Babel, or the Necessity of Violence

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence. An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. R. F. Kuang. en.wikipedia.org . Aug 23, 2022. ISBN: 9780063021426 . Accessed Jan 17, 2026.

On Language

Language was always the companion of the empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

“Translate, please.” This all hinged on him, Robin realized. The choice was his. Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.

Every language is complex in its own way. Latin just happens to work its complexity into the shape of the word. Its morphological richness is an asset, not an obstacle. Consider the sentence He will learn. Tā huì xué. Three words in both English and Chinese. In Latin, it takes only one. Disce. Much more elegant, you see?

He read the city, and he learned its language. New words in English were a game to him, for in understanding the word he always came to understand something about English history or culture itself. […] Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you.

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.

One particularly ingenious pair was the translation from the Chinese character gǔ meaning ‘old or aged’, and the English ‘old’. […] 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.

So you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases.

It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. […] What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. #gestalt

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?

It felt good to sink into the refuge of a dead language, to fight a rhetorical war whose stakes could not really touch him.

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.

Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind the reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language? […] But what is the opposite of fidelity? Betrayal. 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?

Change

Now, what I wish is that all these women would stop taking part in those anti-slavery debates. They see too much of themselves in their situation; it puts ideas in their head. […] She’d like to think that it’s a hop and a skip from abolition to women’s suffrage.

Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign peoples that bring wealth and prosperity to all. 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.

“The point of it all is to keep amassing silver. We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward. And we enforce those trade deals with the same silver bars, now inscribed with Babel’s work, that make our ships faster, our soldiers hardier, and our guns more deadly. It’s a vicious cycle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world. We are that outside force. Hermes. We funnel away silver 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. That’s what this is all for.” This was, Robin had to admit, a very compelling theory of the world. Only it seemed to implicate nearly everything he held dear.

PROFESSOR CRAFT. Babel hardly discriminates against women. It’s simply that so few of our sex are interested in languages.
LETTY. But you’re the only woman professor at Babel, and we all – that is, all the girls here and I – we think that’s quite admirable, so I wanted –
PROFESSOR CRAFT. To know how it’s done? Hard work and innate brilliance. You know that already.
LETTY. It’s different for women, though, and surely you’ve experienced –
PROFESSOR CRAFT. When I have relevant topics for discussion, I will bring them up in class, Miss Price. But class is over. And you’re now infringing on my time.

But language is not like a commercial good, like tea or silks, to be bought and paid for. Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?

He could not bear how this confession would shatter the life they’d built for themselves. And because he himself could not resolve the contradiction of his willingness to thrive at Babel even as it became clearer, day by day, how obviously unjust were the foundations of its fortunes. The only way he could justify his happiness here, to keep dancing on the edges of the two worlds, was to continue awaiting Griffin’s correspondence at night – a hidden silent rebellion whose main purpose was to assuage his guilt over the fact that all this gold and glitter had to come at a cost.

Professor Lovell’s promised future of progress and enlightenment seemed only to have wrought poverty and suffering; the new jobs he thought the displaced workers should take up never materialized.

There were rumors of a grand dinner to be put on for Oxford’s poor and homeless, but the city authorities argued that the richness of roast beef and plum pudding would put the poor in such a state of excitement that they would lose their ability to properly enjoy the illumination. So the poor went hungry that night, but at least the lights were lovely.

Oh, the Qing Emperor doesn’t care about vices. He’s stingy about his silver, that’s all. But trade only works when there’s give and take, and currently we’re sitting at a deficit. There’s nothing we have that those Chinamen want, apparently, except opium. They can’t get enough of the stuff. They’ll pay anything for it. And if I had my way, every man, woman, and child in this country would be puffing opium smoke until they couldn’t think straight.

Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labor and colonial pain.

What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Always this, the argument from bondage, as if his loyalties were shackled by privilege he had not asked for and did not choose to receive. Did he owe Oxford his life, just because he had drunk champagne within its cloisters? Did he owe Babel his loyalty because he once believed its lies?

You want to do the right thing. 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. […] You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid. […] But all sacrifice does is make you feel better. It doesn’t help the rest of us, so it’s an ultimately meaningless gesture.

Most of the British don’t understand there’s a fight to be had at all. For them, this war is something imaginary – something that could only benefit them, something they don’t have to look at or worry over. #societal-apathy

You’ll want to avoid rhetoric about anticolonialism and respecting national sovereignty. Use terms like scandal, collusion, corruption, lack of transparency, and whatnot. Cast things in terms that the average Londoner will get worked up about, and don’t make it an issue of race.

If we are to turn the tides of history, we need some of those men – the same men who find no issue in selling me and my kind at auction – to become our allies. We need to convince them that a British expansion, founded on pyramids of silver, is not in their own best interest. Because their own interest is the only logic they’ll listen to. Not justice, not human dignity, not the liberal freedoms they so profess to value. Profit.

Next to them, tomes by Plato and Locke and Montesquieu waited to be read, discussed, gesticulated about; theoretical rights like freedom and liberty would be debated between those who already enjoyed them, stale concepts that, upon their readers' graduation ceremonies, would promptly be forgotten.

She couldn’t seem to crack the code, no matter how she tried, because every time she asked, the response was always Isn’t it obvious, Letty? Don’t you see? No, she didn’t see. She found their principles absurd, the height of foolishness. She thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless.

All of them had fought tooth and nail to win a seat in a classroom at Oxford. […] So why wasn’t that enough? They’d beaten the system. Why in God’s name did they want so badly to break it as well? Why bite the hand that fed you? Why throw it all away? But there are larger things at stake. It’s a matter of global injustice, Letty. The plunder of the rest of the world. She tried again to put aside her prejudices, to keep an open mind, to learn what bothered them so. Time and time again she found her ethics questioned, and she reiterated her positions, as if proving she was not indeed a bad person. Of course she did not support this war. Of course she was against all kinds of prejudice and exploitation. Of course she sided with the abolitionists. Of course she could support lobbying for change, as long as it was peaceful, respectable, civilized. But then they were talking about blackmail. […] This was no noble fight, only a shared delusion.

It was why Griffin and Anthony had been so confident in their struggle, why they were convinced the colonies could take on the Empire. Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited.

Strikers in the country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. #societal-apathy

And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much for the entire community to bear.

VICTOIRE. I’m not being squeamish; I’m being prudent. It’s too fast, Robin. It’s too much all at once. You need to let the debates settle. You need to let public opinion turn against the war –
ROBIN. It’s not enough. They won’t reason themselves into justice now when they never have before. Fear’s the only thing that works. This is just tactics –
VICTOIRE. This is not coming from tactics. It’s coming from grief.

PROFESSOR CHAKRAVARTI. You are the proximate cause. You can make it stop.
ROBIN. But that’s precisely the devil’s trick. 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.

We have to die to get their pity. 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. 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 has no illusions about what she will encounter. She knows she will face immeasurable cruelty. She knows her greatest obstacle will be cold indifference, born of a bone-deep investment in an economic system that privileges some and crushes others. […] 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.

Belonging

Whenever the English see me, they try to determine what kind of story they know me from. 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.

There was no question about what had happened. They were both shaken by the sudden realization that they did not belong in this place, that despite their association with the Translation Institute and despite their gowns and pretensions, their bodies were not safe on the streets. They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men.

One thing united them all – without Babel, they had nowhere in this country to go. They’d been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand, and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom; they did not want to give them back.

He wanted Pendennis’s life, not so much for the material pleasures – the wine, the cigars, the clothes, the dinners – but for what it represented: the assurance that one would always be welcome in England. If he could only attain Pendennis’s fluency, or at least an imitation of it, then he, too, would blend into the tapestry of this idyllic campus life. And he would no longer be the foreigner, second-guessing his pronunciation at every turn, but a native whose belonging could not possibly be questioned or revoked.

Her distress belied a deeper terror, a terror which Robin felt as well, which was that Anthony had been expendable. That they were all expendable. That this tower – this place where they had for the first time found belonging – treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn’t, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke.

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. He could envision himself as a postgraduate fellow, dripping with distinctions and awards.

Victoire only had Letty, who professed to always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world.

That dream had always been founded on a lie. None of them had ever stood a chance of truly belonging here, for Oxford wanted only one kind of scholar, the kind born and bred to cycle through posts of power it had created for itself. Everyone else it chewed up and discarded. These towering edifices were built from the coin of the sale of slaves, and the silver that kept them running came blood-stained from the mines of Potosí.

Leaving

The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known. He watched the ocean for a long time, indifferent to the wind, staring until even his imagined vision of the shore faded away.

He tried very hard to live exclusively in English. When thoughts popped up in Chinese, he quashed them. He quashed his memories too. His life in Canton – his mother, his grandparents, a decade of running about the docks – it all proved surprisingly easy to shed, perhaps because this passage was so jarring, the break so complete.

Languages are easier to forget than you imagine. Once you stop living in the world of Chinese, you stop thinking in Chinese. I want you to live in English, this is true. But I still need you to practice your Chinese. Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.

They blinked at each other. Robin felt that surely there were other words that should be said, words to mark this occasion – his growing up, leaving home, his entering university – as momentous. But he couldn’t imagine what they might be, and apparently neither could Professor Lovell.

For the first time since he’d arrived at Oxford, it struck him that he was to make a life here. He imagined it stretched out before him: the gradual accumulation of books and trinkets in those spare bookshelves […]

Canton had always been a shifting, dynamic city, sucking in what the sea delivered and digesting it all into its own peculiar hybridity. How could he ever assume it might remain rooted in the past?

Characterization

The labourer gawked at him. A thousand emotions worked through that weathered face – indignation, frustration, and finally, resignation. Robin had been afraid the labourer might argue, might fight, but quickly it became clear that for this man, such treatment was nothing new. This had happened before.

He made a decision then. He would never question Professor Lovell, never probe at the empty space where the truth belonged. As long as Professor Lovell did not accept him as a son, Robin would not attempt to claim him as a father. A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

I see now that I was wrong. Laziness and deceit are common traits among your kind. This is why China remains an indolent and backwards country while her neighbors hurtle towards progress. You are, by nature, foolish, weak-minded, and disinclined to hard work. You must resist these traits, Robin. You must learn to overcome the pollution of your blood.

Some other child suited to better, kinder treatment might have realized that such nonchalance on the part of adults like Mrs Piper, Mr Felton, and Mr Chester to a badly bruised eleven-year-old was frightfully wrong. But Robin was so grateful for this return to equilibrium that he couldn’t find it in himself to even resent what had happened.

Even his course readings became more exciting when he began seeing them as source material for cutting observations, complaining or humorous, to be shared later with the group.

“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.

They became what they’d aspired to be since their first year – aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only in the life of the mind. They adored it.

They were all presently suffering the peculiar madness of the very scared and very determined, the madness that made academia feel as dangerous as the battlefield.

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 at 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.

It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

World Building

No one exclaimed in surprise when he kicked the front door – locked, because plague thieves were stripping the houses in the neighborhood bare, and though there was little of value in their home, the boy and his mother had wanted a few hours of peace before the sickness took them too. The boy heard all the commotion from upstairs, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. By then he only wanted to die.

He learned that London in 1830 was a city that could not decide what it wanted to be. The Silver City was the largest financial centre of the world, the leading edge of industry and technology. But its profits were not shared equally. London was as much a city of plays at Covent Garden and balls in Mayfair as it was a city of teeming slums around St Giles.

References

1. espoused values vs enacted values - Google Search. www.google.com . Accessed Jan 17, 2026.
2. LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts: A consolidated list of the Jeff Dean Facts! github.com . Accessed Jan 17, 2026.