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

There was a solid, enduring quality to their friendship now. They were no longer dazzled and frightened first years, clinging to each other for stability. Instead they were weary veterans united by their trials, hardened soldiers who could lean against each other for anything. Meticulous Letty, despite her grumbling, would always mark up a translation, no matter how late at night or early in the morning. Victoire was like a vault; she would listen to any amount of complaining and petty griping without letting slip to the subjects thereof. And Robin could knock on Ramy’s door at any time, day or night, if he needed a cup of tea, or something to laugh about, or someone to cry with.

When the new cohort – no girls, and four baby-faced boys – had appeared at Babel that autumn, they’d given them scarcely any attention. They had, without consciously intending to, become just like the upperclassmen they had so envied during their first term. What they’d perceived as snobbery and haughtiness, it turned out, was only exhaustion. Older students had no intention of bullying newer ones. They simply didn’t have the time.

They became what they’d aspired to be since their first year – aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

And Robin, despite everything, hoped the day Griffin prophesied would never come, that he could live hanging in this balance forever. For he had never been happier than he was now: stretched thin, too preoccupied with the next thing before him to pay any attention to how it all fitted together.

In late Michaelmas a French chemist named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre came to Babel with a curious object in tow. It was a heliographic camera obscura, he announced, and could be capable of replicating still images using exposed copper plates and light-sensitive compounds, although he couldn’t quite get the mechanics right. Could the Babblers take a look and see if they could improve it somehow?

The problem of Daguerre’s camera became the talk of the tower. The faculty made it a competition – any student cleared for silver-work who could solve Daguerre’s problem was entitled to have their name on his patent, and a percentage of the riches that were sure to follow. For two weeks, the eighth floor frothed with silent frenzy as fourth years and graduate fellows flipped through etymological dictionaries, trying to find a set of words that would get at the right nexus of meaning involving light, colour, image, and imitation.

It was Anthony Ribben who finally cracked it. As per contractual terms with Daguerre, the actual patented match-pair was kept a secret, but rumour was that Anthony had done something with the Latin imago, which in addition to meaning ‘a likeness’ or ‘imitation’ also implied a ghost or phantom. Other rumours held that Anthony had found some way to dissolve the silver bar to create fumes from heated mercury. Whatever it was, Anthony could not say, but he was paid handsomely for his efforts.

The camera worked. Magically, the exact likeness of a captured subject could be replicated on a sheet of paper in marvellously little time. Daguerre’s device – the daguerreotype, they called it – became a local sensation. Everyone wanted their picture taken. Daguerre and the Babel faculty put on a three-day exhibition in the tower lobby, and eager members of the public formed lines that wrapped around the street.

Robin was nervous about a Sanskrit translation due the next day, but Letty insisted they all go in for a portrait. ‘Don’t you want a memento of us?’ she asked. ‘Preserved at this moment in time?’

Robin shrugged. ‘Not really.’

‘Well, I do,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I want to remember exactly how we were now, in this year, in 1837. I never want to forget.’

They assembled themselves before the camera. Letty and Victoire sat down in chairs, hands folded stiffly in their laps. Robin and Ramy stood behind them, uncertain what to do with their hands. Should they place them on the girls’ shoulders? On the chairs?

‘Arms by your sides,’ said the photographer. ‘Hold still as best you can. No – first, cluster a bit closer – there you go.’

Robin smiled, realized he couldn’t keep his mouth stretched wide for that long, and promptly dropped it.

The next day, they retrieved their finished portrait from a clerk in the lobby.

‘Please,’ said Victoire. ‘That looks nothing like us at all.’

But Letty was delighted; she insisted they go shopping for a frame. ‘I’ll hang it over my mantel, what do you think?’

‘I’d rather you throw that away,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s unnerving.’

‘It is not,’ said Letty. She seemed bewitched as she observed the print, as if she’d seen actual magic. ‘It’s us. Frozen in time, captured in a moment we’ll never get back as long as we live. It’s wonderful.’