Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
Next up on my list of Books I Really Should Have Read Ages Ago is R.F. Kuang’s novel set in an alternate-history, fantasy-adjacent Oxford England. And oh boy, this one is going to sit in my head for a long time. The story takes place at the height of British Colonialism, and it’s harrowing and tragic, occasionally touching and cheerfully good-hearted, at times utterly infuriating, and stunningly beautiful.
In what feels like something out of a dream, Robin Swift (not his real name) is rescued from certain death in Canton China and whisked away to a life of luxury and all the books he can read in 1820’s Hampstead England, with the promise of attending university in Oxford and maybe a career at Babel, the Royal Translation Institute. What makes his situation a bit more nightmarish is that his savoir is a cold and remote Englishman who didn’t (possibly on purpose) get there in time to save Robin’s mother and the rest of his family from dying of cholera. There’s also the grueling hours every day learning new languages, and this is not optional. It’s made very clear to Robin that he’s only one mistake or moment of “laziness” away from being sent back to a life of poverty in his home country.
This fluctuation between highs and lows happens over and over in Robin’s life. After years of isolation and relentless study, Robin arrives at Oxford and meets fellow translation student Ramiz Rafi Mirza (or just Ramy, if you like), and suddenly Robin has his first real friend. Ramy is soon joined by the other Babel students in their year, Victoire Desgraves (French by way of Haiti) and Letitia Price (Letty, daughter of an English Admiral who still hasn’t forgiven her for being a prodigy while also being a girl.) The four of them make up a cohort of friends who instantly bond over their status of being lonely young adults on the outside of privileged society, while also being brilliant college students who absorb languages like sunlight, and it’s absolutely magical.
…they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them.
I really can’t overstate just how delightful of a picture R.F. Kuang paints of Robin and his cohort’s first few years at Babel. It’s four people enjoying the delights of 1830’s England – picnics and punting and plays and so much more – with all the benefits of having wealthy benefactors and not needing to worry about money. But it’s also card games, and complaints about British food (or obsessions about the perfect scones), and arguments that are forgiven, mostly, by the next day, and rolling on the floor laughing late at night because the smell of pears has to be coming from somewhere, Victoire. Even the times when all of them are overworked and stressed and almost losing their minds from worry because of upcoming exams are still delightful because all four of them are together in it: coming up with silly games to try to figure out a difficult translation, blanking out in conversations because they can’t stop dissecting the words they’re trying to speak, or delivering long tearful rants that they’ve forgotten every bit of German they ever knew (saying all of this in German, naturally). They’re working together to secure their careers in service to the Crown as upstanding British citizens,
And – here’s the low to balance out the high – none of them are considered real British citizens worth respecting. And they all know it, because society keeps finding new ways to tell them. Victoire has a room to herself, but only because no one would deign to share a space with a woman who’s Black, and no, she isn’t allowed to use the indoor bathroom. Robin endures endless prying questions about things like Chinese foot-binding or urine-based medicine, and having to hear every wealthy white Englishman refer to “Chinamen” as lazy and backwards. Ramy has learned all sorts of coping techniques from being turned away by storekeepers, and hearing people insist that Hindus and Muslims are “pretty much the same thing”. And both Letty and Victoire have to wear trousers to class to avoid upsetting anyone who thinks intellectualism is just too much for women’s delicate sensibilities. All of them have a talent that’s valuable, but they themselves are never going to be valued, if that makes sense.
And the thing that’s so valuable to the British Empire that they’ll bring in women and people with foreign blood in order to make it happen: Silver. Specifically, small bars of silver that are inscribed with two words – with a translation – that can pretty much make anything happen as long as you can come up with the right combination of languages and words.
“…the power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that the 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.”
I think this book would be a linguist’s dream, because there are endless examples here of language, how it morphs over time, how meaning shifts between languages, whether a translator’s goal is to provide a strict word-for-word translation that misses nuances, or to try to capture what the person writing it meant, even if that means you’re having to color something with the values of a completely different society. All of this interplay between words and meanings powers the silver bars, which can be made to do things like instantly cure a cholera patient, increase the efficiency of a steam-engine, or make a wealthy person’s sitting room a little brighter, or make their garden feel a little more quiet and peaceful. Babel’s translators’ job is to constantly find new word combinations to create new effects. And since the bars have to be created by someone who can think in both languages, and since the more familiar a language is to a society the less the existing bars will work, that means more countries from further and further away need to be tapped for native speakers.
Which of course means language has become one more thing for the British Empire to exploit.
Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire.
This book may have fantasy elements, but the existence of Silver technology here is just speeding up actual events in history. The story is a detailed, unflinching look at what British Colonialism really means, and there is some deep pain being expressed at everything wrong with a society that will allow things like slavery and drug trade and cultural theft, and then use violence to make sure only one privileged country benefits. Sometimes the antagonists come across as slightly two-dimensional, but it still feels very believable that the people in charge would be so willfully blind, not just to the fact that it’s wrong to make the poor and not-British suffer, but that any suffering is happening at all. The book starts not too long after the Luddite movement was brutally put down, and many of its members hanged for the crime of *checks notes* not wanting men, women, and children to be crushed or have their limbs ripped off because the wealthy factory owners needed unsafe machines to either run fast, or faster. The real-life historical events of Great Britain forcing an illegal drug onto an entire country just so they could have something China was willing to buy almost seems more cartoonish than wealthy men referring to foreigners as naughty children needing to be spanked.
Robin is caught in the horrible position of benefiting from the system, and wanting to do everything to belong to high society, while hating everyone involved in making it happen. The happy college days turn into a murder mystery, then actual murder, then a terrifying revolution led by the last people who ever wanted to revolt. The chapter headers and numerous footnotes start out scholarly and quirky, but gradually get more and more bitter (don’t skip the footnotes; it feels like there are entire books worth of story hidden in some of them) as Robin and his friends deal with betrayal and rage from people who dragged them from their home countries and can’t understand why they won’t be just be grateful for it. There are hard decisions to be made about violence, about who actually bears the effects from the violence, and when something might be going too far, and if you think there are going to be any uncomplicated answers or uncomplicated people then you haven’t been paying attention. And all that violence and refusal to hear people and the driving need to actually do something about it keeps building until the final chapter, and a cinematic moment that meant I had to sit quietly for a little while and let everything in my brain settle down.
I thought towards the beginning of the book that the Silver element was mostly fantasy window-dressing. But as things progress you can see that Silver technology, the concept of power through translation, is a theme that threads through the entire novel: the way translation is a bridge between people, what’s lost in the meaning between words, how people interpret everything – entire cultures – based on their own viewpoint rather than what the other person is saying, and how every bit of all that can be weaponized. Even the material itself is important; a shiny metal that’s only as valuable as everyone agrees that it is, and which can make an entire economy crumble to a halt as soon as that value goes away.