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

This routine – Latin in the morning, Greek in the afternoon – became Robin’s life for the foreseeable future. He was grateful for this, despite the toil. At last, he had some structure to his days. He felt less unrooted and bewildered now – he had a purpose, he had a place, and even though he still couldn’t quite fathom why this life had fallen to him, of all the dock boys in Canton, he took to his duties with determined, uncomplaining diligence.

Twice a week he had conversational practice with Professor Lovell in Mandarin.^* At first, he could not understand the point. These dialogues felt artificial, stilted, and most of all, unnecessary. He was fluent already; he didn’t stumble over vocabulary recall or pronunciations the way he did when he and Mr Felton conversed in Latin. Why should he answer such basic questions as how he found his dinner, or what he thought about the weather?

But Professor Lovell was adamant. ‘Languages are easier to forget than you imagine,’ he said. ‘Once you stop living in the world of Chinese, you stop thinking in Chinese.’

‘But I thought you wanted me to start thinking in English,’ Robin said, confused.

‘I want you to live in English,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘This is true. But I still need you to practise your Chinese. Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.’

He spoke as if this had happened before.

‘You’ve grown up with solid foundations in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. That’s very fortunate – there are adults who spend their lifetimes trying to achieve what you have. And even if they do, they achieve only a passable fluency – enough to get by, if they think hard and recall vocabulary before speaking – but nothing close to a native fluency where words come unbidden, without lag or labour. You, on the other hand, have already mastered the hardest parts of two language systems – the accents and rhythm, those unconscious quirks that adults take forever to learn, and even then, not quite. But you must maintain them. You can’t squander your natural gifts.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Robin. ‘If my talents lie in Chinese, then what do I need Latin and Greek for?’

Professor Lovell chuckled. ‘To understand English.’

‘But I know English.’

‘Not as well as you think you do. Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do. And you’ll need to attain that mastery of Chinese as well. That begins with practising what you have.’

Professor Lovell was right. It was, Robin discovered, startlingly easy to lose a language that had once felt as familiar as his own skin. In London, without another Chinese person in sight, at least not in the circles of London where he lived, his mother tongue sounded like babble. Uttered in that drawing room, the most quintessentially English of spaces, it didn’t feel like it belonged. It felt made-up. And it scared him, sometimes, how often his memory would lapse, how the syllables he’d grown up around could suddenly sound so unfamiliar.

He put twice the effort into Chinese that he did into Greek and Latin. For hours a day he practised writing out his characters, labouring over every stroke until he achieved a perfect replica of the characters in print. He reached into his memory to recall how Chinese conversations felt, how Mandarin sounded when it rolled naturally off his tongue, when he didn’t have to pause to remember the tones of the next word he uttered.

But he was forgetting. That terrified him. Sometimes, during practice conversations, he found himself blanking on a word he used to toss around constantly. And sometimes he sounded, to his own ears, like a European sailor imitating Chinese without knowing what he said.

He could fix it, though. He would. Through practice, through memorization, through daily compositions – it wasn’t the same as living and breathing Mandarin, but it was close enough. He was of an age when the language had made a permanent impression on his mind. But he had to try, really try, to make sure that he did not stop dreaming in his native tongue.

At least thrice a week Professor Lovell received a variety of guests in his sitting room. Robin supposed they must have also been scholars, for often they came bearing stacks of books or bound manuscripts, which they would pore over and debate about until the late hours of the night. Several of these men, it turned out, could speak Chinese, and Robin sometimes hid out over the banister, eavesdropping on the very strange sound of Englishmen discussing the finer points of Classical Chinese grammar over afternoon tea. ‘It’s just a final particle,’ one of them would insist, while the others cried, ‘Well, they can’t all be final particles.’