Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter o...

Even basic words for clothes all came f...

Damask came from cloth made in Damascus; gingham came from the Malay word genggang, meaning ‘striped’; calico referred to Calicut in Kerala, and taffeta, Ramy told them, had its roots i...

But not all English words had their roots in such far-flung or noble origins. The curious thing about etymology, they soon learned, was that anything could influence a language, from the consumption habits of the rich and worldly...

The lowly cants, the supposed secret languages of thieves, vagabonds, and foreigners, had contributed such common word...

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the wor...

In addition to Etymology, they each took on an extra language that year. The point was not to attain fluency in this language, but to, through the process of its acquisition, deepen their understanding of their focus languages.

Sanskrit came to China by way of Buddhist texts, and this caused a veritable explosion of linguistic innovation, as Buddhism introduced dozens of concepts that Chinese had no easy word for. Nun, or bhiksunī in Sanskrit, became ni.* Nirvana became nièpán.

Core Chinese concepts like hell, consciousness, and calamity come from Sanskrit. You can’t begin to understand Chinese today without also understanding Buddhism, which means understanding Sanskrit. It’s like trying to understand multiplication before you know how to draw numbers.’

Latin, translation theory, etymology, focus languages, and a new research language – it was an absurdly heavy class load, especially when each professor assigned coursework as if none of the other courses existed.

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week.

‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on yo...

Meticulous Letty, despite her grumbling, would always mark up a translation, no matter how late at night or early in the morning. Victoire was like a vault; she would listen to any amount of complaining and petty griping without letting slip to the subjects thereof. And Robin could knock on Ramy’s door at any time, day or night, if he needed a cup of tea, or something to laugh about, or someone to cry with.

It was Anthony Ribben who finally cracked it. As per contractual terms with Daguerre, the actual patented match-pair was kept a secret, but rumour was that Anthony had done something with the Latin imago, which in addition to meaning ‘a likeness’ or ‘imitation’ also implied a ghost or phantom. Other rumours held that Anthony had found some way to dissolve the silver bar to create fumes from heated mercury. Whatever it was, Anthony could not say, but he was paid handsomely for his efforts.

Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it.

Silver’s been around forever. The Athenians were mining it in Attica, and the Romans, as you know, used silver to expand their empire once they realized what it could do. But silver didn’t become international currency, didn’t facilitate a trade network spanning continents, until much later. There simply wasn’t enough of it. Then in the sixteenth century, the Hapsburgs – the first truly global empire – stumbled upon massive silver deposits in the Andes.

The Spaniards brought it out of the mountains, courtesy of indigenous miners you can be certain weren’t paid fairly for their labour,

‘All the silver, and all the power, flows from the New World to Europe.’

‘Silver accrues where it’s already in use. The Spanish held the lead for a long time, while the Dutch, British, and French were nipping at their heels.

Jump ahead another century, and Spain’s a shadow of what it once was; the Napoleonic wars have eroded France’s power, and...

Largest silver reserves in Europe. Best translation institute in the world by far. The best navy on the seas, cemented after Trafalgar, meaning this island is well on its way to ruling the world, isn’t it? But something funny’s been happening over the last century. Something that’s been giving Parliament a...

‘China. This country is gorging itself on imports from the Orient. They can’t get enough of China’s porcelain, lacquered cabinets, and silks. And tea. Heavens. Do you know how much tea gets exported from China to England every year? At least thirty million pounds’ worth.

The British love tea so much that Parliament used to insist that the East India Company always keep a year’s worth of supply in stock in case of shortages. We spend millions and millions on tea from China every year, and we pay for it in silver.

‘But China has no reciprocal appetite for British goods. When the Qianlong Emperor received a display of British manufactured items from Lord Macartney, do you know what his response w...

The Chinese don’t need anything we’re selling; they can produce everything they want on their own. So silver keeps flowing to China, and there’s nothing the British can do abou...

The British Empire will crumble as a consequence of its own greed.

Meanwhile, silver will accrue in new centres of power – places that have heretofore had their resources stolen and exploited. They’ll have the raw materials. All they’ll need then are silver-workers, and the talent will go where the work is; it always does. So it’s all as simple as running out the Empire. The cycles of history will do the rest, and you’ve only got to help us speed it along.’

‘But that’s the problem with a Babel education, isn’t it? They teach you languages and translation, but never history, never science, never international politics. They don’t tell you about the armies that back dialects.’

‘No one knows precisely what the future looks like. Whether the levers of power move to China, or to the Americas, or whether Britain’s going to fight tooth and nail to hold on to its place – that’s impossible to foretell.’

The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’

We are just at the tail end of a great crisis in the Atlantic, after the monarchic empires have fallen one after the other. Britain and France lost in America, and then they went to war against each other to nobody’s benefit.

Now we’re watching a new consolidation of power, that’s true – Britain got Bengal, it got Dutch Java and the Cape Colony – and if it gets what it wants in China, if it can reverse this trade imbalance, it’s going to be unstoppable.

‘But slavery’s been abolished, hasn’t it?’ said Griffin. ‘At least in British territories. No – I’m not saying everything’s good and fixed, and I’m not saying we can fully take the credit for British legislation; I’m sure the abolitionists would take umbrage at that. But I am saying that if you think the 1833 Act passed because of the moral sensibilities of the British, you’re wrong. They passed that bill because they couldn’t keep absorbing the losses.’

‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’

‘The tower’s protected by the most sophisticated security system in the country,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s not just the Grammaticas that are guarded. There’s about half a million pounds’ worth of silver in this building, and only spindly academics around to defend it. Of course the doors are warded.’

‘The bars aren’t that sophisticated,’ Griffin said dismissively. ‘They’re designed to discriminate between students, their guests, and strangers to the Institute.

Oxford lost its charm that September; the golden sunsets and bright blue skies replaced by an endless chill and fog. It rained an inordinate amount, and the storm winds felt uniquely vicious compared to previous years.

The third year at Babel was traditionally known as the Siberian winter, and the reason became obvious when they were issued their courses lists. They were all continuing in their tertiary languages and in Latin, which was rumoured to become devilishly difficult when Tacitus entered the picture. They were also continuing in Translation Theory with Professor Playfair and Etymology with Professor Lovell, though the workload for each course had now doubled, as they were expected to produce a five-page paper for each class every week.

Most importantly, they were all assigned supervisors with whom they would pursue an independent research project.

Ramy and Victoire were both immediately unhappy with their supervisors. Ramy had been invited by Professor Joseph Harding to contribute to an editorial round of the Persian Grammatica, which was nominally a great honour.

Yet Ramy’s indignation seemed trivial compared to what Victoire was dealing with. She was working with Professor Hugo Leblanc, with whom she’d studied French for two years with no trouble, but who now became a source of ceaseless frustration.

‘French is the lexifier, yes, but Kreyòl is its own language, with its own grammatical rules. French and Kreyòl are not mutually intelligible.

You could have studied French for a decade, but a Kreyòl poem might still be impossible to decipher without a dictionary. Leblanc doesn’t have a dictionary – there is no dictionary, not yet – so I’m the next best thing.’

On one side: garden; on the other, the character 齋, which could mean a landscape garden, but more generally evoked a place for private withdrawal, to retreat from the world, with connotations of ritual purification, cleansing, alms-giving, and Daoist acts of repentance.

‘Zhāi. Garden.’

‘Do you always need to speak the match-pair to make it work?’ Robin asked as they walked back to campus. ‘It seems untenable – that is, there are so many bars, and so few translators.’

‘What makes them last longer?’ ‘The number of carats, to start with. Finer silver endures, and the higher the percentage of other alloys, the shorter the time of effect. But there are also subtle differences in the way they’re smelted and engraved;

One afternoon, they arrived at the Ashmolean Museum to fix a silver bar that no number of incantations would activate.

The English side read verify, and the Chinese side used the character 參, meaning ‘to validate’. It could also mean ‘to juxtapose’, ‘to arrange side by side’, and ‘to compare things’.

‘Resonance is a way of cutting costs,’ Professor Chakravarti explained. ‘We need to save the higher-carat silver for bars with endurance needs – the bars that go into the Navy, that protect merchant ships, and the like. So we use silver with a higher percentage of alloys for the bars that operate on English land, since we can keep them fuelled with resonance.’