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

Professor Craft had written a devilishly difficult paper prompt about the fluid roles of the interpretes in the writings of Cicero. They were not simply interpreters, but played a number of roles such as brokers, mediators, and occasionally bribers. Robin’s cohort were instructed to elaborate, then, on the use of language in this context. Robin scribbled an eight-page essay on how the term interpretes was, for Cicero, ultimately value neutral in comparison to Herodotus’s hermeneus, one of whom was killed by Themistocles for using Greek on behalf of the Persians. He concluded with some comments on linguistic propriety and loyalty. He was truly unsure how he’d performed when he walked out of the examination room – his mind had resorted to the funny trick of ceasing to understand what he’d argued as soon as he dotted the last sentence, but the inky lines had looked robust, and he knew he’d at least sounded good.

Professor Lovell’s paper involved two prompts. The first was a challenge to translate three pages of a children’s nonsense alphabet rhyme (‘A is for the apricot, which was eaten by a Bear’) into a language of their choosing. Robin spent fifteen minutes trying to match Chinese characters ordered by their romanizations before giving up and going the easy route, which was just to do it all in Latin. The second page contained an Ancient Egyptian fable told through hieroglyphs and its accompanying English translation with the instructions to identify as best they could, with no prior knowledge of the source language, the difficulties in conveying it into the target language. Here, Robin’s facility with the pictorial nature of Chinese characters helped greatly; he came up with something about ideographic power and subtle visual implications and managed to get it all down before time ran out.

The viva voce was not as bad as it could have been. Professor Playfair was as harsh as promised, but still an incorrigible showman, and Robin’s anxiety dissipated as he realized how much of Playfair’s loud condescension and indignation was for theatrics. ‘Schlegel wrote in 1803 that the time was not so far away that German would be the speaking voice of the civilized world,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Discuss.’ Robin had fortunately read this piece by Schlegel in translation, and he knew Schlegel was referring to the unique and complex flexibility of German, which Robin proceeded to argue was an underestimation of other Occidental languages such as English (which Schlegel accused in that same piece of ‘monosyllabic brevity’) and French. This sentiment was also – Robin recalled hastily as his time ran out – the grasping argument of a German aware that the Germanic empire could offer no resistance to the increasingly dominant French, and who sought refuge instead in cultural and intellectual hegemony. This answer was neither particularly brilliant nor original, but it was correct, and Professor Playfair followed up on only a handful of technicalities before dismissing Robin from the room.

Their silver-working test was scheduled for the last day. They were instructed to report to the eighth floor in thirty-minute increments – Letty first at noon, then Robin, then Ramy, then Victoire at half past one.

At half past noon, Robin walked up all seven flights of the tower and stood waiting outside the windowless room at the back of the southern wing. His mouth was very dry. It was a sunny afternoon in May, but he couldn’t stop the shivering in his knees.

It was simple, he told himself. Just two words – he needed only to write down two simple words, and then it would be over. No cause for panic.

But fear, was, of course, not rational. His imagination ran wild with the thousand and one things that could go wrong. He could drop the bar on the floor, he could suffer a lapse of memory the moment he walked through the door, or he could forget a brush stroke or spell the English word wrong despite practising both a hundred times. Or it could fail to work. It could simply fail to work, and he would never get a position on the eighth floor. It could all be over that quickly.

The door swung open. Letty emerged, pale-faced and shaking. Robin wanted to ask her how it had gone, but she brushed past him and hurried down the stairs.

‘Robin.’ Professor Chakravarti poked his head out the door. ‘Come on in.’

Robin took a deep breath and stepped forward.

The room had been cleared of chairs, books, and shelves – anything valuable or breakable. Only one desk remained, in the corner, and that was bare save for a single blank silver bar and an engraving stylus.

‘Well, Robin.’ Professor Chakravarti clasped his hands behind his back. ‘What do you have for me?’