R. F. Kuang

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel. 

Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.

Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down? 

Babel — a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of translation as a tool of empire.

Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution

Babel

Gica

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.'

Keira

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

sadie

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?

ㅤㅤ

But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper.

Nor would he ever know that Griffin, unlike Robin, had no cohort to lean on after his act, no one to help him absorb the shock of this violence. And so he’d swallowed it, curled in around it, made it a part of himself – and while for others this might have been the first step on the road to madness, Griffin Lovell had instead whittled this capacity to kill into a sharp and necessary weapon.

But he’d waited for death to come before. He remembered this now - he knew death. Not so abruptly, no, not so violently. But the memory of waiting to fade was still locked in his bones; memories of a stale, hot room, of paralysis, of dreaming about the end. He remembered the stillness. The peace. As the windows smashed in, Robin shut his eyes and imagined his mother’s face. 

‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ 

‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘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.’

Her shoulders crumpled. Robin held her tight against him. What an anchor she was, he thought, an anchor he did not deserve. She was his rock, his light, the sole presence that had kept him going. And he wished, he wished, that was enough for him to hold on to.

‘Be selfish,’ he whispered. ‘Be brave.’

‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘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. But I don’t want to die, Robin.’ Her throat hitched. ‘I don’t want to die. 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.’

Griffin would have known how to compel them. Griffin was the storyteller, the true revolutionary; he could paint the necessary picture of imperial expansion, complicity, guilt, and responsibility with a handful of gutting phrases. But Griffin wasn’t here, and the best Robin could do was to channel his dead brother’s spirit.

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.

He stood. What an awful tableau, he thought. Griffin’s and Sterling’s bodies lay adjacent on the ground, blood pooling beneath each one, running together under the rain. Some kind of love story had concluded on this square – some vicious triangle of desire, resentment, jealousy, and hatred had opened with Evie’s death and closed with Griffin’s. Its details were murky, would never be known to Robin in full;* all he knew, with certainty, was that this was not the first time Griffin and Sterling had tried to kill each other, only the first time one of them had succeeded. But all the principal characters were dead now, and the circle was closed.

He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture. The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’, and Robin wanted with every ounce of his being a world that no longer was. He hoped until he thought he was going mad, until he started hearing fragments of his thoughts as if spoken outside of him, low, gruff words that echoed around the stone.

It seemed to defy the laws of physics that Ramiz Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet.

Because their own interest is the only logic they’ll listen to. Not justice, not human dignity, not the liberal freedoms they so profess to value. Profit.’

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.

He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

What he wanted, Robin thought, was for Professor Lovell to admit what he’d done. That it was unnatural, this entire arrangement; that children were not stock to be experimented on, judged for their blood, spirited away from their homeland in service of Crown and country. That Robin was more than a talking dictionary, and that his motherland was more than a fat golden goose. But he knew these were acknowledgments that Professor Lovell would never make. The truth between them was not buried because it was painful, but because it was inconvenient, and because Professor Lovell simply refused to address it.

It was so obvious now that he was not, and could never be, a person in his father’s eyes. No, personhood demanded the blood purity of the European man, the racial status that would make him Professor Lovell’s equal. Little Dick and Philippa were persons. Robin Swift was an asset, and assets should be undyingly grateful that they were treated well at all.

It was the first time Professor Lovell had laid hands on him since that day in the library. Robin didn’t know what Professor Lovell might do now – the look in his eyes was beastly, wholly unrecognizable. Please, Robin thought wildly. Please, hurt me, hit me, because then we’ll know. Then there won’t be any question

‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. 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.’

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.

and this is the necessity of violence. free palestine. liberation for all now.

nadyra

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.

Fiona

In Classical Chinese, the characters 二心 referred to disloyal or traitorous intentions; literally, they translated as ‘two hearts’. And Robin found himself in the impossible position of loving that which he betrayed, twice.

this might be my favourite book of the year. r f kuang’s writing has a way of making you think that is just so unique. it was such a pleasure reading her work this year and i wish there was more!!

yaya

khush

the message is bold and precise but the delivery is so drawn out and unnecessarily repetitive that it causes semantic satiation in the regular reader. patriotism is explored but the involvement of the countries/agents from those countries would make the motivation behind all the events in the later parts of the story all the more plausible. the divide between the colonist and colonized is painted to be black and white, given the page count it would've been more appropriate if the selfish native powers in the colonies' governments and how they were also reason of setback were mentioned.

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History? and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he'll enroll in Oxford University's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation--also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working--the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars--has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire's quest for colonization. For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide... Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

amazing, amazing book made me emotional 🥹

JJ Hampton 

‘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.’

sabiduría 

Marsh

Much like the magic silver of which it tells of, the prose of this book is as beautiful as they are powerful. Atmospheric world-building populated with an intricate tapestry of complex characters, and a very necessary message to herald. Moved me to tears by the end of it. LIBERATION FOR ALL.

This book was often described as “dark academia” - which, yes, is true. But it really did not prepare me for the 2 ton weight of magical silver bars dropped onto my heart. And my brain!!!

Babel follows Robin Swift, an orphan from Canton, China that gets transplanted to England under the condition to one day gain acceptance to the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University, also known as Babel. Through the eyes of Robin, Kuang illustrates the beauty and artistry of language, of deriving some semblance of meaning through translation and piecing together history in its gaps. 

In the same breath, Babel is radicalizing. It takes place in 1830s England, in Kuang’s version of the Industrial Revolution, a world that runs on magical silver bars powered by translation. In this alternate but very closely tied reality, Kuang comments on the exploitation of colonized peoples for the sole benefit of the Crown and the tragic necessity of violence in order to enact change in this world (hence the extended title, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution). Babel honors those that knew they had to lay down their lives fighting to do the right thing.  

RF Kuang is an accomplished scholar. She earned both of her Masters in Chinese studies in both Cambridge and Oxford, and is actively pursuing a PhD at Yale in East Asian Languages. Like the characters in her book, she was also an Oxford scholar, and she remains to be prominent in academia. To demonstrate how important academia is to her, she rightfully calls out its historical ties to imperialism in Babel, despite how she may appear to “bite that hand that feeds” her. 

This book was incredible. It took me forever to read but that time has allowed me to savor the overwhelming emotion packed into this 541 page book that somehow feels like the perfect length for this story. The shame this book paints of witnessing a suffering world from a position of comfort is felt in every page. The courage to break out of this comfort to make a change is felt just the same. As is the beauty, joy, anguish, and desperation for survival.

joana ashley

Yellowface was fun!

But Babel… Oh Babel meant business.

This book was often described as “dark academia” - which, yes, is true. But it really did not prepare me for the 2 ton weight of magical silver bars dropped onto my heart. And my brain!!!

Babel follows Robin Swift, an orphan from Canton, China that gets transplanted to England under the condition to one day gain acceptance to the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University, also known as Babel. Through the eyes of Robin, Kuang illustrates the beauty and artistry of language, of deriving some semblance of meaning through translation and piecing together history in its gaps. 

In the same breath, Babel is radicalizing. It takes place in 1830s England, in Kuang’s version of the Industrial Revolution, a world that runs on magical silver bars powered by translation. In this alternate but very closely tied reality, Kuang comments on the exploitation of colonized peoples for the sole benefit of the Crown and the tragic necessity of violence in order to enact change in this world (hence the extended title, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution). Babel honors those that knew they had to lay down their lives fighting to do the right thing.  

RF Kuang is an accomplished scholar. She earned both of her Masters in Chinese studies in both Cambridge and Oxford, and is actively pursuing a PhD at Yale in East Asian Languages. Like the characters in her book, she was also an Oxford scholar, and she remains to be prominent in academia. To demonstrate how important academia is to her, she rightfully calls out its historical ties to imperialism in Babel, despite how she may appear to “bite that hand that feeds” her. 

This book was incredible. It took me forever to read but that time has allowed me to savor the overwhelming emotion packed into this 541 page book that somehow feels like the perfect length for this story. The shame this book paints of witnessing a suffering world from a position of comfort is felt in every page. The courage to break out of this comfort to make a change is felt just the same. As is the beauty, joy, anguish, and desperation for survival.

ill be crying over this book every night now! liberation for all now! 

sukan

This will sit with me for a while. I loved the magic system, the incisive writing about colonization and the industrial revolution, and the character dynamics. Complex and emotional and thought provoking. I loved the academic style for a fantasy- truly haven’t read anything like it before. And the ending😩

Caroline Piephoff

a beautiful book. I enjoyed reading about Oxford , even if it’s fantasy, in the 1800s. Confronting empire and redistributing power. 

Sachi

a beautiful book. I enjoyed reading about Oxford , even if it’s fantasy, in the 1800s. Confronting empire and redistributing power. 



The pacing is so bad that it feels like nothing happens for the first 60% of the book and if I'd gone into this knowing this was absolutely more historical fiction and the fantasy was a small part of it then I would've been okay with that and my rating would've been different, because I have a different standard for historical fiction. But this was advertised very differently to me and the fact that it took me a little over two months to read? Plus yhe footnotes were a little much and drew me out of the story too often.

Jasper

2.75

The pacing is so bad that it feels like nothing happens for the first 60% of the book and if I'd gone into this knowing this was absolutely more historical fiction and the fantasy was a small part of it then I would've been okay with that and my rating would've been different, because I have a different standard for historical fiction. But this was advertised very differently to me and the fact that it took me a little over two months to read? Plus yhe footnotes were a little much and drew me out of the story too often.

i cant believe i didnt read this sooner AAAAA its so good fuck i loved it

Great, inventive book with clever combination of fantasy and colonialism critique. Really loved this inner struggle of a person removed from his culture, fighting to stay true to himself

Eugene

This book was an AMAZING read, an easy 5 stars!! 

i love that this was my first book of the year. 
it was sad, it was tragic, but it was real. and it didn’t hesitate to speak on harsh topics, and it approached it so thoughtfully.

Kuang is a genius i just have to say. 

the characters had depth, and felt like real people.
their struggles were legit and you could relate to them as a person.

This book tends to ramble a lot and deep dive in things, you would love this if you were a nerd (like me), but i don’t think this would be a reason why you shouldn’t read the book/why you wouldn’t like it!! 

now thinking back, i see that babel is more of a lesson and less of a story, i don’t remember it for its storyline but more for the actions and consequences, i remember it for the message it tried to send and not what actually happened in it. not to say that the plot wasn’t enjoyable. 

that’s all i have to say tbh. just read it😞

Eva Ströberg

Babel - RF Kuang 
.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
.
It’s no secret that Kuang is a master storyteller, especially in this book where she creates alternate reality back in Oxford in the early 1890s where an Oxford scholar from the Translation Institute brought a kid from Canton, China to be trained in Greek and Latin before enrolled to the institute with its famous Babel Tower located close to the University College
.
This book is full of language and etimological references, heavy on world history, laden with criticism about colonialism and racism, so don’t compare it Harry Potter for that sake (Don’t get me wrong, I love the Harry Potter universe too, but this book is an entirely different beast).
.
This book is also massive at 500-ish pages, so pick it up when you have time and interested about languages, and a little magic, for languages are magical, it enables us to talk to different people from different parts of the world with different culture
.
#bookstagram #rfkuang #babel #booksbooksbooks #currentlyreading #2024readingchallenge #2024reads

Oxford, 1836. The city of dreaming spires. It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world. And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows. Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.

An Arcane History

Camilla

Kiran Aftab

my mind is still trying to wrap itself around this book. this was incredibly well-written. rf kuang does not disappoint. get ready for shit to hit the fan

Long live resistance, liberations for us means liberations for you as well. 

Saffy

raya

danakim

4.75 super good but the last 20% fell a little flat for me

macky

An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

Oxford, 1836.
The city of dreaming spires. It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world. And at its heart is Babel, Oxford University's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.

Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Robin Swift thought Babel a paradise. 

Until it became a prison... But can a student stand against an empire?

Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

tori 👻

First and foremost, my favorite kind of book is one that makes me think, that challenges me, teaches me, and completely envelops me in its story. Babel fits the category beautifully. It delivers a range of emotions (such as shame and pride, grief and hope) in such an intricate way and develops its characters so fluidly while also presenting a very dense and informative narrative. Try thinking about the main character, Robin Swift, at the beginning of the novel and then think about him at the end.

I’m writing this a day after finishing Babel because the moment I did I was enveloped with a feeling of grief and shock so strong I haven’t felt in a long time with a book.

It goes beyond what I expected, I can see this becoming a classic. It’ll stick with me and I’m really glad I picked this up as my first book of 2023. Words could never praise it enough or rightfully convey the beauty of R. F. Kuang’s writing.

Babel Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution

Reviews

Highlights