Rf Kuang Babel Quotes

That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.

This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.

Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Be selfish," he whispered. "Be brave.

How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’ ‘Not as odd as you’d think,’ said Victoire. ‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.

There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.

Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It's shackling you. You've identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you. When are you going to realize you can't be one of them?

I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.

But what is the opposite of fidelity?' asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of his dialitic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. 'Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?

So, you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as the rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty - rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the authors ideology and biases.

We're here to make magic with words

She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them. Good. It should.

That's the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.

…there is no such thing as humane colonization.

Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?

History isn't a premade tapestry that we've got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.

A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love.

Words tell stories. Specifically, the history of those words - how they came into use, and how their meaning morphed into what they mean today - tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact.

No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.

Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

What you don’t understand,’ said Ramy, ‘is how much people like you will excuse if it just means they can get tea and coffee on their breakfast tables. They don’t care, Letty. They just don’t care.

If we push in the right spots - then we've moved things to the breaking point. The the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn't a premed tapestry that we've got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.

Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.

We are foreign because this nation has marked us so, and as long as we’re punished daily for our ties to our homelands, we might as well defend them. No, Letty, we can’t maintain this fantasy. The only one who can do that is you.

It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.

But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present

In the years to come, Robin would return so many times to this night. He was forever astonished by its mysterious alchemy, by how easily two badly socialized, restrictively raised strangers had transformed into kindred spirits in a span of minutes.

Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.

But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.

They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud.

After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.

Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited.

How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.

Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

It is astounding, in truth, how much of academia’s perceived resource scarcity is artificially constructed.

Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.

It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?

Let them hate, so long as they fear.

They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.

Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire.

Nice comes to us by way of the Old French nice ('weak, clumsy, silly'), from the Latin nescius ('ignorant, not knowing').

Defying empire, it turned out, was fun.

... the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo.

And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.

I want to live,’ she repeated, ‘and live, and thrive, and survive them. I want a future. I don’t think death is a reprieve. I think it’s – it’s just the end. It forecloses everything – a future where I might be happy, and free. And it’s not about being brave. It’s about wanting another chance. Even if all I did was run away, even if I never lifted a finger to help anyone else as long as I lived – at least I would get to be happy. At least the world might be all right, just for a day, just for me. Is that selfish?

You're lost, brother. You're a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It's gone." He paused beside Robin on his way to the door. His fingers landed on Robin's shoulder, squeezed so hard they hurt. "But realize this, brother. You fly no one's flag. You're free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.

It’s hard to accept what you don’t want to see.

One thing united them all, without Babel they had nowhere in this country to go. They had been chosen for privileges they couldn't have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they didn't understand and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom. They did not want to give them back.

Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves. —MARY PRINCE, The History of Mary Prince

It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries.

Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You’re obsessed with punishment. But that’s not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.

Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.

Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world.

The feminine was an idea that existed in theory, the stuff of novels or a rare phenomenon to be glimpsed from across the street.

Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.

He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.

You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.

Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet. The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth. CHARLES V

But never forget the audacity of what you are attempting. Never forget that you are defying a curse laid by God.

You’re a proper little princess, aren’t you? Big estate in Brighton, summers in Toulouse, porcelain china on your shelves and Assam in your teacups? How could you understand? Your people reap the fruits of the Empire. Ours don’t. So shut up, Letty, and just listen to what we’re trying to tell you. It’s not right what they’re doing to our countries.’ His voice grew louder, harder. ‘And it’s not right that I’m trained to use my languages for their benefit, to translate laws and texts to facilitate their rule, when there are people in India and China and Haiti and all over the Empire and the world who are hungry and starving because the British would rather put silver in their hats and harpsichords than anywhere it could do some good.

We have to die to get their pity. We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. I don't want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko. I don't want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.

…he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that still he wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks.

If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.

The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese. ‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence. FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox

languages aren't just made of words. they're modes of looking at the world. They're the keys to civiliation. And that's knowledge worth killing for

Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one.

Books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless.

Robin’s mind was spinning with claret, or else he wouldn’t have managed what he said next. ‘Why won’t you dance with Letty?’ ‘I’m not looking to start a row.’ ‘No, really.’ ‘Please, Birdie.’ Ramy sighed. ‘You know how it is.’ ‘She wants you,’ Robin said. He’d only just realized this, and now that he said it out loud, it seemed so obvious that he felt stupid for not seeing it earlier. ‘Very badly. So why—’ ‘Don’t you know why?’ Their eyes met. Robin felt a prickle at the back of his neck. The space between them felt very charged, like the moment between lightning and thunder, and Robin had no idea what was going on or what would happen next, only that it all felt very strange and terrifying, like teetering over the edge of a windy, roaring cliff.

By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them.

Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

We’re here to make magic with words.

Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured.

English did not just borrow words from other languages it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular and Robin found it incredible how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods,

Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’ Griffin pointed at the middle birch. ‘Pull the trigger, kid.

« But academics by nature are a solitary, sedentary lot. Travels sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire. » - R.F. Kuang, Babel or the necessity of violence

They were all suffering the same unspoken, private fear, a creeping dread that this strike might do nothing but damn themselves, and that their cries would go unheard into the unforgiving dark.

The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.

Robin wondered then how much of Anthony’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people, how much of his genial, affable polish was an artful construction to fit a particular idea of a Black man in white England and to afford himself maximum access within an institution like Babel. And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen, when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn’t have to go through endless distortions just to be understood.

If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, thought Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come – not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations. For simple ink on paper was not enough to describe this golden afternoon; the warmth of uncomplicated friendship, all fights forgotten, all sins forgiven; the sunlight melting away the memory of the classroom chill; the sticky taste of lemon on their tongues and their startled, delighted relief.

New words in English were a game to him, for in understanding the word he always came to understand something about English history or culture itself. He delighted when common words were, unexpectedly, formed from other words he knew. Hussy was a compound of house and wife. Holiday was a compound of holy and day. Bedlam came, implausibly, from Bethlehem. Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you.

This is the ongoing debate of our field...He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him.... Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?

The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. […] So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.

Why do you call them yi? You must know that they hate it.’ ‘But all it means is “foreign”,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘They are the ones who insisted on its connotations. They create the insult for themselves.’ ‘Then wouldn’t it be easier just to say yáng?’ ‘Would you let someone come in and tell you what words in your own language mean?

All our silver goes to luxury, to the military, to making lace and weapons when there are people dying of simple things these bars could fix. It’s not right that you recruit students from other countries to work your translation centre and that their motherlands receive nothing in return.

Pamphlets. They’d thought they could win this with pamphlets. He almost laughed at the absurdity. Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain. ‘It’s sick,’ he whispered. ‘It’s sick, it’s so sick . . .

How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism.

It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet...’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.

The origins of the word 'anger' were tied closely to physical suffering. 'Anger' was first an 'affliction', as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in term came from the Latin angor, which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical. He was bleeding, but he didn’t know where from. He ached all over from the handcuffs digging into his wrists, from the hard stone floor against his limbs, from the way the police had flung him down as if trying to break all of his bones. He registered these hurts as factual, but he could not really feel them; he couldn’t feel anything other than the singular, blinding pain of Ramy’s loss. And he did not want to feel anything else, did not want to sink into his body and register its hurts, because that physical pain would mean he was alive, and because being alive meant that he had to move forward. But he could not go on. Not from this.