Once or twice a year I take a break from nonfiction and read a novel. This time it was R. F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. Quite a mouthful. I’ll just call it Babel from now on.  

It was fabulous.

Babel is a historical fantasy set in the 1830’s in Victorian England.

Robin Swift, an orphan from Canton, is brought to England by the aloof and mysterious Professor Lowell. Robin is raised in the Professor’s household and educated in Latin, Greek and Mandarin until he is old enough to enroll in the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation at the University of Oxford, commonly known as Babel.

Robin forms deep friendships with three other students who have similarly been plucked from around the world and brought to Babel.

They quickly learn that translation isn’t simply an academic or cultural discipline. It’s a source of power – a magical power that comes from what is lost in translation, from the subtle differences in meaning when words are translated from one language into another. At Babel they learn how to manifest this power through silver-working, engraving word pairs – a word and its translation — onto silver bars.

Those silver bars power the British Empire and ensure its continued dominance of the world.

Soon enough, Robin and his friends are faced with profound choices that test their loyalty to Babel and to each other.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence:
An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
By R. F. Kuang
Harper Voyager, New York, 2022

Babel is a great story. It’s also a work of considerable scholarship. Rebecca F. Kuang has Masters degrees in Chinese Studies from both Oxford and Cambridge. She’s currently working on a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale. Kuang has also won Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for her work.

She’s clearly done a huge amount of research in writing this novel. She lays out important background information as the story progresses without slowing down the narrative. The book is heavily footnoted with linguistic and historical commentary. None of this is tedious or pedantic. It enhanced the story for me: I was entertained and learned a lot too.

Babel is well over 500 pages, but Kuang keeps the story moving along briskly. I’m mostly interested in the ideas and the storyline in novels, but the characters in Babel, especially Robin and his friends, are rich and believable and we see them develop under pressure as the story progresses.

A couple of plot points strained my willingness to suspend disbelief, but I can’t tell you what those are with revealing spoilers! In any case, they don’t detract very much from the overall impact of the book.

Any story involving magic, a school and a small group of friends inevitably invites comparison to Harry Potter. But other than those very high-level points of similarity, the two have almost nothing in common. While Harry Potter is a conventional story of good vs. evil, the lines of conflict in Babel are far more complex. On the other hand, the magic in Babel is confined to silver-working.

The subtext of Harry Potter is a lengthy argument in favor of tolerance. Babel tackles a broader set of issues head-on including language and identity, colonialism, capitalism, free trade, opium addiction, the nature of power and the necessity of violence. Again, I didn’t find any of this dull or lecturing; these themes are important to the plot. They also made me think. Especially about violence.

The question at the heart of the book is this: can societies be reformed from within, or must change be forced through violence?

I was particularly interested in another theme running through Babel: the purpose and morality of translation. On the first day of class, one of Robin’s professors says:

“The first thing any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another.” [p. 104]

The implications of this are profound. It means, among many other things, that translation always introduces some distortion to the meaning of the original. There’s a power dynamic at work here. The translator always gets the last word and invariably imparts some of their own background, culture and biases into the final product. You could say translation does violence to the original, that it’s a betrayal. You might even say that translation is an act of colonialism especially if translations tend to be mostly into dominant languages.

Domination is actually the core purpose of translation at Babel.

Yet at the same time, how can we hope to understand one another, to see beyond our differences, without translation?

The biblical story of Babel tells how we lost our ability to understand each other. But I think we gained something too: “A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world.”

That makes translation “a necessary endevour, however futile.”

As one of Robin’s friends says:

“That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.” [p. 535]

Perhaps that is the true magic of translation.

Thanks for reading.

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