Babel

by R.F. Kuang

A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers.

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

He learned that London in 1830 was a city that could not decide what it wanted to be.

He did not understand these political struggles, not then. He only sensed that London, and England at large, was very divided about what it was and what it wanted to be.

The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.

He was told that potatoes, which he found quite tasty in any form, were not to be served around important company, for they were considered lower-class.

They’d been exposed to a great deal of information at once, and the effect was that Robin wasn’t sure the ground he stood on was real.

‘I know. I had the same impression on my first day here as well. It’s rather like an induction into a hidden world, isn’t it? Like taking food in the seelie court. Once you know what happens in the tower, the mundane world doesn’t seem half as interesting.’

‘Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace.

‘You’ve noticed by now, surely, that Babel alone among the Oxford faculties accepts students not of European origin. Nowhere else in this country will you find Hindus, Muslims, Africans, and Chinamen studying under the same roof. We accept you not despite, but because of your foreign backgrounds.’

‘Because of your origins, you have the gift of languages those born in England cannot imitate. And you, like Psammetichus’s boys, are the tongues that will speak this vision of global harmony into being.’

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

The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.’

‘I’ve only just arrived here, I’ve only just seen Babel for the first time, and I don’t know you or this place well enough to have

‘I knew you were thieves,’ Robin said. ‘I just . . . I didn’t think you were doing anything wrong.’

You’ve noticed by now that London sits at the centre of a vast empire that won’t stop growing. The single most important enabler of this growth is Babel.

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.

The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not.

‘We are that outside force. Hermes. We funnel silver away to people, communities, and movements that deserve it. We aid slave revolts. Resistance movements. We melt down silver bars made for cleaning doilies and use them to cure disease instead.’

the phrase tǎntú* literally meant ‘a flat road’, metaphorically, ‘a tranquil life’. This was what he wanted: a smooth, even path to a future with no surprises.

It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.’

‘It just seems so hard to be cut off,’ he said. ‘From everything.’

‘I know it’s difficult,’ said Griffin. ‘It’s hard to give up the trappings of your station. You still love your stipend and scholar’s

‘It’s not the wine parties,’ Robin insisted. ‘I don’t – I mean, I don’t go to wine parties. And it’s not about the stipend, or the stupid gowns. It’s just that – I don’t know, it’s such a leap.’

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 mo...

‘You do your reading and you stay on the inside. Don’t you worry about the contradiction. Your guilt is assuaged, for now. Enjoy your glirarium, little dormouse.’

‘Babel. They take care of you, don’t they?’

Oxford English was different from London English, and was developed largely by the undergraduate tendency to corrupt and abbreviate just about everything.

‘I 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.

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

They were trying to impress him – and by impressing him, to display their own superiority, to prove that to be a Babbler was not as good as being one of Elton Pendennis’s friends.

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

‘They’re fools, all right? I should never have abandoned your side, dear, sweet, sober Letty. You are always right about everything.’

‘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.’

‘Be that as it may, I have to live with her.’ Victoire’s

Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes.

How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

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.

there’s one other rather severe limitation to the bars – one that keeps every peasant in England from running around wielding them like talismans. Can anyone guess what it is?’

‘You need a fluent speaker.’

‘Quite right,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘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 English have lost their effect.

‘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?’

‘The translation match-pair creates a paradox,’

‘It attempts to create a purer translation, something that will align to the metaphors associated with each word, but this is of course impossible, because no perfect translations are possible.’

So the Spanish become richer and richer, and everywhere they go they leave death, slavery, and impoverishment in their wake.