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

‘I’m not sure they’ll be mutually intelligible,’ said Victoire. ‘They’re both French-based, of course, but Kreyòl takes grammar cues from the Fon language, while Mauritian Creole . . . hm. I don’t know. There’s no Grammatica, so I’ve nothing to consult.’

‘Perhaps you’ll write one,’ said Letty.

Victoire cast her a small smile. ‘Perhaps.’

The happiest development of that summer was that Victoire and Letty had gone back to being friends. In fact, all the strange, ill-defined awfulness of their third year had evaporated with the news that they’d passed their exams. Letty no longer grated on Robin’s nerves, and Ramy no longer made Letty scowl every time he opened his mouth.

To be fair, their fights were tabled rather than resolved. They had not really confronted the reasons why they’d fallen out, but they were all willing to blame it on stress. There would be a time when they had to face up to their very real differences, when they would hash things out instead of always changing the subject, but for now they were content to enjoy the summer and to remember again what it was like to love one another.

For these, truly, were the last of the golden days. That summer felt all the more precious because they all knew it couldn’t last, that such delights were only so because of the endless, exhausting nights that had earned them. Soon year four would start, then graduating exams, and then work. None of them knew what life might look like after that, but surely they could not remain a cohort forever. Surely, eventually, they had to leave the city of dreaming spires; had to take up their respective posts and repay all that Babel had given them. But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

In January of 1838, the inventor Samuel Morse had given a demonstration in Morristown, New Jersey, showing off a device that could transmit messages over long distances using electrical impulses to convey a series of dots and dashes. Sceptical, the United States Congress declined to grant him funding to build a line connecting the capitol in Washington, DC, with other cities, and would drag their feet in doing so for another five years. But scholars at the Royal Institute of Translation, as soon as they heard that Morse’s device worked, went overseas and cajoled Morse into making a months-long visit to Oxford, where the silver-working department was amazed that this device required no match-pairs to work, but instead ran on pure electricity. By July 1839, Babel hosted the first working telegraph line in England, which was connected to the British Foreign Office in London.^*

Morse’s original code transmitted only numerals, under the assumption that the receiver could look up the corresponding words in a guidebook. This was fine for conversations that involved a limited vocabulary – train signals, weather reports, and certain kinds of military communications. But soon after Morse’s arrival, Professors De Vreese and Playfair developed an alphanumeric code that allowed exchange of messages of any kind.^* This expanded the telegraph’s possible uses to the commercial, personal, and beyond. Word spread quickly that Babel had means of communicating instantaneously with London from Oxford. Soon clients – largely businessmen, government officials, and the occasional clergyman – were crammed in the lobby and lined up around the block clutching messages they needed sent. Professor Lovell, exasperated by the clamour, wanted to set the defensive wards on crowd. But calmer, more financially attuned heads prevailed. Professor Playfair, seeing great potential for profit, ordered that the northwest wing of the lobby, which was formerly used for storage, be converted into a telegraph office.

The next obstacle was staffing the office with operators. Students were the obvious source of free labour, and so every Babel undergraduate and graduate fellow was required to learn Morse code. This took only a matter of days, since Morse code was the rare language that did in fact have a perfect one-to-one correlation between language symbols, provided one was communicating in English. When September bled into October and Michaelmas term began that autumn, all students on campus were assigned to work at least one three-hour shift a week. And so, at nine o’clock every Sunday night, Robin dragged himself to the little lobby office and sat by the telegraph machine with a stack of course readings, waiting for the needle to buzz into life.

The advantage of the late shift was that the tower received very little correspondence during those hours, since everyone in the London office would have already gone home. All Robin had to do was stay awake from nine to midnight, in case any urgent missives arrived. Otherwise, he was free to do as he liked, and he usually spent these hours reading or revising his compositions for the next morning’s class.