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

Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m the only ghost in residence at Oxford. We have a few others overseas – Vaibhav and Frédérique, you might have heard of them – they faked drowning on a clipper back from Bombay and they’ve been operating from India since. Lisette simply announced she was leaving for home to get married, and all the Babel faculty were too disappointed in her to follow up on her story. Obviously, Vimal, Cathy, and Ilse are still at Babel. Easier for them to siphon out resources.’

‘Then why’d you leave?’ asked Robin.

‘Someone needs to be in the Old Library full time. In any case, I’d got tired of the campus life, so I faked my death in Barbados, bought a passage on the next packet home, and made my way back to Oxford unnoticed.’ Anthony winked at Robin. ‘I thought you had me that day at the bookshop. I didn’t dare leave the Old Library for a week. Come on, let me show you the rest.’

A quick tour of the workspaces past the shelves revealed a number of ongoing projects, which Anthony introduced with pride. These included the compilation of dictionaries between regional languages (‘We lose a lot by assuming everything must first come through English’), non-English silver match-pairs (‘Same principle – Babel won’t fund match-pairs that don’t translate into English since all of its bars are for use by the British. But that’s like painting with only one colour, or playing only one note on a piano.’), and critiques of existing English translations of religious texts and literary classics (‘Well – you know my opinion on literature in general, but something has to keep Vimal occupied.’) The Hermes Society was not only a hotbed of Robin Hoods, as Griffin had led Robin to believe; it was also a research centre in its own right, though its projects had to be done in secret, with scant and stolen resources.^*

‘What are you going to do with all this?’ asked Victoire. ‘You can’t publish, surely.’

‘We’ve got partners at a few other translation centres,’ said Vimal. ‘We ship them work for review, sometimes.’

‘There are other translation centres?’ asked Robin.

‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s only recently that Babel achieved pre-eminence in linguistics and philology. It was the French who ran the show for most of the eighteenth century, and then the German Romanticists had their heyday for a bit. The difference now is that we have silver to spare, and they don’t.’^*

‘They’re fickle allies, though,’ said Vimal. ‘They’re helpful insofar as they, too, hate the British, but they’ve no real commitment towards global liberation. Really, all this research is just gambling on the future. We can’t make good use of it yet. We haven’t got the reach or the resources. So it’s all we can do to produce the knowledge, write it down, and hope one day there exists a state that can put all this to proper, altruistic use.’

At the other end of the library, the back wall resembled the aftermath of several mortar explosions, charred and cratered across the centre. Underneath, two equally charred tables stood side by side, both somehow upright despite their blackened, shrivelled legs.

‘Right,’ said Anthony. ‘So that’s our silver-work and, er, munitions workshop.’

‘Did that happen over time, or all at once?’ Victoire asked drily.

‘That’s entirely Griffin’s fault,’ said Vimal. ‘Doesn’t seem to think gunpowder is an outdoor activity.’

The intact portion of the back wall was covered with a massive map of the world, dotted with differently coloured pins attached by strings to notes covered in dense, tiny handwriting. Robin wandered closer, curious.

‘That’s a group project.’ Cathy joined him before the map. ‘We add to it little by little when we get back from overseas.’

‘Do all of these pins represent languages?’

‘We think they do. We’re trying to track the number of languages still spoken around the world, and where they’re dying out. And there are a good deal of languages which are dying, you know. A great extinction event began the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World. Spanish, Portuguese, French, English – they’ve been edging out regional languages and dialects like cuckoo chicks. I think it’s not inconceivable that one day, most of the world will speak only English.’ She sighed, looking up at the map. ‘I was born a generation too late. It’s not so long ago that I might have grown up around Gaelic.’

‘But that would destroy silver-working,’ said Robin. ‘Wouldn’t it? It’d collapse the linguistic landscape. There would be nothing to translate. No differences to distort.’

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

‘Come on, you two.’ Anthony waved them over to a doorway, which led to a small reading room that had been converted into a dining room. ‘Let’s eat.’