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

They tried to befriend the second-year cohort, too, a group of five white boys who lived just across the way on Merton Street. But this went south immediately when one of them, Philip Wright, told Robin at a faculty dinner that the first-year cohort was largely international only because of departmental politics. ‘The board of undergraduate studies is always fighting over whether to prioritize European languages, or other . . . more exotic languages. Chakravarti and Lovell have been making a stink about diversifying the student body for years. They didn’t like that my cohort are all Classicists. I assume they were overcorrecting with you.’

Robin tried to be polite. ‘I’m not sure why that’s such a bad thing.’

‘Well, it’s not a bad thing per se, but it does mean spots taken away from equally qualified candidates who passed the entrance exams.’

‘I didn’t take any entrance exams,’ said Robin.

‘Precisely.’ Philip sniffed, and did not say another word to Robin for the entire evening.

So it was Ramy, Letty, and Victoire who became such constant interlocutors that Robin started seeing Oxford through their eyes. Ramy would adore that purple scarf hanging in the window of Ede & Ravenscroft; Letty would laugh herself silly at the puppy-eyed young man sitting outside Queen’s Lane Coffeehouse with a book of sonnets; Victoire would be so excited that a new batch of scones had just been put out at Vaults & Garden but because she would be stuck in her French tutorial until noon, Robin absolutely had to buy one, wrap it up in his pocket, and save it for her for when class was let out. Even his course readings became more exciting when he began seeing them as source material for cutting observations, complaining or humorous, to be shared later with the group.

They were not without their rifts. They argued endlessly, the way bright young people with well-fed egos and too many opinions do. Robin and Victoire had a long-running debate over the superiority of English versus French literature, wherein both were oddly, fiercely loyal to their adopted countries. Victoire insisted that England’s best theorists could not hold a candle to Voltaire or Diderot, and Robin would have given her the benefit of the doubt if only she didn’t keep scoffing at the translations he took out from the Bodleian on the grounds that ‘They’re nothing compared to the original, you might as well not read it at all.’ Victoire and Letty, though normally quite close, seemed to always get snippy on issues of money and whether Letty truly counted as poor as she claimed to be just because her father had cut her off.^* And Letty and Ramy bickered most of all, largely over Ramy’s claim that Letty had never stepped foot in the colonies and therefore shouldn’t opine on the supposed benefits of the British presence in India.

‘I do know a thing or two about India,’ Letty would insist. ‘I’ve read all sorts of essays, I’ve read Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah—’

‘Oh, yes?’ Ramy would ask. ‘The one where India is a lovely Hindu nation, overrun by tyrannical Muslim invaders? That one?’

At which point Letty would always get defensive, sullen, and irritable until the next day. But this was not entirely her fault. Ramy seemed particularly determined to provoke her, to dismantle her every assertion. Proud, proper Letty with her stiff upper lip represented everything Ramy disdained about the English, and Robin suspected Ramy would not be satisfied until he’d got Letty to declare treason against her own country.

Still, their fights could not really pull them apart. Rather, these arguments only drew them closer together, sharpened their edges, and defined the ways they fitted differently into the puzzle of their cohort. They spent all their time together. On weekends, they sat at a corner table outside the Vaults & Garden café, interrogating Letty on the oddities of English, of which only she was a native speaker. (‘What does corned mean?’ Robin would demand. ‘What is corned beef? What are you all doing to your beef?’^* ‘And what is a welcher?’^* Victoire would ask, looking up from her latest penny serial. ‘Letitia, please, what in God’s name is a jigger-dubber?’^*)