Babel

Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

By: R. F. Kuang

Narrated by: Chris Lew Kum Hoi, Billie Fulford-Brown

Length: 21 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel.

Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 R. F. Kuang (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Between Allegory and Alternate History - 這也是翻譯

I infer from the preface that the author has recently had the experience of being an Asian-American sojourning in Oxford. It's clear the experience left its mark on her and on this story. The novel is excellent, though difficult for me to review without tossing in coy spoilers on how it ends. I'll restrain myself and say simply that as a student of the relevant history, I found the ending completely appropriate.

For centuries China had a global trade surplus--both in our timeline and in that of this alternate history, which closely parallels our own. This was probably the case even when the volume of global trade was constrained by the capacity of the silk road, but in the Early Modern Era, beginning with Portuguese sea trade in the Pacific, it began to grow exponentially. In an era when all transactions were still conducted in precious metals, the economic consequences of this surplus were difficult to understand, let alone predict. Philip II of Spain, his coffers bursting with the loot of the New World, had trouble grasping the difficulty he encountered outfitting his famous naval expedition of 1588. Without realizing it, he had discovered inflation. Money can seem so concrete when payments are made in weight-increments of silver or gold. In fact it is anything but. Money is abstract, and like those of many abstractions its ebbs and flows can seem like magic. Perhaps they ARE magic.

Spain's treasury did not remain full for long. All of that silver circulated throughout expanding markets, and in coming centuries a succession of very smart people with a range of different motives came to understand and exploit some of the underlying magical principles governing its circulation. One of these people, mentioned perhaps only once or twice in passing in Kuang's novel since he belonged to an earlier era, was the greatest physicist of his day and perhaps the greatest alchemist of all time, Isaac Newton. For the last three decades of his life Newton was Master of the Royal Mint, and in that capacity he worked magic by manipulating the conversion--or translation--between silver and gold to his own nation's advantage. He helped jump-start Britain's imperial and colonial expansion. This economic alchemy or magic was very real in our own timeline, and though it is not discussed in this book (though it plays an important role in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle"), it may be assumed to have set the stage for its events, which take place in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century.

Newton's efforts notwithstanding, the Chinese global trade surplus meant that the West's silver, including that of Britain, continued to drain into China at an alarming rate, funding the importation of silks, tea, porcelain, lacquerware, and other such goods. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain's lords and magnates were wise to the problem. Their solution--again, in our own timeline as in that of this book--was to foist the opium trade on China, first by offering a lucrative product in sufficient quantity to produce a class of addicts willing and able to pay vast sums to obtain it it, and then, when authorities attempted to suppress the trade, at gunpoint. Thus did they engineer the First Opium War.

This much is simply widely accepted history. What Kuang does with this history could be described either as a fantasy subgenre of alternate history fiction, or as an allegory for colonial oppression. If I describe it as both, and hold both descriptions in my head simultaneously, I am ready to perform the kind of mental manipulation Kuang's Oxford scholars are trained in. 這也是翻譯--this too is translation. Allegorically, within the Tower of Babel of Kuang's Oxford, the manipulation is inscribed in silver, becoming or expressing a kind of magic.

I confess I'm enamored of this magic, in part because I, too, am a translator, working in several languages over the past four decades. No doubt Kuang's Oxfordians would dismiss much of my skill as that of a mere "natural polyglot," but I had to work hard for it, too. As a real-life translator, I will let you in on a secret: translation IS magic, and it only becomes more potent as people progressively forget that we exist at all, mediating their reading and their conversation. The greatest magic trick of the translator is to make themselves disappear. We all know that knowledge is power. Are we so confident we can always spot the most knowledgable?

In this review I've worn my own background and interests on my sleeve, and consequently what I've written is pretty dry. Kuang's novel is anything but. My review doesn't even touch on the characters and their wholly believable personal and historical struggles, all of which are absolutely engrossing. I am reminded of Arkady Martine's award-winning "A Memory of Empire" and its sequel, "A Desolation Called Peace," with which this book incidentally shares a very apt epigraph from Tacitus. I am not a huge fan of the audio production. The primary narrator does a good job with character voices, but there is a secondary narrator (perhaps for passages appearing as footnotes in the print edition?). The sound editing is uneven, and the Mandarin voicing of Chinese phrases and passages inconsistent, making some of them difficult to understand. At a guess, neither narrator is a native speaker. However, this will bother only those listeners with knowledge of Chinese.

fabula sine simili est

An absolute thrill, beginning to end. I loved the characters, world building, themes, and magic system. The philosophies and debates and perspectives were thrilling to ponder. I felt like I learned and grew with the protagonist, and the mechanics had me yearning to study language and play with the possibilities.

Great story marred by insecurity

I found the story and performance to be very enjoyable. Unfortunately, I was often distracted from the story by the footnotes that insisted on telling me things I either already knew or didn’t care to know about. It felt as if the author didn’t trust her readers to get her point through the story she told, and had to spell things out.

Couldn’t get into it

Spent the majority of the book trying to get involved in the story, but was never pulled in at any point. The premise sounded so interesting, but was let down. Glad some liked it, I stopped listening with about 5 hours left.

Performance good, book is mediocre

Too long, characters don’t make that much sense. It’s a creative concept but she’s quite heavy handed with the social commentary and I didn’t connect to anybody.

Heavy Handed

Wholly lacking in believable characters. The characters feel like puppets inexpertly wielded in service of plot, without minds of their own, or even believable motivations for their actions.

written by a master

A thoughtful exploration of colonialism and the nature of human beings through a real scholars masterful lens.

Such a dazzling strange story

Been a moment since I read a book of such force and dark matter. Unforgettable

Utter brilliance!

I can’t rave enough about how amazing & all consuming this book is, I can only hope there is a sequel to read! This book is brilliantly written & so intricate. The inter working so connected that I’m sure if I read it 2 more times I would pick up on more that I didn’t catch the first go. I may just reread it again today.

A Story with Conflicted Motivations

The “magic” mechanism in this story relies on the concept of “lost in translation” that occurs over the etymological evolution of words across languages. Engrave the word in one language on one side of a silver bar, then engrave the etymological counterpart in a different language on the other side - and the bar will manifest what was “lost in translation” between the two after the words are spoken by someone with a true grasp of the words.

This is, in my opinion, a sophisticated enough mechanism to be intriguing, and one that could have been a clever tool for making social commentary, especially, if deftly to a previous time period.

RF Kuang tried but I found the effort leaving something greatly desired.

When I compare this effort, for example, to Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, it is not nearly as effective, primarily because the main motivation for Twain was clearly to satire and critique both the period to which his character “time travels” (medieval) as well as the period from which the protagonist traveled (late 19th century).

I think if RF Kuang had written with the same clear purpose and leaned into the effort, but with a more deft hand, this novel would have been a classic.

However, there is nothing light about her touch on social commentary.

Where Twain used expert comedic satire to draw a reader to take his own conclusions, Kuang attempts to use shock (at the tragedy that befalls the characters) and awe (at her complex and clear subject matter expertise over language and etymology) to bludgeon the reader into her’s - and her conclusions are neither original nor revelatory to anyone with an internet connection. I don’t know if Twain’s were in his time or not, however, even if his were as equally regurgitated as Kuang’s are here, he at least presented them with all the skill of an expert comedian and storyteller. Kuang’s effort seems very amateurish by comparison, which is understandable because she is both early in her career and may not be the type of generational talent that Twain was in the first place.

I think it’d be really interesting if Kuang were to rewrite this 30 years from now, as an older, more experienced author who has been removed from the universe of academia for a while.