Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘Over ten years ago,’ Vimal dismissed. ‘And the Schlegel Gita is dreadful; he said himself that he hadn’t grasped the basic philosophy that underlies the whole thing. Which shows, because he’s used about seven different words for yoga—’

‘that’s Literature. One of the worst applications of a Babel education, if you ask me.’

‘I’m here for silver-working. 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.’

The fifth and sixth floors housed both instruction rooms and reference materials – the primers, grammars, readers, thesauruses, and at least four different editions of every dictionary published in what Anthony claimed was every language spoken in the world. ‘Well, the dictionaries are really scattered all over the tower, but here’s where you come if you need to do some archival heavy lifting,’ Anthony explained. ‘Right in the middle, you see, so no one ever has to walk more than four flights to get what they need.’ In the centre of the sixth floor, a series of red-bound books sat on crimson velvet cloth beneath a glass display case. The way the soft lamplight gleamed against their leather covers made them look quite magical – more like magicians’ grimoires than common reference materials.

‘These are the Grammaticas,’ said Anthony. ‘They look impressive, but it’s all right, you can touch. They’re meant to be consulted. Just ...

The Grammaticas were bound volumes of varying thicknesses but identical binding, arranged alphabetically by the Romanized name of the language and by publication date within those languages. Some Grammatica sets – notably the European languages – took up entire display cases on the...

The Chinese Grammaticas spanned only three volumes; the Japanese and Korean Grammaticas contained only one volume each. Tagalog,...

‘All of that translation work was done by the Spanish; that’s why you’ll also see Spanish-to-English translator credits behind the cover pages. And a good deal of the Caribbean and South Asian ...

Those languages weren’t of interest at Babel until after the Peace of Paris, which of course dumped a great deal of territor...

Nathaniel Halhed had written the Bengali Grammatica, Sir William Jones the Sanskrit Grammatica.

This was a pattern, Robin noticed – the initial authors all tended to be white British men rather than native speakers of those languages.

‘It’s only recently that we’ve done much in Oriental languages at all,’ said Anthony. ‘We were lagging behind the French there for quite a while. Sir William Jones made some headway introducing Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian to the courses lists when he was a fellow here – he started the Persian Grammatica in 177...

‘Then Richard Lovell joined the faculty,’ said Anthony. ‘I hear he’s something like a genius with Far Eastern languages. He’s contributed two volumes to the Chinese Grammatica alone.’

‘Why are these under display cases?’ asked Victoire. ‘Seems rather difficult to take them out.’ ‘Because these are the only editions in Oxford,’ said Anthony. ‘There are backups at Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Foreign Offices in London. Those are updated annually to account for new findings. But these are the only comprehensive, authoritative collections of knowledge of every language that exist. New work is added by hand, you’ll notice – it costs too much to reprint every time new additions are made, and besides, our printing presses can’t handle that many foreign scripts.’

‘The Grammaticas are better protected than the Princess Victoria. These books are impervious to fire, flood, and attempted removal by anyone who isn’t in the Institute register. If anyone tried to steal or damage one of these, they’d be struck by an unseen force so powerful they’d lose all sense of self and purpose until the police arrived.’

‘There’s more silver in these walls than in the vaults of the Bank of England.’ ‘Truly?’ Letty asked. ‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel is one of the richest places in the entire country.

The eighth floor was the only part of Babel that lay hidden behind doors and walls. The other seven were designed following an open floor plan, with no barriers surrounding the staircase, but the stairs to the eighth floor led to a brick hallway which in turn led to a heavy wooden door.

‘Fire barrier,’ Anthony explained. ‘In case of accidents. Seals off the rest of the building so that the Grammaticas don’t get burnt if something up here explodes.’ He leaned his weight against the door and pushed.

The eighth floor looked more like a workshop than a research library. Scholars stood bent around worktables like mechanics, holding assortments of engraving tools to silver bars of all shapes and sizes. Whirring, humming, drilling sounds filled the air. Something exploded near the window, causing a sh...

‘I’m Professor Jerome Playfair, chair of the faculty. I dabble in French and Italian, but my first love is German.

Once you know what happens in the tower, the mundane world doesn’t seem half as interesting.’

Now, we know this following story from Herodotus.’

‘He tells us of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who once formed a pact with Ionian sea raiders to defeat the eleven kings who had betrayed him. After he had overthrown his enemies, he gave large tracts of land to his Ionian allies. But Psammetichus wanted an even better guarantee that the Ionians would not turn on him as his former allies once had. He wanted to prevent wars based on misunderstandings. So he sent young Egyptian boys to live with the Ionians and learn Greek so that when they grew up, they could serve as interpreters between the two peoples. ‘Here at Babel, we take inspiration from Psammetichus.’ He peered around, and his sparkling gaze landed on each of them in turn as he spoke.

‘Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between for...

Babel alone among the Oxford faculties accepts students not of European origin. Nowhere else in this country will you find Hindus, Muslims, Africans, and Chinamen studying under the same roof. We accept yo...

‘Because of your origins, you have the gift of languages those born in England cannot imitate. And you, like Psammetichus’s boys, are the tongues that will spea...

There is indeed something special about silver that makes it an ideal vehicle for what we do. 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.’

‘Heimlich. German for the secret and clandestine, which is how I’ll translate it to English. But heimlich means more than just secrets. We derive heimlich from a Proto-Germanic word that means “home”. Put together this constellation of meaning, and what do you get? Something like the secret, private feeling you get from being somewhere you belong, secluded from the outside world.’

As he spoke, he wrote the word clandestine on the flip side of the bar. The moment he finished, the silver began to vibrate. ‘Heimlich,’ he said. ‘Clandestine.’ Once again Robin heard a singing without a source, an inhuman voice from nowhere. The world shifted. Something bound them – some intangible barrier blurred the air around them, drowned out the surrounding noise, made it feel as though they were the only ones on a floor they knew was crowded with scholars. They were safe here. They were alone. This was their tower, their refuge.*

They were no strangers to this magic. They had all seen silver-work in effect before; in England it was impossible to avoid. But it was one thing to know the bars could work, that silver-work was simply the foundation of a functioning, advanced society. It was another thing to witness with their own eyes the warping of reality, the way wo...

‘Babel sees more robbery attempts than all of the banks in London combined. The doors keep most of the riffraff out, but the wards need some way to distinguish scholars from intruders. We’ve tried hair and fingernails, but they’re too easy to steal.’ ‘Thieves can steal blood,’ said Ramy. ‘They can,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘But they’d have to be much more determined about the whole endeavour, wouldn’t they?’

‘Now you’re part of the tower,’ Professor Playfair told them as he locked the drawers. ‘Now the tower knows you.’ Ramy made a face. ‘Bit creepy, isn’t it?’ ‘Not at all,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘You’re in the place where magic is made. It’s got all the trappings of a modern university, but at its heart, Babel isn’t so different from the alchemists’ lairs of old. But unlike the alchemists, we’ve actually figured out the key to the transformation of a thing. It’s not in the material substance. It’s in the name.’

Babel shared a buttery in the Radcliffe quadrangle with several other humanities faculties. The

‘it’s very irritating, actually, the way everyone wants to equate India with Hinduism. “Oh, Muslim rule is an aberration, an intrusion; the Mughals just interlopers, but tradition – that’s Sanskrit, that’s the Upanishads.”’

Babel, apparently, always anointed its chosen ones at a young age. Letty, who was from down south in Brighton, had dazzled family friends with her prodigious memory ever since she could speak; one such friend, who knew some Oxford dons, secured her a set of tutors and had her drilled in French, German, Latin, and Greek until she was old enough to matriculate. ‘Though I almost didn’t make it.’ Letty blinked, eyelashes fluttering madly. ‘Father said he’d never pay for a woman’s education, so I’m grateful for the scholarship. I had to sell a set of bracelets to pay for the coach fare up.’ Victoire, like Robin and Ramy, had come to Europe with a guardian. ‘Paris,’ she clarified. ‘He was a Frenchman, but he had acquaintances at the Institute, and he was going to write to them when I was old enough. Only then he died, and for a while I wasn’t sure I’d get to come.’ Her voice faltered a bit. She took a sip of tea. ‘But I managed to get in touch with them, and they arranged to bring me over,’ she concluded vaguely.

One thing united them all – without Babel, they had nowhere in this country to go. They’d been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand, and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom; they did not want to give them back.

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.

‘You’re Robin Swift,’ said the man. ‘You grew up without a father but with an inexplicable English nursemaid and a never-ending supply of books in English, and when Professor Lovell turned up to carry you off to England, you said farewell to your motherland for good. You think the professor might be your father, but he hasn’t admitted that you are his own. You’re quite sure he never will.

‘My name,’ said his doppelgänger, ‘is Griffin Lovell.’ Upon closer inspection, he and Robin were not so alike after all. He was several years older, and his face bore a hard maturity that Robin’s hadn’t yet acquired. His voice was deeper, less forgiving, more assertive. He was several inches taller than Robin, though he was also much thinner; indeed, he appeared composed entirely of sharp edges and angles. His hair was darker, his skin paler. He looked like a print illustration of Robin, the lighting contrasts amplified and the colour blanched out.

Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent the same way it hoards silver and uses them to produce translation magic that benefits England and England only. The vast majority of all silver bars in use in the world are in London. The newest, most powerful bars in use rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic to work, but you’ll count less than a thousand bars in the countries where those languages are widely spoken, and then only in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. And that’s wrong. That’s predatory. That’s fundamentally unjust.’

This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources.

The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism.

Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire. Consider – Sir Horace Wilson, who’s the first endowed chair in Sanskrit in Oxford history, spends half his time conducting tutorials for Christian missionaries.

‘The point of it all is to keep amassing silver. We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward. And we enforce those trade deals with the very same silver bars, now inscribed with Babel’s work, that make our ships faster, our soldiers hardier, and our guns more deadly. It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world.

‘We are that outside force. Hermes. We funnel silver away to people, communities, and movements that deserve it. We aid slave revolts. Resistance movements. We melt down silver bars made for cleaning doilies and use them to cure disease instead.’ Griffin slowed ...

‘That’s the thing about secret societies,’ said Griffin. ‘They’re easy to romanticize. You think it’s this long courting process – that you’ll be inducted, shown a whole new world, shown all the levers and people at play. If you’ve formed your only impression of secret societies from novels and penny dreadfuls, then you might expect rituals and passwords and secret meetings in abandoned warehouses.

‘But that’s not how things work, brother. This is not a penny dreadful. Real life is messy, scary, and uncertain.’

Babel would like to crush the life out of us, and you don’t want to know what happens to the Hermes members they catch. We exist because we’re decentralized. We don’t put all of our information in one place.

‘One more thing. Where do you live?’ ‘Hm? Univ – we’re all at University College.’ ‘I know that. What room?’ ‘Oh.’ Robin blushed. ‘Number four, Magpie Lane, room seven. The house with the green roof. I’m in the corner. With the sloping windows facing Oriel chapel.’ ‘I know it.’ The sun had long set. Robin could no longer see Griffin’s face, half-hidden in shadow. ‘That used to be my room.’

Consider how tricky it is merely to say the word hello. Hello seems so easy! Bonjour. Ciao. Hallo. And on and on. But then say we are translating from Italian into English.