This is my first 5-star book of the year and my first book by a Chinese author – R. F. Kuang*.

I’ve listened to it in audiobook format and because the narrator and main character are both men, in my head the author was also a man (it didn’t help that they used initials and the English language is so bad at identifying genders).

We can admit here some dose of internalized sexism, because R. F. Kuang is a woman. And a fricking brilliant one!

If you’re like me and love learning different languages, you will love this book. The whole story develops around the art of translation. But this is not just a treaty on how languages shape the world or how they’re used as a tool for domination (that would be cool already). There are secret societies, intrigue, betrayal, tension.

The book is set in the early 1800’s in Oxford, England. The world built by Kuang is very similar to the real world at the time, with the difference that the book adds a bit of magic. There are silver bars that can be enchanted with pairs of words in different languages. Those objects have the power to heal or to improve certain qualities, such as making ships go faster and weapons stronger. Needless to say, England uses the bars to dominate the world.

The bars are a metaphor for technology, and the need for foreign translators to activate them plays into the exploitation of rich resources in other countries. British imperialism, colonialism and the complicity of academia in perpetuating them are central topics to this book, which has been defined by the author as a “Historical Dark Academia”.

“London sits at the center of a vast empire that won’t stop growing. The single most important enabler of this growth is Babel. Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent in the same way. It hoards silver and uses it to produce translation magic that benefits England. And England only.”

Babel

In this scenario we have a cohort of students coming from other countries – Robin, from China, Ramy from India, Victoire from France/Haiti, and Letty, the daughter of a British former admiral. All of them are brilliant and struggle with belonging somehow, especially Robin.

“He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman 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.”

Babel

This duality follows Robin throughout the whole book, and as the story evolves he’s pushed more and more against the wall in terms of choosing a side. I’ll stop here before any spoilers.

I was also fascinated by the topic of translation in the book, and it actually made me want to work with translation. The classes by Professor Playfair are one of the highlights (even though Kuang said that her editors asked her to limit those passages for the sake of the average reader).

“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?”

Babel

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I think translation obviously changes the text, but this transformation is happening all the time with written material. Taking the ideas out of my head and into paper is a translation of my thoughts. Another person reading it is also a translation of my ideas in their head since everyone has a different context and will read it differently. Therefore, a text is constantly transforming itself from the moment it’s set into the external world. There’s no escaping change.

The question is what do you change into? And that’s the hard task of a translator, to choose how much and in which direction to change things, in the hope that the end result will be as close as possible to what the author intended.

“So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic and poet all at once. (…) The poet runs untrammeled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.”

Babel

That also led me to some questions that I had in my head for a long time: Isn’t a translation of a book a new book? Is the translator of a book a second author? If I read a book twice in different languages, am I reading two different books?

As usual, I have no idea of the answer to those questions. But if you like tickling your brain with deep reflections and a beautifully well-rounded text, this book is for you.

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*Is important to note that Kuang is described as an American author. She was born in Guangzhou, China, and her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was 4. I decided to include her as a Chinese author because her work is still very much linked with Asian expression, even if that expression is in the U.S. and influenced by American culture.

It’s a hard choice that I’ve encountered during this Read the World Challenge, as I’m always learning about people that don’t fully fit in one nationality.