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

Robin didn’t mind this one bit. ‘I like just us.’

Ramy cast him a smile.

They spent their third day together touring the jewels of the university. Oxford in 1836 was in an era of becoming, an insatiable creature feeding on the wealth which it bred. The colleges were constantly renovating; buying up more land from the city; replacing medieval buildings with newer, lovelier halls; constructing new libraries to house recently acquired collections. Almost every building in Oxford had a name – derived not from function or location, but from the wealthy and powerful individual who inspired its creation. There was the massive, imposing Ashmolean Museum, which housed the cabinet of curiosities donated by Elias Ashmole, including a dodo’s head, hippopotamus skulls, and a three-inch-long sheep’s horn that was supposed to have grown out of the head of an old woman in Cheshire named Mary Davis; the Radcliffe Library, a domed library that somehow appeared even larger and grander from the inside than from the outside; and the Sheldonian Theatre, ringed by massive stone busts known as the Emperor Heads, all of whom looked like ordinary men who had stumbled upon Medusa.

And there was the Bodleian – oh, the Bodleian, a national treasure in its own right: home of the largest collection of manuscripts in England (‘Cambridge has only got a hundred thousand titles,’ sniffed the clerk who admitted them, ‘and Edinburgh’s only got a paltry sixty-three’), whose collection only continued to expand under the proud leadership of the Reverend Doctor Bulkeley Bandinel, who had a book-buying budget of nearly £2,000 a year.

It was the Reverend Doctor Bandinel himself who came to greet them on their first tour of their library and guided them to the Translators’ Reading Room. ‘Couldn’t let a clerk do it,’ he sighed. ‘Normally we let the fools wander about on their own and ask around for directions if they get lost. But you translators – you truly appreciate what’s going on here.’

He was a heavy-set man with droopy eyes and a similarly droopy demeanour whose mouth seemed permanently slumped in a frown. Yet as he moved through the building, his eyes lit up with genuine pleasure. ‘We’ll start in the main wings, then traipse over to the Duke Humphreys. Follow along, feel free to have a look – books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless, so don’t be nervous. We’re quite proud of our last few major acquisitions. There’s the Richard Gough map collection donated in 1809 – the British Museum didn’t want them, can you believe it? And then the Malone donation ten or so years ago – it greatly expanded our Shakespearean materials. Oh, and just two years ago, we received the Francis Douce collection – that’s thirteen thousand volumes in French and English, though I suppose neither of you is specializing in French . . . Arabic? Oh, yes – right this way; the Institute has the bulk of Arabic materials at Oxford, but I’ve got some poetry volumes from Egypt and Syria that may interest you . . .’

They left the Bodleian dazed, impressed, and a bit intimidated by the sheer amount of material at their disposal. Ramy made an imitation of Reverend Doctor Bandinel’s hanging jowls, but could summon no real malice; it was difficult to disdain a man who so clearly adored the accumulation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

They ended the day with a tour of University College by Billings, a senior porter. It turned out that thus far they had seen only a small corner of their new home. The college, which lay just to the east of the houses on Magpie Lane, boasted two green quadrangle courtyards and an arrangement of stone buildings that resembled castle keeps. As they walked, Billings rattled off a list of namesakes and biographies of those namesakes, including donors, architects, and otherwise significant figures. ‘ . . . now, the statues over the entrances are of Queen Anne and Queen Mary, and in the interior, James II and Dr Radcliffe . . . And those brilliant painted windows in the chapel were done by Abraham van Linge in 1640, yes, they’ve held up very well, and the glass painter Henry Giles of York did the east window . . . There’s no service on, so we can take a poke around inside; follow me.’

Inside the chapel, Billings paused before a bas-relief monument. ‘I suppose you’ll know who that is, being translation students and all.’

They knew. Robin and Ramy both had been hearing the name constantly since their arrival at Oxford. The bas-relief was a memorial to the University College alum and widely recognized genius who in 1786 published a foundational text identifying Proto-Indo-European as a predecessor language linking Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek. He was now perhaps the single best-known translator on the continent, save for his nephew, the recently graduated Sterling Jones.