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

‘We’re in Summertown,’ said Griffin. ‘Pretty, though a bit boring. Woodstock’s at the end of this green – just take a left and walk all the way down south until things start looking familiar. We’ll part here. Five days.’ Griffin turned to go.

‘Wait – how do I reach you?’ Robin asked. Now that Griffin’s departure seemed imminent, he was somehow reluctant to part ways. He had a sudden fear that if he let Griffin out of his sight then he might disappear for good, that this would all turn out to be a dream.

‘I told you – you don’t,’ said Griffin. ‘If there’s a cross on the tree, I reach you. Gives me insurance in case you turn out to be an informant, you see?’

‘Then what am I supposed to do in the meantime?’

‘What do you mean? You’re still a Babel student. Act like one. Go to class. Go out drinking and get into brawls. No – you’re soft. Don’t get into brawls.’

‘I . . . fine. All right.’

‘Anything else?’

Anything else? Robin wanted to laugh. He had a thousand other questions, none of which he thought Griffin would answer. He took the chance on just one. ‘Does he know about you?’

‘Who?’

‘Our – Professor Lovell.’

‘Ah.’ This time, Griffin did not glibly rattle off an answer. This time, he paused before he spoke. ‘I’m not sure.’

This surprised Robin. ‘You don’t know?’

‘I left Babel after my third year,’ Griffin said quietly. ‘I’d been with Hermes since I started, but I was on the inside like you. Then something happened, and it wasn’t safe anymore, so I ran. And since then I’ve . . .’ He trailed off, then cleared his throat. ‘But that’s beside the point. All you need to know is you probably shouldn’t mention my name at dinner.’

‘Well, that goes without saying.’

Griffin turned to go, paused, then turned back around. ‘One more thing. Where do you live?’

‘Hm? Univ – we’re all at University College.’

‘I know that. What room?’

‘Oh.’ Robin blushed. ‘Number four, Magpie Lane, room seven. The house with the green roof. I’m in the corner. With the sloping windows facing Oriel chapel.’

‘I know it.’ The sun had long set. Robin could no longer see Griffin’s face, half-hidden in shadow. ‘That used to be my room.’

Chapter Six

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master, that’s all.’

LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass

Professor Playfair’s introductory class to Translation Theory met at Tuesday mornings on the fifth floor of the tower. They’d barely been seated when he began to lecture, filling the narrow classroom with his booming showman’s voice.

‘By now you are each passably fluent in at least three languages, which is a feat in its own right. Today, however, I will try to impress upon you the unique difficulty of translation. Consider how tricky it is merely to say the word hello. Hello seems so easy! Bonjour. Ciao. Hallo. And on and on. But then say we are translating from Italian into English. In Italian, ciao can be used upon greeting or upon parting – it does not specify either, it simply marks etiquette at the point of contact. It is derived from the Venetian s-ciào vostro, meaning something akin to “your obedient servant”. But I digress. The point is, when we bring ciao into English – if we are translating a scene where the characters disperse, for example – we must impose that ciao has been said as goodbye. Sometimes this is obvious from context, but sometimes not – sometimes we must add new words in our translation. So already things are complicated, and we haven’t moved past hello.

‘The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another. The Swiss philologist Johann Breitinger, who claimed that languages were merely “collections of totally equivalent words and locutions which are interchangeable, and which fully correspond to each other in meaning”, was dreadfully wrong. Language is not like maths. And even maths differs depending on the language^* – but we will revisit that later.’

Robin found himself searching Professor Playfair’s face as he spoke. He was not sure what he was looking for. Some evidence of evil, perhaps. The cruel, selfish, lurking monster Griffin had sketched. But Professor Playfair seemed only a cheerful, beaming scholar, enamoured by the beauty of words. Indeed, in daylight, in the classroom, his brother’s grand conspiracies felt quite ridiculous.