‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. 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. But for all we know, the real culprit could be a persimmon.’
You need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.
In the years to come, Robin would return so many times to this night. He was forever astonished by its mysterious alchemy, by how easily two badly socialized, restrictively raised strangers had transformed into kindred spirits in the span of minutes. Ramy seemed just as flushed and excited as Robin felt. They talked and talked. No topics seemed taboo; everything they brought up was either a point of instant agreement – scones are better without sultanas, thank you – or a cause for fascinating debate – no, London’s lovely, actually; you country mice are just prejudiced because you’re jealous. Only don’t swim in the Thames.
‘Why did you talk like that?’ Robin asked him once they were out of earshot. ‘And what do you mean, you’re actually royalty?’ ‘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. Back in Calcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim from Bengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He owns property in London. And you know how he did it? He opened a restaurant, which failed; and then he tried to be hired as a butler or valet, which also failed. And then he had the brilliant idea of opening a shampoo house in Brighton.’ Ramy chuckled. ‘Come and get your healing vapours! Be massaged with Indian oils! It cures asthma and rheumatism; it heals paralysis. Of course, we don’t believe that at home. But all Dean Mahomed had to do was give himself some medical credentials, convince the world of this magical Oriental cure, and then he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’
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. The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire’s sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial, or when they all knew Letty was about to come to class with a paper bag full of lemon biscuits because it was a Wednesday morning and Taylor’s bakery put out lemon biscuits on Wednesdays. But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.
The language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable, and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more. But what do we know of thought and feeling except as expressed through language?’
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.* So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’
When we say a word or phrase is untranslatable, we mean that it lacks a precise equivalent in another language. Even if its meaning can be partially captured in several words or sentences, something is still lost – something that falls into semantic gaps which are, of course, created by cultural differences in lived experience. Take the Chinese concept dao, which we translate sometimes as “the way”, “the path”, or “the way things ought to be”. Yet none of those truly encapsulates the meaning of dao, a little word that requires an entire philosophical tome to explain.
English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. 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.
The photograph looked strange, though he did not say so aloud. All of their expressions were artificial, masks of faint discomfort. The camera had distorted and flattened the spirit that bound them, and the invisible warmth and camaraderie between them appeared now like a stilted, forced closeness. Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation.
Letty suddenly broke down crying and declared she knew not a word of German, not a single word, that she was a fraud and her entire career at Babel had been based on pretence. None of them understood this rant until much later, for she had indeed delivered it in German.
‘You know,’ said Robin, ‘there’s a Chinese character, xiǎn,* which can mean “rare, fresh, and tasty”. But it can also mean “meagre and scanty”.’ Ramy spat the truffle into a napkin. ‘Your point?’ ‘Sometimes rare and expensive things are worse.’
He remembered English phrases rising unbidden to his mind as he watched the revels; phrases from songs and poems that he wasn’t quite sure on the meaning of, but which looked and sounded right – and perhaps that was just what poetry was? Meaning through sound? Through spelling? He couldn’t remember whether he merely thought it, or if he asked it out loud to everyone he came across, but he found himself consumed with the question ‘What is the light fantastic?’
For these, truly, were the last of the golden days. That summer felt all the more precious because they all knew it couldn’t last, that such delights were only so because of the endless, exhausting nights that had earned them. Soon year four would start, then graduating exams, and then work. None of them knew what life might look like after that, but surely they could not remain a cohort forever. Surely, eventually, they had to leave the city of dreaming spires; had to take up their respective posts and repay all that Babel had given them. But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.
‘I’m thinking about the Chinese character for dawn,’ he said truthfully. He couldn’t let himself dwell on the larger magnitude of it all. His thoughts threatened to spiral to places he feared he could not control unless he brought them down to the familiar distraction of language. ‘Dàn. It looks like this.’ He drew the character in the air: 旦. ‘Up top is the radical for the sun – rì.’ He drew 日. ‘And under that, a line. And I’m just thinking about how it’s beautiful because it’s so simple. It’s the most direct use of pictography, see. Because dawn is just the sun coming up over the horizon.’
The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.
‘We could escape to the New World,’ Ramy proposed. ‘Go to Canada.’ ‘You don’t even speak French,’ Letty said. ‘It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?’
‘You want to do the right thing,’ said Ramy, bullish. ‘You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you’ve committed, then you’re absolved.’
‘The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese. ‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.’ Once again, Griffin offered the gun to Robin. ‘Careful, it’s front-heavy.’ This time Robin accepted it. He aimed it experimentally at the trees. The barrel did, indeed, tip downwards; he tilted his hand up against his wrist to keep it level. ‘Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’
The fate of a poor family in Canton is in fact intricately tied to the fate of an out-of-work weaver from Yorkshire. Neither benefits from the expansion of empire. Both only get poorer as the companies get richer. So if they could only form an alliance …’ Anthony wove his fingers together. ‘But that’s the problem, you see. No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.’
Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical.
He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture. The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’, and Robin wanted with every ounce of his being a world that no longer was. He hoped until he thought he was going mad, until he started hearing fragments of his thoughts as if spoken outside of him, low, gruff words that echoed around the stone.
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. One being creates another, moulds and influences it in its own image. The son becomes, then replaces, the father; Kronos destroys Ouranos, Zeus destroys Kronos and, eventually, becomes him. But Robin had never envied his father, never wanted anything of his except his recognition, and he hated to see himself reflected in that cold, dead face. No, not dead – reanimated, haunting; Professor Lovell leered at him, and behind him, opium burned on Canton’s shores, hot and booming and sweet.
It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries.
‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. But I don’t want to die, Robin.’ Her throat hitched. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko.* I don’t want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.’ She fell against his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, rocking back and forth. ‘I want to live,’ she repeated, ‘and live, and thrive, and survive them. I want a future. I don’t think death is a reprieve. I think it’s – it’s just the end. It forecloses everything – a future where I might be happy, and free. And it’s not about being brave. It’s about wanting another chance. Even if all I did was run away, even if I never lifted a finger to help anyone else as long as I lived – at least I would get to be happy. At least the world might be all right, just for a day, just for me. Is that selfish?’ Her shoulders crumpled. Robin held her tight against him. What an anchor she was, he thought, an anchor he did not deserve. She was his rock, his light, the sole presence that had kept him going. And he wished, he wished, that was enough for him to hold on to. ‘Be selfish,’ he whispered. ‘Be brave.’
In these last moments, the seconds weren’t enough. In theory this decision they’d made was something beautiful. In theory they would be martyrs, heroes, the ones who’d pushed history off its path. But none of that was a comfort. In the moment, all that mattered was that death was painful and frightening and permanent, and none of them wanted to die.
For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.
Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.