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

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.

Robin parsed the sentence, consulted his dictionary to check that auferre meant what he thought it did, then wrote out his translation.^*

When Michaelmas term began in early October, Professor Lovell departed for Oxford, where he would stay for the next eight weeks. He would do this for each of Oxford’s three academic terms, returning only during the breaks. Robin relished these periods; even though his classes did not pause, it felt possible to breathe and relax then without risk of disappointing his guardian at every turn.

It also meant that, without Professor Lovell breathing over his shoulder, he had the freedom to explore the city.

Professor Lovell gave him no allowance, but Mrs Piper occasionally let him have some small change for fares, which he saved up until he could get to Covent Garden by carriage. When he learned from a paperboy about the horse-drawn omnibus service, he rode it almost every weekend, crisscrossing the heart of London from Paddington Green to the Bank. His first few trips alone terrified him; several times he grew convinced he would never find his way back to Hampstead again and would be doomed to live out his life as a waif on the streets. But he persisted. He refused to be cowed by London’s complexity, for wasn’t Canton, too, a labyrinth? He determined to make the place home by walking every inch of it. Bit by bit London grew to feel less overwhelming, less like a belching, contorted pit of monsters that might swallow him up at any corner and more like a navigable maze whose tricks and turns he could anticipate.

He read the city. London in the 1830s was exploding with print. Newspapers, magazines, journals, quarterlies, weeklies, monthlies, and books of every genre were flying off the shelves, tossed on doorsteps, and hawked from the corners of nearly every street. He pored over newsstand copies of The Times, the Standard, and the Morning Post; he read, though did not fully comprehend, articles in academic journals like Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review; he read penny satirical papers like Figaro in London, melodramatic pseudo-news like colourful crime reports and a series on the dying confessions of condemned prisoners. For cheaper stuff, he entertained himself with the Bawbee Bagpipe. He stumbled on a series called The Pickwick Papers by someone named Charles Dickens, who was very funny but seemed to hate very much anyone who was not white. He discovered Fleet Street, the heart of London publishing, where newspapers came off the printing presses still hot. He went back there time and time again, bringing home stacks of yesterday’s papers for free from piles that were dumped on the corner.

He didn’t understand half of what he read, even if he could decipher all the individual words. The texts were packed with political allusions, inside jokes, slang, and conventions that he’d never learned. In lieu of a childhood spent absorbing it all in London, he tried devouring the corpus instead, tried to plough through references to things like Tories, Whigs, Chartists, and Reformers and memorize what they were. He learned what the Corn Laws were and what they had to do with a Frenchman named Napoleon. He learned who the Catholics and Protestants were, and how the (he thought, at least) small doctrinal differences between the two were apparently a matter of great and bloody importance. He learned that being English was not the same as being British, though he was still hard-pressed to articulate the difference between the two.

He read the city, and he learned its language. 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. In London’s East End he encountered Cockney rhyming slang, which initially presented a great mystery, for he had no clue how Hampstead could come to mean ‘teeth.’^* But once he learned about the omitted rhyming component, he had great fun coming up with his own. (Mrs Piper was not very amused when he began referring to dinner as the ‘meal of saints’.)^*