Babel

by R.F. Kuang

In Italian, ciao can be used upon greeting or upon parting – it does not specify either, it simply marks etiquette at the point of contact. It is derived from the Venetian s-ciào vostro, meaning something akin to “your obedient servant”. But I digress. The point is, when we bring ciao into English – if we are translating a scene where the characters disperse, for example – we must impose that ciao has been said as goodbye. Sometimes this is obvious from context, but sometimes not – sometimes we must add new words in our translation. So already things are complicated, and we haven’t moved past hello.

The Swiss philologist Johann Breitinger, who claimed that languages were merely “collections of totally equivalent words and locutions which are interchangeable, and which fully correspond to each other in meaning”, was dreadfully wrong.

Language is not like maths. And even maths differs depending on the language

‘Language does not exist as a nomenclature for a set of universal concepts,’ Professor Playfair went on. ‘If it did, then translation would not be a highly skilled profession – we would simply sit a class full of dewy-eyed freshers down with dictionaries and have the completed works of the Buddha on our shelves in no time.

Instead, we have to learn to dance between that age-old dichotomy, helpfully elucidated by Cicero and Hieronymus: verbum e verbo and sensum e sensu.

‘Word for word,’ Letty said promptly. ‘And se...

‘That is the dilemma. Do we take words as our unit of translation, or do we subordinate accuracy of individual words to the overall spirit of the text?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ said Letty. ‘Shouldn’t a faithful translation of individual words produce an equally faithful text?’ ‘It would,’ said Professor Playfair, ‘if, again, words existed in relation to each other in the same way in every language. But they do not. The words schlecht and schlimm bot...

These differences aren’t trivial, mind you – Erasmus wrote an entire treatise on why he rendered the Greek logos into the Latin sermo in his translation of the New Testament. Translating word-for-word is simply inadequate.’

‘That servile path thou nobly dost decline,’ Ramy recited, ‘of tracing word by word, and line by line.’ ‘Those are the laboured births of slavish brains, not the effect of poetry, but pains,’ Professor Playfair finished. ‘John Denham.

So you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases. After all, the Latin translatio means “to carry across”. Translation involves a spatial dimension – a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered like spices from an alien land. Words...

If translation were only a matter of finding the right themes, the right general ideas, then theoretically we could eventually make our meaning clear, couldn’t we? But something gets in the way – syntax, grammar, morphology and orthography, all the things that form the bones of a language. 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 ...

So there’s no way to convey the binary opposition between the masculine ein Fichtenbaum an...

So we must proceed from the starting assumption that distortion is inevitable. The question is how t...

‘First, that the translation conveys a complete and accurate idea of the original,’ said Victoire. ‘Second, that the translation mirrors the style and manner of writing of the original. And third, that the translation should read with all the ease of the original composition.’

is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth.

‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content.

Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some think French fulfils this role; s...

‘Oh, no, this one is easy,’ said Ramy. ...

‘For me, however, it matters not what the Adamic language was, for it’s clear we have lost any access to it. We will never speak the divine language. But by amassing all the world’s languages under this roof, by collecting the full range of human expressions, or as near to it as we can get, we can try. We will never touch heaven from this mortal plane, but our confusion is not infinite. We can, through perfecting the arts of translation, achieve what humanity lost at Babel.’

Latin was taught by a woman named Professor Margaret Craft, who could not have been more different from Professor Playfair. She rarely smiled. She delivered her lectures without feeling and by rote memory, never glancing once at her notes, although she flipped through these as she spoke, as if she’d long ago memorized her place on the page. She did not ask their names – she only ever referred to them with a pointed finger and a cold, abrupt ‘You.’ She came off at first as utterly humourless, but when Ramy read aloud one of Ovid’s dryer injections – fugiebat enim, ‘for she was fleeing’, after Jove begs Io not to flee – she burst out in a fit of girlish laughter that made her seem twenty years younger; indeed, like a schoolgirl who might have sat among them.

‘Babel hardly discriminates against women. It’s simply that so few of our sex are interested in languages.’

On Wednesday afternoon, Robin had his solo tutorial in Chinese. He’d half expected to find Professor Lovell in the classroom, but his instructor turned out to be Professor Anand Chakravarti, a genial and understated man who spoke English with such a pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent that he might have been raised in Kensington.

Chinese class was a wholly different exercise from Latin. Professor Chakravarti didn’t lecture at Robin or make him do recitations. He conducted this tutorial as a conversation. He asked questions, Robin tried his best to answer, and they both tried to make sense out of what he’d said.

It was an odd exercise to analyse and dismantle a language he thought he knew like the back of his hand, to learn to classify words by ideogram or pictogram, and to memorize an entire vocabulary of new terms, most having to do with morphology or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him.

Which Chinese words could be traced back to recognizable pictures? Which couldn’t? Why was the character for ‘woman’ – 女 – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’?

These are questions Richard and I are still trying to answer. We’re far from a satisfactory edition of the Chinese Grammatica, you see. When I was studying Chinese, I had no good Chinese-English resources – I had to make do with Abel-Rémusat’s Elémens de la grammaire chinoise and Fourmont’s Grammatica Sinica.

He was not simply a student but a colleague, a rare native speaker capable of expanding the bounds of Babel’s scant existing knowledge. Or a silver mine to be plundered,

The truth was, it felt exciting to contribute to the Grammaticas.

Classical Chinese was to vernacular Mandarin what Latin was to English; one could guess at the gist of a phrase, but the rules of grammar were unintuitive and impossible to grasp without rigorous reading practice.

Punctuation was a guessing game. Nouns could be verbs when they felt like it. Often, characters had different and contradictory meanings, either of which produced valid possible interpretations – the character 篤, for instance, could mean both ‘to restrict’ and ‘large, substantial’.

That afternoon they tackled the Shijing – the Book of Songs – which was written in a discursive context so far removed from contemporary China that even readers of the Han period would...

‘I propose we break here,’ Professor Chakravarti said after twenty minutes of debating the character 不, which in most contexts meant a negative ‘no, not’, but in the given context seemed instead like a word of praise,...

‘There’s another good Herodotus story, again about Psammetichus. Psammetichus wanted to determine which language was the foundation of all earthly languages, so he gave two newborn infants to a shepherd with the instructions that they should not be allowed to hear human speech.

For a while all they did was babble, as infants do. Then one day one of the infants stretched out his little hands to the shepherd and exclaimed bekos, which is the Phrygian word for bread. And so Psammetichus decided the Phrygians must have been the first race on earth, and Phrygian the first language.

‘The issue is it’s impossible to isolate infants from an environment with language if you want them to develop as infants should. Might be interesting to buy a child and see – but, well, no.’

The most devout Christians think it does, but you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’ He shook his head. ‘There are those who think that the Adamic language might be English – might become English – purely because the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors, but then we must also remember that it was barely a century ago that Voltaire declared that French was the universal language. That was, of course, before Waterloo. Webb and Leibniz once speculated that Chinese might, in fact, have once been universally intelligible due to its ideogrammatic nature, but Percy debunks this by arguing Chinese is a derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually. But I do think there is a pure realm of meaning – a language in between, where all concepts are perfectly expressed, which we have not been able to approximate. There is a sense, a feeling of when we have got it right.’

French, Italian, and Spanish dominate the faculty, but their new contributions to the silver-working ledgers dwindle by the year. There’s simply too much communication across the continent. Too many loanwords. Connotations change and converge as French and Spanish grow closer to English, and vice versa.

Decades from now, the silver bars we use from Romance languages might no longer have any effect.

‘We have bars that can help people who need them most. None of that exists anywhere else in the world.’

‘But language,’ said Professor Lovell, ‘is not like a commercial good, like tea or silks, to be bought and paid for. Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’

‘The Qing Emperor has one of the largest silver reserves in the world,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘He has plenty of scholars. He even has linguists who understand English. So why doesn’t he fill his court with silver bars? Why is it that the Chinese, rich as their language is, have no grammars of their own?’

‘Or that you’re hoarding knowledge that should be freely shared,’ said Robin. ‘Because if language is free, if knowledge is free, then why are all the Grammaticas under lock and key in the tower? Why don’t we ever host foreign scholars, or send scholars to help open translation centres elsewhere in the world?’ ‘Because as the Royal Institute of Translation, we serve the interests of the Crown.’

that what you believe?’ A cold edge crept into Professor Lovell’s voice. ‘Robin Swift, do you think what we do here is fundamentally unjust?’ ‘I only want to know,’ said Robin, ‘why silver could not save my mother.’

Some of the words took guesswork, since romanized Chinese words had very different spelling patterns to English words, but in the end, through working out several common change patterns – tè always meant ‘the’, ü was oo – Robin broke the code.

The study meeting turned out much livelier than expected. Robin, who was used to reading his translations out loud to Mr Chester, who drolly corrected him as he went, was not anticipating such hearty debate over turns of phrase, punctuation, or how much repetition was too much. It quickly became apparent they had drastically different translation styles.

‘Military contracts compose over half of the work orders. They’re a necessary part of the tenure application. And they pay well too – most of the senior faculty got rich fighting Napoleon.

You fake your death, and then you go underground.’ ‘Is that what you did?’ ‘About five years ago, yes. You will too, eventually. And then you’ll become a shadow on the campus you once had the run of, and pray that some other first year will find it in their conscience to grant you access to your old libraries.’

In Classical Chinese, the characters 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.

Oxford English was different from London English, and was developed largely by the undergraduate tendency to corrupt and abbreviate just about everything.