Babel

by R.F. Kuang

London existed to him like Lilliput did: a faraway, imaginary, fantasy place where no one looked, dressed, or spoke remotely like him.

When thoughts popped up in Chinese, he quashed them.

He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive.

‘A place where all the great minds of the nation can congregate in research, study, and instruction. It’s a wonderful place, Robin.’

‘Imagine a town of scholars, all researching the most marvellous, fascinating things. Science. Mathematics. Languages. Literature. Imagine building after building filled with more books than you’ve seen in your entire life. Imagine quiet, solitude, and a serene place to think.’

Oxford gives you all the tools you need for your work – food, clothes, books, tea – and then it leaves you alone. It is the centre of all knowledge and innovation in the civilized world. And, should you progress sufficiently well in your studies here, you might one day be lucky enough to call it home.’

‘But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’

Robin stood before his mirror, staring intently at his face for so long that eventually it began to seem alien.

Look at his eyes. That was incontrovertible proof, wasn’t it? Then why would his father not claim Robin as his own? Why was he only a ward, and not a son?

there were some truths that could not be uttered, that life as normal was only possible if they were never acknowledged.

Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you.

He imagined the Cabinet as a series of massive shelves where men in fancy dress were arranged like dolls.

the university he knew only from the painting on the wall – the city of knowledge, the city of dreaming spires.

He was only now realizing how badly he wanted a friend, but he didn’t know how to make one, and the prospect of trying but failing suddenly terrified him.

It was clear he wasn’t truly angry, just passionate and clearly brilliant, so invested in the truth he needed the whole world to know.

This was his home for the next four years – the bed under the low, sloping ceiling where he would wake every morning, the leaking tap over the sink where he would wash his face, and the desk in the corner that he would hunch over every evening, scribbling by candlelight until wax dripped onto the floorboards.

‘Either I’m a dirty thieving lascar, or I’m a servant in some nabob’s house. And I realized in Yorkshire that it’s easier if they think I’m a Mughal prince.’

The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men.

Of all the marvels of Oxford, Babel seemed the most impossible – a tower out of time, a vision from a dream. Those stained-glass windows, that high, imposing dome; it all seemed to have been pulled straight from the painting in Professor Lovell’s dining room and dropped whole onto this drab grey street. An illumination in a medieval manuscript; a door to a fairy land. It seemed impossible that they should come here every day to study, that they had the right to enter at all. Yet here it stood, right in front of them, waiting.

After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’

he felt also a thrum of excitement at the thought that perhaps his unbelonging did not doom him to existing forever on the margins, that perhaps, instead, it made him special.

‘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.’

And then they were laughing again. Soon it became apparent that no topics were off limits. They could talk about anything, share all the indescribable humiliations they felt being in a place they were not supposed to be, all the lurking unease that until now they’d kept to themselves. They offered up everything about themselves because they had, at last, found the

only group of people for whom their experiences were not so unique or baffling.

practised in the art of papering over pain, and he did not pry.

That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom; they did not want to give them back.

Later, when everything went sideways and the world broke in half, Robin would think back to this day, to this hour at this table, and wonder why they had been so quick, so carelessly eager to trust one another. Why had they refused to see the myriad ways they could hurt each other? Why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side? But the answer was obvious – that they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.

‘So why the hesitation?’ Why indeed? Robin tried to sort through his confusion, to find a reason for prudence that did not simply boil down to fear. But that was precisely it – fear of consequences, fear of breaking the gorgeous illusion of the Oxford he’d won admission to, the one Griffin had just sullied before he’d been able to properly enjoy it.

I’m asking you to take a chance on a conviction.’

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.

Why was the character for ‘woman’ – 女 – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’?

Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’

‘Or that you’re hoarding knowledge that should be freely shared,’

he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that still he wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks.

he felt he wanted to scream. Cry. Kick the wall. Anything, if only to make his father look him in the face.

He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it,

how Professor Lovell, who was for some reason both prosecutor and judge, would coldly sentence Robin to the noose.

He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance – and was it so wrong for him to cling to what he had?

Babel represented more than material comforts. Babel was the reason he belonged in England, why he was not begging on the streets of Canton. Babel was the only place where his talents mattered. Babel was security. And perhaps all that was morally compromised, yes – but was it so wrong to want to survive?

but for what it represented: the assurance that one would always be welcome in England.

And he would no longer be the foreigner, second-guessing his pronunciation at every turn, but a native whose belonging could not possibly be questioned or revoked.

The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’

But they would never engrave a word in a silver bar and feel the weight of its meaning reverberate in their fingers. They would never change the fabric of the world by simply wishing it.

Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’

‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’

‘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?’

‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’

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 world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.