Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Magdalene was pronounced maudlin; by the same token, St Aldate’s had become St Old’s. The Magna Vacatio became the Long Vacation became the Long. New College became New; St Edmund’s became Teddy. It took months before Robin was used to uttering ‘Univ’ when he meant ‘University College’.

A spread was a party with a sizable number of guests; a pidge was short for pigeonhole, which in turn meant one of the wooden ...

‘Rich boys studying on their father’s money.

don’t understand what anyone means by genteel,’ said Ramy. ‘People always throw it around in reference to the high- and well-born. But what’s it actually mean? Does it just mean that you’re very wealthy?’ ‘I mean it in the context of manners,’ said Victoire.

Translating poetry is for those who haven’t the creative fire themselves. They can only seek residual fame cribbing off the work of others.’

think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in.

Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart.

So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’

‘You’ve got to live and breathe a language, not just muddle through a text now and then.

‘Did you know Babel has a general entrance exam for applicants who don’t come specially recommended? She took it and passed. It was the only faculty at Oxford that would take women. She’d always wanted to come to Babel – she’d studied for it her whole life – but her father kept refusing to let her go to school. It wasn’t until Lincoln died that her father let her come and take his place. Bad to have a daughter at Oxford, but worse to have no children at Oxford at all.

‘She’s unbearable sometimes, yes. But she’s not trying to be cruel. She’s scared she isn’t supposed to be here. She’s scared everyone wishes she were her brother, and she’s scared she’ll be sent home if she steps even slightly out of line. Above all, she’s scared that either of you might go down Lincoln’s path. Go easy on her, you two. You don’t know how much of her behaviour is dictated by fear.’

‘Her behaviour,’ said Ramy, ‘is dictated by self-absorption.’

‘Translators are always being accused of faithlessness,’ boomed Professor Playfair. ‘So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty? Let us begin with what Dryden wrote about the Aeneid. I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’ He looked around the classroom. ‘Does anyone here think that is fidelity?’

‘I’ll bite,’ said Ramy. ‘No, I don’t think that can possibly be right. Virgil belonged to a particular time and place. Isn’t it more unfaithful to strip all that away, to make him speak like any Englishman you might run into on the street?’ Professor Playfair shrugged. ‘Is it not also unfaithful to make Virgil sound like a stuffy foreigner, rather than a man you would happily carry on a conversation with? Or, as Guthrie did, to cast Cicero as a member of the English Parliament?

But I confess, these methods are questionable. You take things too far, and you get something like Pope’s translation of the Iliad.’ ‘I thought Pope was one of the greatest poets of his time,’ Letty said. ‘Perhaps in his original work,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘But he injects the text with so many Britishisms that he makes Homer sound like an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. Surely this does not ...

‘It isn’t only the English that do this,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Recall how Herder attacks the French neoclassicists for making Homer a captive, clad in French clothes, and following French customs, lest he offend. And all the well-known translators in Persia favoured the “spirit” of translation rather than word-for-word accuracy – indeed, they often found it appropriate to change European names into Persian and replac...

Schleiermacher argued that translations should be sufficiently unnatural that they clearly present themselves as foreign texts. He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Schleiermacher chose the former. Yet the dominant strain in England now is the latter – to make translations sound so natural to the English reader that they do not read as translations at all.

‘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?’

Translators are of the same faithless and stolid race that they have ever been: the particle of gold they bring us over is hidden from all but the most patient eye, among shiploads of yellow sand and sulphur. THOMAS CARLYLE, ‘State of German Literature’

Babel students did not take qualifying exams until the end of their third year, so Trinity flew by with no more and no less stress than the previous two terms.

This year, they were finally allowed access to the silver-working department. They would not be allowed to make their own engravings until year four, but this term they would begin a preparatory theory course called Etymology – taught, Robin learned with some trepidation, by Professor Lovell.

‘The core principle underlying silver-working is untranslatability. When we say a word or phrase is untranslatable, we mean that it lacks a precise equivalent in another language. Even if its meaning can be partially captured in several words or sentences, something is still lost – something that falls into semantic gaps which are, of course, created by cultural differences in lived experience.

Take the Chinese concept dao, which we translate sometimes as “the way”, “the path”, or “the way things ought to be”. Yet none of those truly encapsulates the meaning of dao, a little word that requires an entire philosophical tome to explain.

translation can perfectly carry over the meaning of the original. But what is meaning? Does meaning refer to something that supersedes the words we use to describe our world? I think, intuitively, yes. Otherwise we would have no basis for critiquing a translation as accurate or inaccurate, not without some unspeakable sense of what it lacked. Humboldt,* for instance, argues that words are connected to the concepts they describe by something invisible, intangible – a mystical realm of meaning and ideas, emanating from a pure mental energy which only takes form when we ascribe it an imperfect signifier.’

‘That pure realm of meaning – whatever it is, wherever it exists – is the core of our craft.

The basic principles of silver-working are very simple. You inscribe a word or phrase in one language on one side, and a corresponding word or phrase in a different language on the other. Because translation can never be perfect, the necessary distortions – the meanings lost or warped in the journey – are caught, and then manifested by the silver. And that, dear students, is as close to magic as anything within the realm of natural science.’

‘We’ve sold quite a few copies of this bar to fishermen. The Greek kárabos has a number of different meanings including “boat”, “crab”, or “beetle”.

Focus on kárabos for now. From kárabos we get caravel, which is a quick and lightweight ship. Both words mean “ship”, but only kárabos retains the sea-creature associations in the original Greek.

He tapped the ends of the bar, where the words kárabos and caravel were written on opposite sides. ‘Affix this to a fishing ship, and you’ll find it yields a better load than any of its sister crafts. These bars were quite popular in the last century, until overuse meant fishing yields dropped down to what they were before. The bars can warp reality to some extent, but they can’t materialize new fish.

‘Now, this is one of our most widely replicated bars. You’ll find these in doctors’ bags throughout England.’ He lifted the second bar to the right. ‘Triacle and treacle.’

An ingenious discovery by a student named Evie Brooke – yes, that Evie – who realized the word treacle was first recorded in the seventeenth century in relation to the heavy use of sugar to disguise the bad taste of medicine.

She then traced that back to the Old French triacle, meaning “antidote” or “cure from snakebite”, then the Latin theriaca, and finally to the Greek theriake, both meaning “antidote”.’

‘Daisy-chaining,’ said Professor Playfair. He turned the bar around to show them the Latin and Greek engraved along the sides. ‘It’s a technique that invokes older etymologies as guides, shepherding meaning across miles and centuries. You might also think of it as extra stakes for a tent. It keeps the whole thing stable and helps us identify with accuracy the distortion we’re trying to capture. But that’s quite an advanced technique

‘The Greek word idiótes can mean a fool, as our idiot implies. But it also carries the definition of one who is private, unengaged with worldly affairs – his idiocy is derived not from lack of natural faculties, but from ignorance and lack of education.

When we translate idiótes to idiot, it has the effect of removing knowledge. This bar, then, can make you forget, quite abruptly, things you thought you’d learned.

We are restrained by the natural evolution of languages. Even words that diverge in meaning still have quite a close relationship with each other. This limits the magnitude of change the bars can effect. For example, you can’t use them to bring back the dead, because we haven’t found a good match-pair in a language where life and death are not in opposition to each other. Besides that, there’s one other rather severe limitation to the bars – one that keeps every peasant in England from running around wielding them like talismans.

‘Words have no meaning unless there is someone present who can understand them. And it can’t be a shallow level of understanding

you can’t simply tell a farmer what triacle means in French and expect that the bar will work. You need to be able to think in a language – to live and breathe it, not just recognize it as a smattering of letters on a page.

This is also why invented languages* will never work, and why ancient languages like Old Engl...

Old English would be a silver-worker’s dream – we’ve got such extensive dictionaries and we can trace the etymology quite clearly, so the bars would be wonderfully exact. But nobody thinks in Old English. Nobody lives and breathes in Old English. It’s partly ...

Fluency in Latin and Greek are still mandatory for many degrees, though the reformers have been agitating for years f...

‘How do the bars work if a fluent speaker must be present?’ Victoire asked. ‘Shouldn’t they lose their effect as soon as the translator leaves the room?’

‘Very good question.’ Professor Playfair held up the first and second bars. Placed side by side, the second bar was clearly slightly longer than the first. ‘Now you’ve raised the issue of endurance. Several things affect the endurance of a bar’s effect.

First is the concentration and amount of silver. Both these bars are over ninety per cent silver – the rest is a copper alloy, which is used often in coins – but the triacle bar is about twenty per cent larger, which means it’ll last a f...

‘Many of the cheaper bars you see around London don’t last quite as long. Very few of them are actually silver all the way through. More often, they’re just a thin sheen of silver coating over wood or some other cheap metal. They run out of charge in a mat...

‘We hold the secrets, and we can set whatever terms we like. That’s the beauty of being cleverer than everyone else.

‘I must issue a warning. There is one match-pair that you must never, ever attempt. Can anyone guess what that is?’ ‘Good and evil,’ said Letty. ‘Good guess, but no.’ ‘The names of God,’ said Ramy. ‘We trust you not to be that stupid. No, this one’s trickier.’

‘It’s translation,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Simply, the words for translation itself.’

‘The verb translate has slightly different connotations in each language. The English, Spanish, and French words – translate, traducir, and traduire – come from the Latin translat, which means “to carry across”. But we get something different once we move past Romance languages.’ He began inscribing a new set of letters on the other side.