Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘But how does it all work?’ ‘It’s easiest to think of Babel as the centre, and all the resonance-dependent bars in England as the periphery.

The periphery draws on the centre for power.’ Professor Chakravarti gestured around him. Each rod, Robin noticed, appeared to be vibrating at a very high frequency, but though it felt as if the tower should be rin...

‘These rods, engraved with commonly used match-pairs, sustain linked bars throughout the country. The manifesting power comes from the rod, you see, which means that the bars ou...

‘So do these resonate with every bar in England?’ Robin saw in his mind an invisible network of meaning stretching over the country, keeping the silver-work alive. It was quite terrifying to consider. ‘I’d have thought there would be more of them.’

‘Not quite. There are much smaller resonance centres across the country – there’s one in Edinburgh, for example, and one in Cambridge.

The effect does weaken with distance. But the lion’s share is in Oxford – it spreads the Translation Institute too far out to maintain multiple centres, as y...

‘How’s the link forged, then?’ ‘It’s a complicated process.’ Professor Chakravarti led Robin to a slender rod near the south-side window. He knelt down, retrieved the Ashmolean bar from his bag, and held it up against the rod.

‘They’ve got to be smelted from the same material. And then there’s a good deal of etymological symbol work – you’ll learn all of that in your fourth year, if you specialize in silver-working. We actually use an invented alphabet, based on a manuscript first discovered by an alchemist from Prague in the seventeenth century.* It’s so that no one outside Babel can replicate our process. For now, you can think of all this adjustment as deepening the bond of connection.’

‘But I thought fake languages didn’t work to activate the bars,’ said Robin. ‘They don’t to manifest meaning,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘As a linking mechanism, however, they work quite well. We could do with basic numbers, but Playfair likes his mysteries. Keeps things proprietary.’

London, and Babel, were getting richer every day, for the same ships fuelled by long-enduring silver-work brought back chests and chests of silver in return.

‘You know, that’s not a surprise. The way Babel treats its students, particularly those they recruit from abroad. You’re an asset to them, but that’s all you are. A translation machine. And once you fail them, you’re out.’

Oxford, and Babel by extension, were, at their roots, ancient religious institutions, and for all their contemporary sophistication, the rituals that comprised university life were still based in medieval mysticism.

Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.*

‘What’s going on in Afghanistan?’ ‘Don’t you read the news? The British are going to pull Afghanistan into their sphere of influence. But there are plans in motion to make sure that doesn’t happen

‘You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

By 1836, spectators were no longer allowed at the vivas either, and the townspeople lost a great source of annual entertainment.

Acting from generosity, or perhaps sadism, the Babel faculty made available a set of silver bars for examinees to use as study aids. These bars were engraved with a match-pair using the English word meticulous and its Latin forerunner metus, meaning ‘fear, dread’. The modern usage of meticulous had arisen just a few decades before in France, with the connotation of being fearful of making a mistake. The effect of the bars was to induce a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work.

Stress had the unique ability to wipe students’ minds clear of things they had been studying for years.

Failure of memory was only the first symptom to come. Never had Robin’s anxiety over his marks made him so physically ill. First came a persistent, throbbing headache, and then the constant urge to throw up every time he stood or moved. Waves of tremors kept coming over him with no warning; often his hand shook so hard that he had difficulty gripping his pen. Once, during a practice paper, he found his vision blacking out; he couldn’t think, couldn’t remember a single word, couldn’t even see. It took him nearly ten minutes to recover. He couldn’t make himself eat. He was somehow both exhausted all the time and unable to sleep from a surplus of nervous energy.

Then, like all good Oxford upperclassmen, he found himself losing his mind. His grip on reality, already tenuous from sustained isolation in a city of scholars, became even more fragmented. Hours of revision had interfered with his processing of signs and symbols, his belief in what was real and what was not. The abstract was factual and important; daily exigencies like porridge and eggs were suspect.

Everyday dialogue became a chore; small talk was a horror, and he lost his grip on wha...

In their fourth year, once they had finished their apprenticeships, they would learn proper techniques of match-pair design, engraving, and experimentation for magnitude and duration of effect, as well as the intricacies of resonance links and spoken manifestation.

They had to prove they possessed the undefinable stuff, the inimitable instinct for meaning, that made a translator a silver-worker.

The pamphlet was rather dated – it was written in 1798, and employed many archaic spellings – but did contain a number of brief, easily digestible tips.

The first was to stay away from religion. This one they already knew from dozens of horror stories. It was theology that had got Oxford interested in Oriental languages in the first place – the only reason Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac had initially become subjects of academic study was the translation of religious texts. But the Holy Word, it turned out, was both unpredictable and unforgiving on silver.

There was a desk in the north wing of the eighth floor that no one dared approach because it still occasionally emi...

There, it was rumoured, some foolish graduate fellow had attempted to translate o...

More helpful was the second lesson in the pamphlet, which was to focus their research by looking for cognates. Cognates – words in different languages that shared a common ancestor and often similar meanings as well* – were often the best clues for fruitful match-p...

But the difficulty with cognates was that often their meanings were so close that there was little distortion in translation, and thus litt...

There was, after all, no significant difference between the word chocolate in English and in Spanish. Moreover, in looking for cognates, one had to be wary of false friends – words which seemed like co...

The English have did not come from the Latin habere (‘to hold, to possess’), for example, but from the Latin capere (‘to seek’). And the Italian cognato did not mean ‘cognate’ l...

False friends were especially tricky when their meanings appeared related as well. The Persian word farang, which was used to refer to Europeans, appeared to be a cognate of the English foreign. But farang actually arose from a reference to the Franks, and morphed to encompass Western Europeans. The English foreign, on the other hand, originated ...

The third lesson in the pamphlet introduced a technique called daisy-chaining. This they vaguely recalled from Professor Playfair’s demonstration. If the words in their binary match-pair had evolved too far apart in meaning for a translation to be plausible, one could try adding a third or even fourth language as an intermediary. If all these words were engraved in chronological ord...

Another related technique was the identification of a second etymon: another source that may have interfered in the evolution of meaning. The French fermer (‘to close, to lock’) was for instance quite obviously based on the Latin firmāre (‘to make hard, to strengthen’) but had also been influenced by the Latin ferrum, meaning ‘iro...

All these techniques sounded good in theory. They were much harder to replicate. The difficult part, after all, was coming up with a suitable match-pair in the first place. For inspiration, they took out a copy of the Current Ledger – the comprehensive list of match-pairs ...

Track is related to trecken, from Middle Dutch, which means to pull – especially when you go through the French intermediary. And now you have two words that mean what we think of as a track, but only one of them involves a moving force. The result is the tracks pull the carts forward themselves. That’s brilliant.’

One particularly ingenious pair was the translation from the Chinese character gǔ (古) meaning ‘old or aged’, and the English ‘old’. The Chinese gǔ carried a connotation of durability and strength; indeed, the same character 古 was present in the character gù (固), which meant ‘hard, strong, or solid’. Linking the concepts of durability and antiquity helped prevent machinery from decaying over time; in fact, the longer it was in use, the more reliable it became.

As they flipped through the ledger, another theory became more evident. Evie had been wildly prolific between the years 1833 and 1834, but by 1835, her research had dropped completely off the record. Not a single innovation in the past five years.

Robin won one night with jīxīn. ‘In Canton, mothers would send their sons off to the imperial exams with a breakfast of chicken hearts,’ he explained. ‘Because chicken hearts – jīxīn – sounds similar to jìxing, which means memory.’*

‘It’s a metaphor of sacrifice – the key is the trade. The chicken’s blood – the chicken’s heart – is what supports your memory. So you’ve only got to slaughter a chicken to the gods and you’ll pass.’

Robin had to translate, unseen, a five-hundred-character-long passage in Classical Chinese that Professor Chakravarti had composed. It was a charming parable about a virtuous man who loses one goat in a mulberry field but finds another. Robin realized after the exam that he’d mistranslated yànshǐ, which meant ‘romantic history’, as the tamer ‘colourful history’,* which missed the tone of the passage somewhat, but hoped the ambiguities between ‘sexual’ and ‘colourful’ in English would be enough to fudge things over.

Robin scribbled an eight-page essay on how the term interpretes was, for Cicero, ultimately value neutral in comparison to Herodotus’s hermeneus, one of whom was killed by Themistocles for using Greek on behalf of the Persians. He concluded with some comments on linguistic propriety and loyalty.

Professor Lovell’s paper involved two prompts. The first was a challenge to translate three pages of a children’s nonsense alphabet rhyme (‘A is for the apricot, which was eaten by a Bear’) into a language of their choosing.

‘Míngbai,’ Robin blurted. ‘Mandarin. It means – so it means, “to understand”, right? But the characters are loaded with imagery. Míng – bright, a light, clear. And bai – white, like the colour. So it doesn’t just mean to understand, or to realize – it has the visual component of making clear, to shine a light on.’

‘Míngbai,’ he said, holding up the bar so that Professor Chakravarti could see. 明白. Then he flipped it over. ‘Understand.’

One, certainly devised by Professor Lovell, paired the Chinese four-word idiom 百卉千葩 with the English translation ‘a hundred plants and thousand flowers’. The connotation of the Chinese original, which invoked rich, dazzling, and myriad colours, made the roses redder, the blooming violets larger and more vibrant.

‘Sometimes rare and expensive things are worse.’ ‘Don’t tell the English that, it’ll shatter their entire sense of taste.’

‘One does not appreciate heaven until one has known hell,’ said Vimal. ‘Revelations. Or Mark. Or something like that.’

‘Ibasho,’ said Ilse Dejima.

‘Ibasho,’ she repeated, swaying. Her arms floated in front of her, either dancing or conducting the music, he couldn’t tell which. For that matter, he couldn’t tell where the music was coming from at all. ‘It doesn’t translate well into English. It means “whereabouts”. A place where one feels like home, where they feel like themselves.’