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

Anthony called victory an inevitability. Anthony believed the material contradictions of England would tear it apart, that their movement would succeed because the revels of the Empire were simply unsustainable. This, he argued, was why they had a chance.

Victoire knows better.

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.

She cannot know what shape that struggle will take. There are so many battles to be fought, so many fights on so many fronts – in India, in China, in the Americas – all linked together by the same drive to exploit that which is not white and English. She knows only that she will be in it at every unpredictable turn, will fight until her dying breath.

‘Mande mwen yon ti kou ankò ma di ou,’ she’d told Anthony once, when he’d first asked her what she thought of Hermes, if she thought they might succeed.

He’d tried his best to parse Kreyòl with what he knew of French, then he’d given up. ‘What’s that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘At least, we say it when we don’t know the answer, or don’t care to share the answer.’

‘And what’s it literally mean?’

She’d winked at him. ‘Ask me a little later, and I’ll tell you.’

Acknowledgements

Babel is about infinite worlds of languages, cultures, and histories – many of which I do not know – and its writing would not have been possible without the friends who shared their knowledge with me. Many, many thanks are in order:

First, to Peng Shepherd, Ehigbor Shultz, Farah Naz Rishi, Sarah Mughal, and Nathalie Gedeon for helping me ensure that Robin, Ramy, and Victoire were written with detail and compassion. To Caroline Mann and Allison Resnick for their Classics expertise; to Sarah Forssman, Saoudia Ganiou, and De’Andre Ferreira for their help with translations; and to my dear professors at Yale – in particular Jing Tsu, Lisa Lowe, and Denise Ho – for shaping my thinking about coloniality, post-coloniality, and the bearing of language on power.

I am supported by the most wonderful teams at Harper Voyager on both sides of the pond. Thank you to my editors, David Pomerico and Natasha Bardon; as well as to Fleur Clarke, Susanna Peden, Robyn Watts, Vicky Leech, Jack Renninson, Mireya Chiriboga, Holly Rice-Baturin, and DJ DeSmyter.

Thank you to the artists who made Babel look the way it does: Nico Delort, Kimberly Jade McDonald, and Holly Macdonald.

Thank you also to Hannah Bowman, without whom none of this would be possible, and the entire team at Liza Dawson Associates – especially Havis Dawson, Joanne Fallert, Lauren Banka, and Liza Dawson.

Thank you to Julius Bright-Ross, Taylor Vandick, Katie O’Nell, and the Vaults & Garden cafe, who made those strange, sad months in Oxford bearable. And thank you to the New Haven homies – Tochi Onyebuchi, Akanksha Shah, and James Jensen – for the pizzas and the laughs. All hail the Great Egg.

Thank you to Tiff and Chris for helping run Coco’s Cocoa, a most wonderful interdimensional, magical dog-owned café at which most of this manuscript was written.

Thank you to Bennett, who was the best company I could have asked for during that long, lonely, terrible year in which Babel came together, and whose counsel shaped so many details of this story. He would like everyone to know that he named the book, as well as the Hermes Society, for while I have a sense for the literary, he has a sense for the awesome.

Finally, thank you to Mom and Dad, to whom I owe everything.

About the Author

REBECCA F. KUANG is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award–nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the novel Babel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

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Also by R. F. Kuang

The Poppy War

The Dragon Republic

The Burning God

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.