"Babel"

[fiefoe]

R. F. Kuang's novel is so earnest and serious that it's almost humorless. The first half is a fascinating exploration of what translation can do magically, but the second half staggers under the weight of all the political realities of such magic.

• London had a mechanical heartbeat. Silver hummed through the city. It glimmered from the wheels of cabs and carriages and from horses’ hooves; shone from buildings under windows and over doorways; lay buried under the streets and up in the ticking arms of clock towers;
• it was the monstrous industrial labyrinth of William Blake’s ‘cruel Works / Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other’.* London had accumulated the lion’s share of both the world’s silver ore and the world’s languages, and the result was a city that was bigger, heavier, faster, and brighter than nature allowed.
• The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades Eve to eat. But in Latin, malum means “bad” and mālum,’ he wrote the words out for Robin, emphasizing the macron with force, ‘means “apple”. It was a short leap from there to blaming the apple for the original sin.
• You, on the other hand, have already mastered the hardest parts of two language systems – the accents and rhythm, those unconscious quirks that adults take forever to learn, and even then, not quite. But you must maintain them.
• He delighted when common words were, unexpectedly, formed from other words he knew. Hussy was a compound of house and wife. Holiday was a compound of holy and day. Bedlam came, implausibly, from Bethlehem. Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you.
• He learned that the practice of serving food in successive courses was adopted from the French, and that the reason it was not yet a universal norm was a lingering resentment over that little man Napoleon.
• In 1833, a momentous thing happened – slavery was abolished in England and its colonies, to be replaced by a six-year apprenticeship term as a transition to freedom. Among Professor Lovell’s interlocutors, this news was taken with the mild disappointment of a lost cricket match.
• Arabian Nights,’... Antoine Galland, the French translator – did his very best to Frenchify the dialogue and to erase all cultural details he thought would confuse the reader. He translates Haroun Alraschid’s concubines as dames ses favourites.
• ‘Whenever the English see me, they try to determine what kind of story they know me from,’ Ramy said. ‘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.’ ‘I’ve always just tried to blend in,’ said Robin. ‘But that’s impossible for me,’ said Ramy. ‘I have to play a part.
• the intercollegiate pecking order and associated stereotypes. Exeter was genteel but unintellectual; Brasenose was rowdy and lush with wine. Their neighbouring Queen’s and Merton were safely ignored. Balliol boys, who paid near the highest tuitions at the University,
• ‘He tells us of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who once formed a pact with Ionian sea raiders to defeat the eleven kings who had betrayed him... He wanted to prevent wars based on misunderstandings. So he sent young Egyptian boys to live with the Ionians and learn Greek so that when they grew up, they could serve as interpreters between the two peoples. ‘Here at Babel, we take inspiration from Psammetichus.’
• After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’ This was, Robin thought, the kindest thing anyone had ever had to say about his being foreign-born.
• No, the power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing – the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.’
• That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom; they did not want to give them back. By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them.
• Robin threw up his arms in frustration. ‘I mean, you’re giving me nothing, and asking me for everything.’ ‘Yes, brother, that’s really how secret societies with any degree of competence work.
• ‘Shouldn’t a faithful translation of individual words produce an equally faithful text?’ ‘It would,’ said Professor Playfair, ‘if, again, words existed in relation to each other in the same way in every language. But they do not... We ought not merely translate each word on its own, but must rather evoke the sense of how they fit the whole of the passage.
• Translation involves a spatial dimension – a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered like spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tearooms of today’s Britain.
• So there’s no way to convey the binary opposition between the masculine ein Fichtenbaum and the feminine einer Palme. You see? So we must proceed from the starting assumption that distortion is inevitable. The question is how to distort with deliberation.’
• What does it mean for a composition to read “easily”? What audience do we have in mind when we make these claims?
• ‘What we are doing is magic. It won’t always feel that way – indeed, when you do tonight’s exercise, it’ll feel more like folding laundry than chasing the ephemeral. But never forget the audacity of what you are attempting. Never forget that you are defying a curse laid by God.’
• or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him. Then came the harder questions. Which Chinese words could be traced back to recognizable pictures? Which couldn’t? Why was the character for ‘woman’ – 女 – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’?
• Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually. But I do think there is a pure realm of meaning – a language in between, where all concepts are perfectly expressed, which we have not been able to approximate. There is a sense, a feeling of when we have got it right.’
• his translation of Shakespeare. I have tried to soar with the author where he soars.’
• ‘I write,’ Pendennis said with very deliberate indifference, the way people who are very conceited throw out morsels of information they hope become objects of fascination. ‘I write poetry.
• ‘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. That’s why Shelley writes that translating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible.* ... The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’
• ‘Translators are always being accused of faithlessness,’ boomed Professor Playfair. ‘So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty?
• he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Schleiermacher chose the former. 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... ‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’... ‘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?’
• Evie Brooke – yes, that Evie – who realized the word treacle was first recorded in the seventeenth century in relation to the heavy use of sugar to disguise the bad taste of medicine. She then traced that back to the Old French triacle, meaning “antidote” or “cure from snakebite”, then the Latin theriaca, and finally to the Greek theriake, both meaning “antidote”.’ ‘But the match-pair is only between English and French,’ said Victoire. ‘How—’ ‘Daisy-chaining,’... ‘It’s a technique that invokes older etymologies as guides, shepherding meaning across miles and centuries. You might also think of it as extra stakes for a tent.
• Even words that diverge in meaning still have quite a close relationship with each other. This limits the magnitude of change the bars can effect.
• ‘Words have no meaning unless there is someone present who can understand them. And it can’t be a shallow level of understanding – ... This is also why invented languages* will never work, and why ancient languages like Old English have lost their effect.
• More often, they’re just a thin sheen of silver coating over wood or some other cheap metal. They run out of charge in a matter of weeks, after which they need to be touched up, as we put it.’ ‘For a fee?’ Robin asked.
• ‘It’s translation,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Simply, the words for translation itself.’...  tortured, accompanying scream. ‘The translation match-pair creates a paradox,’ Professor Playfair said calmly as the bar started shaking so hard that it leapt inches off the table in its throes.
• Languages affect each other; they inject new meaning into each other, and like water rushing out of a dam, the more porous the barriers are, the weaker the force. Most of the silver bars that power London are translations from Latin, French, and German. But those bars are losing their efficacy. As linguistic flow spreads across continents – as words like saute and gratin become a standard part of the English lexicon – the semantic warp loses its potency.’
• ‘Well, certainly. Language is a resource just like gold and silver. People have fought and died over those Grammaticas.’... ‘Do you know the official punishment in China for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner is death?’
• ‘But táifēng isn’t just a loanword,’ said Robin. ‘It means something in Chinese – tái is great, and fēng is wind–’ ‘And you don’t think the Chinese could have come up with a transliteration that had its own meaning?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘This happens all the time. Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations.
• ‘Well, it’s a particular kind of mental state. You do speak the words, but more importantly, you hold two meanings in your head at once. You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine traversing them.
• ‘That’ll wear off,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Walk around town muttering the same words over and over again, and soon you start feeling like a parrot instead of a magician.’
• 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’. The Ashmolean staff had been using this to compare fraudulent artifacts against the real ones,
• ‘Did you know Anthony was a slave?’ Letty asked one night in hall. Unlike Victoire, she was determined to raise the issue at every opportunity; indeed, she was obsessed with Anthony’s death in a way that felt uncomfortably, performatively righteous.
• It took a third graduate fellow to pull Wright to his feet, drag him to the front door, and fling him unceremoniously down the steps. Everyone else watched, mouths hanging open. Such a grotesque ceremony seemed unbefitting of a modern academic institution. Yet this was utterly appropriate. 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.*
• 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’ like one might hope, but rather ‘brother-in-law’. False friends were especially tricky when
• 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.
• If he pretended never to notice, and if they succeeded in whatever it was they wanted, then the fragile equilibrium of their lives at Babel would not be disturbed. Then they could maintain the thin veneer of deniability Robin had lived with for years. Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.
• ‘Bào,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The radical for fire. And beside it, the radical for violence, cruelty, and turbulence; the same radical which on its own can mean untamed, savage brutality; the same radical used in the words for thunder and cruelty.* And he translated it against burst, the tamest English translation possible, so tame that it hardly translates as such at all – so that all of that force, that destruction, was trapped in the silver.
• He did not know that impressing a white man could be as dangerous as provoking one... He could have written a thesis on white pride, on white curiosity. He knew how to make himself an object of fascination while neutralizing himself as a threat. He fine-tuned the greatest of all tricks, which was to swindle an Englishman into looking at him with respect. He grew so good at this that he almost began to lose himself in the artifice. A dangerous trap indeed, for a player to believe his own stories, to be blinded by the applause.
• they ended up going to see the sitting room show of someone who called herself Princess Caraboo. Princess Caraboo was notorious among Babel students. Once a humble cobbler’s daughter, she had persuaded several people into believing she was exotic royalty from the island of Javasu.
• These were the Factories, explained Mr Baylis, named not because they were centres of production, but because they were the residences of the factors – the agents of trade. Merchants, missionaries, government officials, and soldiers lived here during trading season. ‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ said Mr Baylis. ‘Quite like a handful of diamonds on top of a heap of old rubbish.’
• They were all white men who seemed cut from precisely the same cloth as Mr Baylis – superficially charming and talkative men who, despite their clean-cut attire, seemed to exude an air of intangible dirtiness.
• ‘It’s their free choice, isn’t it?’ Mr Baylis said. ‘You can’t fault business. Chinamen are simply filthy, lazy, and easily addicted. And you certainly can’t blame England for the foibles of an inferior race. Not where there’s money to be made.’
• Finally, Commissioner Lin spoke. ‘We know this.’ William Botelho swiftly translated. It was an odd conversation, conveyed through four people, none of whom spoke directly to the person he was listening to.
• No, personhood demanded the blood purity of the European man, the racial status that would make him Professor Lovell’s equal. Little Dick and Philippa were persons. Robin Swift was an asset,... He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.
• ‘You know, I once thought that having offspring was a kind of translation of its own. Especially when the parents are of such vastly different stock. One is curious to see what ends up coming through.’
• Robin’s eyes darted around the deck, searching for anything that might serve as an anchor – oars, wooden buckets, spare planks – damn it, why was everything on a ship designed to float?
• The four of them took turns losing their minds. There was an unspoken rule to this game: one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.
• ‘Capitale,’ Victoire said. ‘The Latin capitale, derived from caput, becomes the Old French chatel, which in English becomes chattel. Livestock and property become wealth. They write that on the bars, daisy-chain it with the word cattle, and then they fix those bars to iron chains so that slaves can’t escape. You know how? It makes them docile. Like animals.’
• it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.
• ‘But that would destroy silver-working,’ said Robin. ‘Wouldn’t it? It’d collapse the linguistic landscape. There would be nothing to translate. No differences to distort.’ ‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’
• Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’ ‘But—’ ‘But nothing. The abolitionist movement you know is a load of pomp. Rhetoric only. Pitt first raised the motion because he saw the need to cut off the slave trade to France. And Parliament got on board with the abolitionists because they were so very afraid of Black insurrection in the West Indies.’... I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’
• The Greeks loved parricide, Mr Chester had been fond of saying; they loved it for its infinite narrative potential, its invocations of legacy, pride, honour, and dominance. They loved the way it struck every possible emotion because it so deviously inverted the most basic tenet of human existence.
• He knew what she meant. She had chosen to let him die. This did not hurt as much as it should have. Rather, it clarified things; the stakes before them, the insignificance of their lives against the cause they’d chosen.
• Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges. {??}
• ‘We go on strike.’ Yes, he was on solid footing now; here was a question to which he knew the answer. He lifted his chin, tried to inject his voice with all the authority of Griffin and Anthony.
• many potential match-pairs prepared for the China campaign. One excited him very much: the Chinese character 利 (lì) could mean to sharpen one’s weapon, though it also carried connotations of profit and advantage, and its logogram represented grain being cut with a knife. Knives sharpened with the 利-sharp match-pair had frightfully thin blades, and unerringly found their targets.
• That afternoon commenced the strangest collaboration Robin had ever witnessed. Men who weeks ago had been screaming obscenities at Babel students now sat in the lobby among them, talking over tactics of street warfare and barrier integrity.... ‘Barricades are the only good thing we ever imported from the French,’
• ‘You are the proximate cause,’ insisted Professor Chakravarti. ‘You can make it stop.’ ‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’ ‘Even so, there are lines you can’t cross.’
• ‘When I think of Letty, I think about the character xì.’ He drew it in the air for her: 隙. ‘It’s most commonly used to mean “a crack or a fissure”. But in Classical Chinese texts, it also means “a grudge, or a feud”. According to rumours, the Qing Emperor uses a bar engraved with the xì-feud match-pair installed under a stone mural of the imperial lineage. And when cracks appear, it shows that someone is plotting against him.’
• She looked grief-stricken, vulnerable, the wretched heroine of a terrible fairy tale. But that, he reminded himself, was the advantage of the image Letty occupied. In this country, she had the face and colouring that inspired sympathy. Among them, no matter what happened, Letty alone could walk out of here innocent.
• without his laughter, his quick, easy wit, his sudden turns of conversation that made them feel like they were spinning plates. They were no longer a cohort. Now they were only a wake.
• Only Chinese had a character that encapsulated how much simple words could hurt: 刺, cì, the character for thorns, for stabs, for criticism. Such a flexible character. In a phrase, 刺言, 刺語, it meant ‘barbed, stinging words’. 刺 could mean ‘to goad’. 刺 could also mean ‘to murder’.
• But what struck him most just then was the beauty. The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.

• One could also argue that the business of translators in Legal was manipulating language to create favourable terms for European parties. One example is the alleged sale of land by King Paspehay to the English in Virginia ‘for copper’, despite the obvious difficulty of translating precisely the notions of European kingship or land as property into Algonquin languages.
• Omar ibn Said was a West African Islamic scholar captured into slavery in 1807. When he wrote his autobiographical essay in 1831, he was still enslaved by American politician James Owen in North Carolina. He would remain enslaved for the rest of his life.
• Most were composed without a basic understanding of the principles of silver-working, and involved elaborate spells in made-up languages often in imitation of Oriental languages. Yet some were, occasionally, rather incisive applications of folk etymology. For this reason, Professor Playfair conducted an annual survey of contraband silver match-pairs,
• Thomas Macaulay’s infamous February 1835 ‘Minute on Education’: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’
• the words of their own King Frederick II of Prussia thrown back at them. Frederick was so cowed by the literary dominance of French that he wrote in 1780 an essay, in French, criticizing his native German for sounding half-barbarous, unrefined, and unpleasing to the ear. He then proposed to improve the sound of German by adding -a as the final syllable to a great quantity of verbs to make them sound more Italian.
• The tactics of revolt spread fast. The British textile workers picked up these techniques of barricade from the 1831 and 1834 Canut revolts by silk workers in Lyon. Those revolts had been brutally repressed – but, crucially, they did not hold the backbone of the entire nation hostage.
• The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful;
• In (the white Englishwoman) Aphra Behn’s 1688 romantic novel Oroonoko, the African prince Oroonoko kills his lover Imoinda to save her from being violated by the English military forces against whom they are revolting. Oroonoko is later captured, bound to a post, quartered, and dismembered. Oroonoko, and its theatrical adaptation by Thomas Southerne, were received at the time as a great romance.