Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.

The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.

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

London was both unimaginably rich and wretchedly poor. London – lovely, ugly, sprawling, cramped, belching, sniffing, virtuous, hypocritical, silver-gilded London – was near to a reckoning, for the day would come when it either devoured itself from inside or cast outwards for new delicacies, labour, capital, and culture on which to feed.

For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them;

Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day.

But if the world was an abstract object for them, it was even more abstract to him, for he had no stake in any of these matters.

he could

never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.) ‘With your eyes like that – can you see everything? Or is it only in little slits?’

but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

‘I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.’

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.

They’d been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand, and they were acutely

aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom; they did not want to give them back.

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.

Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent the same way it hoards silver and uses them to produce translation magic that benefits England and England only.

It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism.

Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire.

We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward.

there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another.

you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’

‘For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘She was only just a woman.’

We’ve never needed their help, and they’ve only constructed that narrative out of a misplaced sense of superiority.’

You’ll find you can’t reconcile your sense of ethics with what they ask you to do.

‘Military contracts compose over half of the work orders. They’re a necessary part of the tenure application. And they pay well too

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

‘I don’t think you two quite understand how hard it is to be a woman here,’ said Victoire. ‘They’re liberal on paper, certainly. But they think so very little of us.

Every weakness we display is a testament to the worst theories about us, which is that we’re fragile, we’re hysterical, and we’re too naturally weak-minded to handle the kind of work we’re set to do.’

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.

‘Which seems right to you? 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?’

Remind the readers it's a translated text. It's unfair to let readers know otherwise

‘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.’

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.

A genuine Oxford tutor would shudder to hear his young men disputing upon moral and political truth, forming and pulling down theories, and indulging in all the boldness of political discussion. He would augur nothing from it but impiety to God, and treason to Kings.

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.’

But slaves we are, and labour in another man’s plantation; we dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s. JOHN DRYDEN, extract from the ‘Dedication’ to his translation of the Aeneid