tend to avoid it.’

‘Why?’ Ramy asked. ‘It sounds fun.’ ‘It’s a cushy posting if what you want is to travel abroad on someone else’s money,’ said Anthony. ‘But academics by nature are a solitary, sedentary lot. Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to ...

Alums who apply for interpreting jobs always quit within the first two years. Even Sterling Jones – Sir William Jones’s nephew, mind you – couldn’t hack it for more than eight months, and they had him travelling first class wherever he went. Anyway, 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.’

The fourth floor was a good deal busier than the third. The scholars also appeared to be younger: messy-haired and patch-sleeved types compared with the polished, well-dressed folks in Legal.

‘Literature,’ Anthony explained. ‘That is, the businesses of translating foreign novels, stories, and poems into English and – less frequently – vice versa. It’s a bit low on the prestige rung, to be honest, but it’s a more coveted placement than interpretation. One considers a postgraduation appoin...

‘Does everyone here introduce themselves with their languages?’ Ramy asked. ‘Of course,’ Vimal said. ‘Your languages determine how interesting you are. Orientalists are fascinating. Classicists are dull. Anyhow, welcome to the best floor in the tower.’

‘You’ll find our book-buying budget is effectively limitless, and our librarians like to maintain a thorough collection. Though we can’t translate everything that comes through here; we just haven’t the manpower.

Translating ancient texts still occupies a good part of our time.’

‘Bettering one’s understanding of the human condition is not a matter of profit.’ Vimal sniffed. ‘We’re always updating the classics – between the past century and now, we’ve become a lot better at certain languages, and there’s no reason why classics should remain so inaccessible. I’m currently working on a better Latin version of the Bhagavad Gita—’