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

‘Some of us actually like it here, mind you.’ A young man wearing postgraduate gowns strode up next to Anthony. ‘These are the first years?’

‘That’s all of them.’

‘Not a big class, are you?’ The man waved cheerfully at them. ‘Hello. Vimal Srinivasan. I’ve just graduated last term; I do Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and German.’^*

‘Does everyone here introduce themselves with their languages?’ Ramy asked.

‘Of course,’ Vimal said. ‘Your languages determine how interesting you are. Orientalists are fascinating. Classicists are dull. Anyhow, welcome to the best floor in the tower.’

Victoire was peering around the shelves with great interest. ‘So do you get your hands on every book that’s published abroad?’

‘Most of them, yes,’ said Vimal.

‘All the French releases? As soon as they come out?’

‘Yes, greedy,’ he said, with absolutely no malice. ‘You’ll find our book-buying budget is effectively limitless, and our librarians like to maintain a thorough collection. Though we can’t translate everything that comes through here; we just haven’t the manpower. Translating ancient texts still occupies a good part of our time.’

‘Which is why they’re the only department that runs a deficit every year,’ said Anthony.

‘Bettering one’s understanding of the human condition is not a matter of profit.’ Vimal sniffed. ‘We’re always updating the classics – between the past century and now, we’ve become a lot better at certain languages, and there’s no reason why classics should remain so inaccessible. I’m currently working on a better Latin version of the Bhagavad Gita—’

‘Never mind that Schlegel just put one out,’ Anthony quipped.

‘Over ten years ago,’ Vimal dismissed. ‘And the Schlegel Gita is dreadful; he said himself that he hadn’t grasped the basic philosophy that underlies the whole thing. Which shows, because he’s used about seven different words for yoga—’

‘Anyway,’ Anthony said, ushering them away, ‘that’s Literature. One of the worst applications of a Babel education, if you ask me.’

‘You don’t approve?’ Robin asked. He shared Victoire’s delight; a life spent on the fourth floor, he thought, would be wonderful.

‘Me, no.’ Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m here for silver-working. I think the Literature Department are an indulgent lot, as Vimal knows. See, the sad thing is, they could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they’re the ones who really understand languages – know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase. But they’re too obsessed fiddling with their lovely images to bother with how all that living energy might be channelled into something far more powerful. I mean, of course, silver.’

The fifth and sixth floors housed both instruction rooms and reference materials – the primers, grammars, readers, thesauruses, and at least four different editions of every dictionary published in what Anthony claimed was every language spoken in the world.

‘Well, the dictionaries are really scattered all over the tower, but here’s where you come if you need to do some archival heavy lifting,’ Anthony explained. ‘Right in the middle, you see, so no one ever has to walk more than four flights to get what they need.’

In the centre of the sixth floor, a series of red-bound books sat on crimson velvet cloth beneath a glass display case. The way the soft lamplight gleamed against their leather covers made them look quite magical – more like magicians’ grimoires than common reference materials.

‘These are the Grammaticas,’ said Anthony. ‘They look impressive, but it’s all right, you can touch. They’re meant to be consulted. Just wipe your fingers on the velvet first.’

The Grammaticas were bound volumes of varying thicknesses but identical binding, arranged alphabetically by the Romanized name of the language and by publication date within those languages. Some Grammatica sets – notably the European languages – took up entire display cases on their own; others, largely the Oriental languages, contained very few volumes. The Chinese Grammaticas spanned only three volumes; the Japanese and Korean Grammaticas contained only one volume each. Tagalog, surprisingly, spanned five volumes.

‘But we can’t take credit for that,’ said Anthony. ‘All of that translation work was done by the Spanish; that’s why you’ll also see Spanish-to-English translator credits behind the cover pages. And a good deal of the Caribbean and South Asian Grammaticas – here they are – are still in progress. Those languages weren’t of interest at Babel until after the Peace of Paris, which of course dumped a great deal of territory into Britain’s imperial holdings. Similarly, you’ll find most of the African Grammaticas are translated into English from German – it’s the German missionaries and philologists who are doing the most work there; we haven’t had anyone doing African languages for years.’