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

Robin did not like her. Her lecturing voice had an awkward, unnatural rhythm with unexpected pauses that made it hard to follow her line of argument, and the two hours they spent in her classroom seemed to drag for an eternity. Letty, however, seemed rapt. She gazed at Professor Craft with shining admiration. When they filed out at the end of class, Robin hung by the door to wait as she collected her things so they could all walk to the Buttery together. But she instead went up to Professor Craft’s desk.

‘Professor, I was wondering if I could speak with you for—’

Professor Craft rose. ‘Class is over, Miss Price.’

‘I know, but I wanted to ask you for a moment – if you have spare time – I mean, just as a woman at Oxford, I mean, there aren’t so many of us, and I hoped to hear your advice—’

Robin felt then he should stop listening, out of some vague sense of chivalry, but Professor Craft’s chilly voice cut through the air before he could reach the stairs.

‘Babel hardly discriminates against women. It’s simply that so few of our sex are interested in languages.’

‘But you’re the only woman professor at Babel, and we all – that is, all the girls here and I – we think that’s quite admirable, so I wanted—’

‘To know how it’s done? Hard work and innate brilliance. You know that already.’

‘It’s different for women, though, and surely you’ve experienced—’

‘When I have relevant topics for discussion, I will bring them up in class, Miss Price. But class is over. And you’re now infringing on my time.’

Robin hastened around the corner and down the winding steps before Letty could see him. When she sat down with her plate in the Buttery, he saw her eyes were a bit pink around the edges. But he pretended not to notice, and if Ramy or Victoire did, they said nothing.

On Wednesday afternoon, Robin had his solo tutorial in Chinese. He’d half expected to find Professor Lovell in the classroom, but his instructor turned out to be Professor Anand Chakravarti, a genial and understated man who spoke English with such a pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent that he might have been raised in Kensington.

Chinese class was a wholly different exercise from Latin. Professor Chakravarti didn’t lecture at Robin or make him do recitations. He conducted this tutorial as a conversation. He asked questions, Robin tried his best to answer, and they both tried to make sense out of what he’d said.

Professor Chakravarti began with questions so basic that Robin at first couldn’t see how they were worth answering, until he picked apart their implications and realized they were far beyond his scope of understanding. What was a word? What was the smallest possible unit of meaning, and why was that different from a word? Was a word different from a character? In what ways was Chinese speech different from Chinese writing?

It was an odd exercise to analyse and dismantle a language he thought he knew like the back of his hand, to learn to classify words by ideogram or pictogram, and to memorize an entire vocabulary of new terms, most having to do with morphology or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him.

Then came the harder questions. Which Chinese words could be traced back to recognizable pictures? Which couldn’t? Why was the character for ‘woman’ – 女 – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’?

‘I don’t know,’ Robin admitted. ‘Why is it? Are slavery and goodness both innately feminine?’

Professor Chakravarti shrugged. ‘I don’t know either. These are questions Richard and I are still trying to answer. We’re far from a satisfactory edition of the Chinese Grammatica, you see. When I was studying Chinese, I had no good Chinese-English resources – I had to make do with Abel-Rémusat’s Elémens de la grammaire chinoise and Fourmont’s Grammatica Sinica. Can you imagine? I still associate both Chinese and French with a headache. But I think we’ve made progress today, actually.’

Then Robin realized what his place here was. He was not simply a student but a colleague, a rare native speaker capable of expanding the bounds of Babel’s scant existing knowledge. Or a silver mine to be plundered, said Griffin’s voice, though he pushed the thought away.