Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (R. F. Kuang) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. notes)

Notes

1

For example, I never heard anyone refer to High Street as ‘The High’ when I was at Oxford, but G.V. Cox tells us otherwise.

2

In Book IV, Chapter VII of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues against colonialism on the grounds that the defence of colonies is a drain on resources, and that the economic gains of the monopolistic colonial trade are an illusion. He writes: ‘Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.’ This view was not widely shared at the time.

3

I killed Cock Robin.

Who saw him die?

4

William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, 1804.

5

As Robin’s family had only recently migrated south, he had grown up speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese. But his Cantonese, Professor Lovell informed him, could now be forgotten. Mandarin was the language of the Qing imperial court in Peking, the language of officials and scholars, and therefore the only dialect that mattered.

This view is a side effect of the British Academy’s path dependency on scant previous Western research. Matteo Ricci’s Portuguese-Chinese dictionary was of the Mandarin dialect he learned at the Ming court; Francisco Varo, Joseph Prémare, and Robert Morrison’s Chinese dictionaries were also of Mandarin. Britain’s Sinologists of that era, then, were far more focused on Mandarin than on other dialects. And so Robin was asked to forget his preferred native tongue.

6

‘Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.’

7

Hampstead Heath rhymes with teeth. Example: ‘She’s still got all her baby hampsteads.’

8

Dinner, sinner.

9

A reasonable error. By rape, Pope meant ‘to snatch, to take by force’, which is an older meaning derived from the Latin rapere.

10

Because he owned slaves.

11

This was to be the last Marryat title Robin ever read. It was just as well. Frederick Marryat’s novels, though full of the high seas adventuring and valour that endeared them to young English boys, also portrayed Black people as happy, satisfied slaves and American Indians as either noble savages or dissolute drunks. Chinese and Indians he described as ‘races of inferior stature and effeminate in person’.

12

As the weekly papers recorded the climbing death counts, Robin asked Mrs Piper why the doctors could not simply go around healing the sick with silver, as Professor Lovell had done to him. ‘Silver is expensive,’ responded Mrs Piper, and that was the last they ever spoke of it.

13

Here Mr Hallows forgets that chattel slavery, wherein slaves were treated as property and not persons, is a wholly European invention.

14

Indeed, in the wake of Haiti’s liberation, the British began toying with the idea of importing labourers of other races, such as the Chinese (‘a sober, patient, industrious people’), as a possible alternative to African slave labour. The Fortitude experiment of 1806 attempted to establish a colony of two hundred Chinese labourers in Trinidad to create a ‘barrier between us and the Negroes’. The colony failed, and most labourers soon returned to their native China. Still, the idea of replacing African labour with Chinese labour remained attractive to British entrepreneurs, and would be continually revived throughout the nineteenth century.

15

Formerly known as Gropecunt Lane, Magpie Lane was originally, as the name suggests, a street of brothels. This was not mentioned in Robin’s guidebook.

16

There had once been a boy named Henry Little who’d visited Hampstead with his father, one of Professor Lovell’s colleagues in the Royal Asiatic Society. Robin tried to engage him in conversation about scones, which he thought as good an opening salvo as any, but Henry Little merely reached out and stretched Robin’s eyelids out so hard that Robin, startled, kicked him in the shin. Robin was banished to his room, and Henry Little to the garden; Professor Lovell had not invited his colleagues to bring their children over since then.

17

This was true. University College had produced, among others, a Chief Justice of Bengal (Sir Robert Chambers), a Chief Justice of Bombay (Sir Edward West), and a Chief Justice of Calcutta (Sir William Jones). All were white men.

18

無 (wú) means ‘negative, not, without’; 形 (xíng) means ‘appearance, form, shape’. 五行 means not just invisible, but intangible. To illustrate: the poet Zhang Shunmin of the Northern Song dynasty wrote once that ‘詩是無形的畫, 畫是有形詩’; that poems were incorporeal (wúxíng) paintings, and paintings were corporeal poems.

19

幫忙 (bāngmáng), ‘to help, to lend a hand’.

20

Sarah Stickney Ellis, a well-known author, published several books (including The Wives of England, The Mothers of England, and The Daughters of England) arguing that women had a moral imperative to improve society through domestic propriety and virtuous conduct. Robin had no strong opinion on the matter; he’d picked up her work by accident.

21

This is, frankly, quite a generous description of the Legal Department. 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. The Legal solution to these issues was simply to declare that the Algonquins were too savage to have developed those concepts, and it was a good thing the English were there to teach them.

22

He was not. The eighth floor of the Institute had been reconstructed seven times since the building’s initial construction.

23

A good amount of foundational Western scholarship on Sanskrit was done by German Romantics such as Herder, Schlegel, and Bopp. Not all of their monographs had been translated into English – at least, not well – and so most students studying Sanskrit at Babel were also required to learn German.

24

Cf. the related German unheimlich.

25

This is true. Mathematics is not divorced from culture. Take counting systems – not all languages use base ten. Or geometry – Euclidean geometry assumes a conception of space not shared by all. One of the greatest intellectual shifts in history involves the transition from Roman numerals to the more elegant Arabic numerals, whose place-value notation and concept of zero, signifying nothing, made possible new forms of mental arithmetic. Old habits died hard; in 1299, merchants in Florence were banned by the Florentine Arte del Cambio from using both zero and Arabic numerals: ‘He shall write openly and fully by letter.’

26

Like Robin, Ilse was known to the English not by her birth name but by an adopted name; a combination of a chosen Anglicized name (Ilse) and the island from which she’d come (Dejima).

27

The boys stayed out of this one. Privately, Ramy thought Letty had a fair point that as a woman, she was entitled to inherit none of the Price estate to begin with. Robin thought it was a bit rich for her to call herself ‘impoverished’ when they were all receiving stipends sizable enough that they could dine out whenever they felt like it.

28

Robin, Victoire, and Ramy were all very disappointed to learn that corned beef had nothing to do with corn, but with the size of rock salt crystals used to cure said beef.

29

A swindler, a grifter.

30

Thief’s slang for a gaoler (jigger meaning ‘door’, and dubber meaning ‘closer’).

31

坦途.

32

‘On Agriculture’.

33

These receptions were entertaining at first, but quickly grew tiresome when it became apparent that Babel scholars were there less as distinguished guests and more as zoo animals on display, expected to dance and perform for wealthy donors. Robin, Victoire, and Ramy were always treated as national representatives of the countries they appeared to hail from. Robin had to put up with excruciating small talk about Chinese botanical gardens and lacquerware; Ramy was expected to elaborate on the inner workings of the ‘Hindu race’, whatever that meant; and Victoire, bizarrely, was always being asked for speculation advice in the Cape.

34

Through Colin Thornhill and the Sharp brothers, Robin became aware of various ‘sets’ of people one might run with, which included ‘fast men’, ‘slow men’, ‘reading men’, ‘gentlemen’, ‘cads’, ‘sinners’, ‘smilers’, and ‘saints’. He thought perhaps he qualified as a ‘reading man’. He hoped he was not a ‘cad’.

35

Many romantic Univ undergraduates fancied themselves successors to Percy Bysshe Shelley, who rarely attended lectures, was expelled for refusing to admit authorship of a pamphlet titled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, married a nice girl named Mary, and later drowned in a violent storm off the Gulf of Larici.

36

Robin, despite his general dislike of Shelley, had still read his thoughts on translation, which he grudgingly respected: ‘Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower – and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.’

37

For example: ‘You know how the French refer to an unfortunate situation? Triste comme un repas sans fromage. Sad as a meal without cheese. Which is, really, the state of all English cheese.’

38

Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt is perhaps most famous for writing in 1836 ‘On the Structural Difference of Human Languages and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of the Human Race’, in which he argues, among other things, that a culture’s language is deeply tied to the mental capacities and characteristics of those who speak it, which explains why Latin and Greek are better suited for sophisticated intellectual reasoning than, say, Arabic.

39

The military applications of this match-pair were really not as useful as Professor Playfair made them sound. It was impossible to specify which pieces of knowledge one wanted to remove, and often the match-pair only caused enemy soldiers to forget how to lace their boots, or how to speak the fragmented English they knew. The Duke of Wellington was not impressed.

40

In the late eighteenth century, there had been a brief craze of the silver-working potential of created languages such as the abbess Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical Lingua Ignota, which had a glossary of over a thousand words; John Wilkins’s language of truth, which involved an elaborate classification scheme for every known thing in the universe; and Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty’s ‘Universal Language’, which attempted to reduce the world to a perfectly rational expression of arithmetic. All these faltered upon a common obstacle that later became accepted as basic truth at Babel: that languages are more than mere ciphers, and must be used to express oneself to others.

41

風暴.

42

颱風.

43

‘Awkward,’ Victoire would say, pointing to Robin, ‘comes from the Old Norse aufgr, which means “turned the wrong way round, like a turtle on its back”.’

‘Then Victoire must derive from vicious, not Victoria, for you are nothing but vice,’ Robin would retort.

44

尼.

45

涅槃.

46

An understatement. A few short decades after Potosí’s ‘discovery’ in 1545, the silver city had become a death trap for enslaved Africans and drafted indigenous labourers working amidst mercury vapour, foul water, and toxic waste. Spain’s ‘King of Mountains and Envy of Kings’ was a pyramid built on bodies lost to disease, forced marches, malnutrition, overwork, and a poisoned environment.

47

Two weeks into Michaelmas several freshers at Balliol had rented several punting boats and, in their drunken revels, created a traffic jam in the middle of the Cherwell that piled up three barges and one houseboat, costing incalculable pounds in damages. As punishment, the university had suspended all races until next year.

48

It took a great deal of rigour and scrutiny to contribute anything to a Grammatica. Oxford was still smarting from the embarrassments dealt by a former visiting lecturer named George Psalmanazar, a Frenchman who, claiming to be from Formosa, passed off his pale skin by saying that Formosans lived underground. He had lectured and published on the Formosan languages for decades before he was exposed as a complete fraud.

49

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.

50

This was only the beginning of the multiple flaws of Schlegel’s work. Islam he considered a ‘dead empty Theism’. He also assumed that Egyptians were descended from Indians, and argued Chinese and Hebrew were inferior to German and Sanskrit because they lacked inflection.

51

Many of Babel’s customers were ready to believe that their silver-work made use of foreign languages, but not that their maintenance involved foreign-born scholars, and more than once Professor Chakravarti had had to enlist one of the white fourth years to accompany him and Robin on trips just to get them through the door.

52

The manuscript in question – named the Baresch Codex after the alchemist who brought it to public attention – is a vellum-bound codex of what appears to be magic, science, or botany. It is written in an alphabet combining some Latin symbols and wholly unfamiliar symbols; this alphabet employs no capitalization and no punctuation marks. The script appears closest to Latin, and indeed makes use of Latin abbreviations, but the manuscript’s purpose and meaning have remained a mystery since its discovery. The manuscript was acquired by Babel in the mid-eighteenth century, and many Babel scholars since have failed to translate it; the alphabet used for resonance links takes inspiration from the manuscript’s symbols but represents no progress in deciphering the original.

53

And even this exam ritual was rather tame compared to the way things were done in the late eighteenth century. Back then fourth years were subject to what was called the ‘door test’, in which recent examinees lined up to walk through the entrance the morning after grading finished. Those who had passed would step through the door with no trouble; those who had failed would be treated by the tower as trespassers, and suffer whatever violent punishment the current wards were designed to inflict. This practice was finally abolished on the grounds that maiming was not proportionate punishment for academic underperformance, but Professor Playfair still lobbied annually to bring it back.

54

Though many Babel graduates were happy to work in Literature or Legal, the silver-working exam had higher stakes for scholars of foreign origin, who found it difficult to find prestigious postings in departments other than the eighth floor, where their fluency in non-European languages was most valuable. Griffin, upon failing his silver-working test, had been offered a continuation track in Legal. But Professor Lovell had always expressed the belief that nothing except silver-working mattered, and that every other department was for unimaginative, untalented fools. Poor Griffin, who had been raised under his contemptuous and exacting roof, agreed.

55

The English night and Spanish noche, for example, are both derived from the Latin nox.

56

A trap as tricky as false friends is folk etymologies: incorrect etymologies assigned by popular belief to words that in fact had different origins. The word handiron, for instance, means a metal tool to support logs in a fireplace. One is tempted to assume its etymology involved the words hand and iron separately. But handiron is truly derived from the French andier, which became andire in English.

57

Jīxīn: 雞心; jìxing: 記性.

58

A reasonable mistake. The characters in yànshǐ are 艷史. 史, shǐ, means ‘history’. 艷, yàn, can mean both ‘colourful’ and ‘sexual, romantic’.

59

鮮.

60

Gabriel Shire Tregear, a London-based print seller and flaming racist, issued a series of caricature prints known as ‘Tregear’s Black Jokes’ in the 1830s which aimed to ridicule the presence of Black people in social situations where Tregear thought they did not belong.

61

In the mid-eighteenth century, Babel scholars were briefly seized by an astrology fad, and several state-of-the-art telescopes were ordered for the roof on behalf of scholars who thought they could derive useful match-pairs from the names of star signs. These efforts never yielded anything interesting, as astrology is fake, but the stargazing was pleasant.

62

Milton, 1645:

‘Come, and trip as ye go,

On the light fantastick toe.’

63

In that time, the authorities in Oxford, like those in London, seemed to think the poor were akin to little children, or animals, rather than grown, intelligent adults.

64

As with all valuable and expensive things, there was a massive underground market for counterfeit and amateur silver bars. At New Cut, one could buy charms to Banish Rodents, to Cure Common Ailments, and to Attract Wealthy Young Gentlemen. 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, though the use of this survey was a matter of utmost secrecy.

65

In doing so, Babel and Morse greatly upset the inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, whose own telegraph machine had been installed on the Great Western Railway just two years prior. However, Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraph used moving needles to point to a preset board of symbols, which did not afford nearly the range of communication that Morse’s simpler, click-based telegraph did.

66

In an act of incredible academic generosity, they allowed this improved system to also be referred to as the Morse Code.

67

A list of offences that Babel undergraduates had got away with in the past included public intoxication, brawling, cockfighting, and intentionally adding vulgarities to a recital of the Latin grace before dinner in hall.

68

The character 爆 is composed of two radicals: 火 and 暴.

69

Ramy was, though he did not know it, then at the centre of a debate between the Orientalists, including Sir Horace Wilson, who favoured teaching Sanskrit and Arabic to Indian students, and the Anglicists, including Mr Trevelyan, who believed Indian students of promise ought to be taught English.

This debate would come down firmly on the side of the Anglicists, best represented by Lord 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.’

70

Wilson’s election to this position had raised something of a controversy. He had been in heated competition with Reverend W.H. Mill for election, and Reverend Mill’s supporters spread the rumour that Wilson had insufficient character for the job, as he had eight illegitimate children. Wilson’s supporters defended him on the grounds that in fact, he had only two.

71

‘Goodbye; may God be your protector.’

72

The proliferation of Britain’s railways had happened very quickly after the invention of silver-powered steam engines. The thirty-five-mile Liverpool-to-Manchester line, built in 1830, was the first railway built for general use, and nearly seven thousand miles of track had been laid around England since. The line from Oxford to London would have been built much sooner, but Oxford’s professors delayed it for nearly four years on the grounds that such easy access to the temptations of the capital would wreak moral havoc on the young, naive gentlemen left in their care. And because of the noise.

73

Baynes ended up placing a cannon in front of the English Factory to keep the Chinese from seizing his wife, and it was all very exciting for a fortnight until the lady was at last peaceably persuaded to leave.

74

This society, founded in November 1834, was created with the goal of inducing the Qing Empire to become more open to Western traders and missionaries through deploying ‘intellectual artillery’. It was inspired by the London Society, which generously elevated the poor and dissuaded political radicalism through the gift of education.

75

Reverend Gützlaff indeed often went by the name Ai Han Zhe, which translates as ‘One who loves the Chinese’. This moniker was not ironic; Gützlaff really did see himself as the champion of the Chinese people, whom he referred to in correspondence as kind, friendly, open, and intellectually curious people who unfortunately happened to be under the ‘thralldom of Satan’. That he could reconcile this attitude with his support for the opium trade remains an interesting contradiction.

76

洋貨.

77

晴天, qīngtiān; qīng meaning ‘clear’, tiān meaning ‘the skies or heavens’.

78

Guǐ (鬼) can mean ‘ghost’ or ‘demon’; in this context, it is most commonly translated as ‘foreign devil’.

79

This was true, though Ramy did so only because he would not have been allowed to matriculate otherwise.

Religion had always been a point of contention between the four of them. Though they were all mandated by the college to attend Sunday services, only Letty and Victoire did so willingly; Ramy, of course, resented every minute, and Robin had been raised by Professor Lovell to be a devout atheist. ‘Christianity is barbaric,’ Professor Lovell opined. ‘It’s all self-flagellation, professed repression, and bloody, superstitious rituals as dress-up for doing whatever one wants. Go to church, if they make you, but take it as a chance to practise your recitations under your breath.’

80

Horace, on the education of youths to ward off corruption. ‘A cask will long retain the flavour of that with which it was first filled.’

81

From the Latin rabere: ‘to rave, to be mad’.

82

駟不及舌.

83

Here Letty was referring to the establishment of humanitarian societies for the protection of Indigenous peoples in British territories, such as the evangelical authors of the 1837 ‘Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes’, which, though recognizing British presence had been a ‘source of many calamities to uncivilized nations’, recommended the continued expansion of white settlement and spread of British missionaries in Australia and New Zealand in the name of a holy ‘civilizing mission’. The Aborigines, they argued, would not suffer so greatly if only they learned to dress, talk, and behave like proper Christians. The great contradiction, of course, is that there is no such thing as humane colonization. The contribution of Babel to such a mission, meanwhile, was to supply English teaching materials to missionary schools and to translate English property laws to peoples displaced by colonial settlement.

84

This is a great lie, and one that white Britons are happy to believe. Victoire’s following argument notwithstanding, slavery continued in India under the East India Company for a long time after. Indeed, slavery in India was specifically exempt from the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Despite early abolitionists’ belief that India under the EIC was a country of free labour, the EIC was complicit in, directly profited from, and in many cases encouraged a range of types of bondage, including forced plantation labour, domestic labour, and indentured servitude. The refusal to call such practices slavery simply because they did not match precisely the transatlantic plantation model of slavery was a profound act of semantic blindness.

But the British, after all, were astoundingly good at holding contradictions in their head. Sir William Jones, a virulent abolitionist, at the same time admitted of his own household, ‘I have slaves that I rescued from death and misery, but consider them as servants.’

85

The poor Germanists always lost to the Romance linguists in these verbal spars, for they had to deal with hearing 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.

86

Gora – ‘white, pale’, in reference to skin colour. Sahib – a salutation of respect. Put together, with the right tone of sarcasm and vehemence, it means something else altogether. Let it not be forgotten that, though Jones professed a great love and admiration for Indian languages throughout his career, he initially turned his scholarly attentions to Sanskrit because he suspected indigenous translators of being dishonest and unreliable.

87

Other projects included, among others:

1. A comparative analysis of the quantity of footnotes added to translations of European texts versus non-European texts. Non-European texts, Griffin found, tended to be loaded down with an astonishing amount of explanatory context, to the effect that the text was never read as a work on its own, but always through the guided lens of the (white, European) translator.

2. An inquiry into the silver-working potential of words originating in cants and cryptolects.

3. Plans for the theft and subsequent return to Egypt of the Rosetta Stone.

88

The Hermes Society also had connections with translation centres at universities in America, but these were even more repressive and dangerous than Oxford. For one, they were founded by slave owners, built and maintained with slave labour, and their endowments were sustained by the slave trade. For another, these American universities since their founding were preoccupied with the project of evangelizing, eradicating, and erasing Natives; the Indian College, founded 1655 at Harvard University, promised free tuition and housing to Native students who were required in turn to speak only in Latin and Greek, convert to Christianity, and either assimilate into white society or return to their villages to evangelize English culture and religion. A similar programme at the College of William and Mary was described by their president, Lyon G. Tyler, as a prison where Native children ‘served as so many hostages for the good behaviour of the rest’.

89

This is true. Nice comes to us by way of the Old French nice (‘weak, clumsy, silly’), from the Latin nescius (‘ignorant, not knowing’).

90

Thomas Love Peacock, essayist, poet, and friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, had also enjoyed a long career in India as an official with the East India Company. He was, in that year, the Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence.

91

Meaning one’s favourite trope or favourite line of argument.

92

This is not a quotation from the Book of Genesis, which recounts the scattering of languages at Babel in much tamer terms. It is rather from the Third Apocalypse of Baruch, falsely attributed to the scribe Baruch ben Neriah. Griffin, in a fit of disillusionment, had briefly pursued a project recounting various versions of the fall of Babel.

93

火藥味.

94

兔死狐悲.

95

He would never know, for instance, that there was a time when Griffin, Sterling, Anthony, and Evie had thought of themselves as a cohort as eternally bonded as Robin’s did; or that Griffin and Sterling had quarrelled once over Evie, bright and vibrant and brilliant and beautiful Evie, or that Griffin truly hadn’t meant it when he’d killed her. In his retellings of that night, Griffin made himself out to be a calm and deliberate murderer. But the truth was that, like Robin, he’d acted without thinking, from anger, from fear, but not from malice; he did not even really believe it would work, for silver responded only sporadically to his command, and he didn’t know what he’d done until Evie was bleeding out on the floor. Nor would he ever know that Griffin, unlike Robin, had no cohort to lean on after his act, no one to help him absorb the shock of this violence. And so he’d swallowed it, curled in around it, made it a part of himself – and while for others this might have been the first step on the road to madness, Griffin Lovell had instead whittled this capacity to kill into a sharp and necessary weapon.

96

This supplementary silver bar is one of the rare Old English–to-English match-pairs, created by a Hermes scholar, John Fugues, who participated in a project in the 1780s where scholars locked themselves in a castle and spoke only Old English to each other for three months. (Such experiments have not been repeated since, though not for lack of funding; Babel was simply unable to find volunteers willing to undergo the same extreme isolation, compounded by the inability to properly express oneself to others.) The Old English bēacen refers to audible signals, portents, and signs – instead of the rather flat English meaning, which just refers to a great signal of fire.

97

死豬不怕開水燙.

98

This loophole was, in fact, deliberate. In its early days, the tower viciously attacked entrants and escapees alike, but the wards were imprecise, and the number of wrongful maimings escalated until the city government insisted there had to be some sort of due process. Professor Playfair’s response was to catch thieves only upon departure, when the incriminating evidence would be in their pockets or strewn across the cobblestones around them.

99

This decision had been a matter of fierce debate between Robin and Victoire. Robin had wanted to hold all the scholars hostage; Victoire, instead, made the compelling argument that several dozen scholars were much more likely to comply with being forced out of a building at gunpoint than being trapped in a basement for weeks on end, with nowhere to bathe, do their laundry, or shit.

100

The word strike, in relation to labour, originally had the connotation of submission. Ships would drop, or strike, their sails when surrendering to enemy forces or saluting their superiors. But when sailors in 1768 struck their sails in protest to demand better wages, they turned strike from an act of submission to a strategic act of violence; by withholding their labour, they proved they were in fact indispensable.

101

The verb भिन्त्ते (bhintte) makes use of the Sanskrit root भिद् (bhid), which means ‘to break, to pierce, to strike, or to destroy’. भिन्त्ते has a variety of meanings, including ‘to fracture, to distract, to dissolve, and to disunite’.

102

Professor Craft had drawn Robin’s and Victoire’s blood and replaced their vials in the wall; they were now as free to enter and exit the tower as ever before.

103

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.

104

If this organizational competence strikes one as surprising, remember that both Babel and the British government made a great mistake in assuming all antisilver movements of the century were spontaneous riots carried out by uneducated, discontented lowlifes. For instance, the Luddites, so maligned as technology-fearing machine breakers, were a highly sophisticated insurrectionary movement, composed of small, well-disciplined groups who used disguises and watchwords, raised funds and gathered arms, terrorized their opponents, and carried out well-planned, targeted attacks. (And, while it is true the Luddite movement ultimately failed, it was only after Parliament had mobilized twelve thousand troops to put it down – more troops than had fought in the Peninsular War.) It was this level of training and professionalism that Abel’s men brought to the Babel strike.

105

Barricade comes from the Spanish barrica, meaning ‘barrel’, the basic building block of the first barricades. Besides their historical significance, barrels made for good barricade material for several reasons: they were easy to transport, easy to fill with sand or rocks, and easy to stack in ways that left portholes for snipers stationed behind them.

106

Crucially, everything that ran on steam power was in trouble. Professor Lovell, it turned out, had made the majority of his fortune by turning steam power from a fussy and complicated technology to a reliable source of energy that powered nearly the whole of the British fleet. His great innovation had actually been quite simple: in Chinese, the character for vapour was 气 (qì), which also bore connotations of spirit and energy. When installed on the engines devised by Richard Trevithick some decades earlier, it produced a shocking amount of energy at a fraction of the cost in coal. (Researchers in the 1830s had explored applications of this match-pair in aerial transportation, but they hadn’t got very far as the balloons kept either exploding or shooting into the stratosphere.)

This single invention, some argued, explained Britain’s victory at Trafalgar. Now all of England ran on steam. Steam locomotives had displaced many horse-drawn vehicles; steam-engine ships had mostly displaced sails. But Britain had very few Chinese translators indeed, and, with the exception of Robin and Professor Chakravarti, all the other translators were, unhelpfully, dead or abroad. Without scheduled maintenance, steam power would not fail to work entirely, but it would lose its unique power; it’s incredible efficiency that put British ships in a league beyond anything the American or Spanish fleets could achieve.

107

The Baresch alphabet used on the resonance rods, for instance, is not strictly necessary to their function; it was created by Babel scholars solely so that its proprietary resonance technology would remain inscrutable to outsiders. It is astounding, in truth, how much of academia’s perceived resource scarcity is artificially constructed.

108

Abel brought them a running stream of gruesome updates. On the Cherwell, a houseboat collided with a transport barge when the navigation systems of both failed, causing a steaming pile-up in the middle of the river. Three people died, trapped in submerged cabins. Up in Jericho, a four-year-old child was crushed under the wheels of a carriage which ran amok. Out in Kensington, a seventeen-year-old girl and her lover were buried alive when the ruins of a church tower collapsed above them during a midnight tryst.

109

On a Wednesday, two carts collided, one of which was loaded with barrels of fine brandy. When the sweet fumes leaked out onto the street, a small crowd of bystanders rushed in to scoop up the brandy with their hands, and it was all good fun until a man with a lit pipe walked into the fray, turning the street into a conflagration of people, horses, and exploding barrels.

110

The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution.

But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. 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; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

111

‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’

112

But that was part of the genius of Babel. By keeping them isolated, by distracting them with coursework so that they never had the chance to form bonds outside their cohort, it had cut off all avenues towards meaningful solidarity, had made them believe for so long that they were the only ones caught in their particular web.

113

114

The Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the largest immediate effect of which was to provoke a government crackdown on radical organizing. The cavalry rushed a crowd agitating for parliamentary representation, crushing men, women, and children alike under their hooves. Eleven died.

115

‘Arm’d with thy sad last gift – the pow’r to die! / Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy.’ (Thomas Day and John Bicknell, 1775)

116

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.