Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

Mountains will be in labour, the birth will be a single laughable little mouse.

HORACE, Ars Poetica, trans. E.C. Wickham

Griffin made good on his word. He never left another note for Robin. At first, Robin was sure Griffin would merely take some time to sulk before pestering him again for smaller, more routine errands. But a week became a month, which became a term. He’d expected Griffin to be a bit more vindictive – to leave a recriminating farewell letter, at least. For the first few days after their falling-out, he flinched every time a stranger glanced his way on the street, convinced that the Hermes Society had decided it best to tie up this loose end.

But Griffin had cut him out entirely.

He tried not to let his conscience bother him. Hermes was not going anywhere. There would always be battles to fight. They would all be there waiting when Robin was ready to rejoin them, he was sure. And he could do nothing for Hermes if he did not remain firmly ensconced within Babel’s ecosystem. Griffin had said it himself – they needed people on the inside. Wasn’t that reason enough to stay right where he was?

Meanwhile, there were third-year exams. End-of-year exams were quite a matter of ceremony at Oxford. Up until the last years of the previous century, viva voce exams – oral questioning ordeals made public for crowds of spectators to witness – had been the norm, although by the early 1830s the regular BA degree required only five written examinations and one viva voce exam, on the grounds that oral responses were too difficult to assess objectively and were unnecessarily cruel besides. By 1836, spectators were no longer allowed at the vivas either, and the townspeople lost a great source of annual entertainment.

Instead, Robin’s cohort was told to expect a three-hour essay exam in each of their research languages; a three-hour essay exam in Etymology; a viva voce exam in Translation Theory, and a silver-working test. They could not stay on at Babel if they failed any of their language or theory exams, and if they failed the silver-working test, they could not, in the future, work on the eighth floor.^*

The viva voce would be done in front of a panel of three professors led by Professor Playfair, who was a notoriously tough examiner, and who was rumoured to make at least two students dissolve into tears every year. ‘Balderdash,’ he would drawl slowly, ‘is a word which used to refer to the cursed concoction created by bartenders when they’d nearly run out of every drink at the end of the night. Ale, wine, cider, milk – they’d dump it all in and hope their patrons wouldn’t mind, since after all the goal was simply to get drunk. But this is Oxford University, not the Turf Tavern after midnight, and we are in need of something slightly more illuminating than getting sloshed. Would you like to try again?’

Time, which had felt infinite during their first and second years, now ran quickly down the hourglass. No longer could they put off their readings to have a lark on the river under the assumption there was always the opportunity later to catch up. Exams were in five weeks, then four, then three. When Trinity term drew to an end, the last day of class should have culminated in a golden afternoon, in desserts and elderflower cordial and punting on the Cherwell. But the moment the bells rang at four, they packed up their books and walked straight from Professor Craft’s classroom to one of the study rooms on the fifth floor, where they would wall themselves in, every day for the next thirteen days, to pore over dictionaries and translated passages and vocabulary lists until their temples throbbed.

Acting from generosity, or perhaps sadism, the Babel faculty made available a set of silver bars for examinees to use as study aids. These bars were engraved with a match-pair using the English word meticulous and its Latin forerunner metus, meaning ‘fear, dread’. The modern usage of meticulous had arisen just a few decades before in France, with the connotation of being fearful of making a mistake. The effect of the bars was to induce a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work.

Ramy hated and refused to use them. ‘It doesn’t tell you where you went wrong,’ he complained. ‘It just makes you want to vomit for no reason you can discern.’

‘Well, you could do with more caution,’ Letty grumbled, returning his marked-up composition. ‘You’ve made at least twelve errors on this page, and your sentences are far too long—’

‘They’re not too long; they’re Ciceronian.’

‘You can’t just excuse all bad writing on the grounds that it’s Ciceronian—’

Ramy waved a hand dismissively. ‘That’s fine, Letty, I cranked that one out in ten minutes.’

‘But it’s not about speed. It’s about precision—’