Page 52 of Babel

‘So you are a Chinaman, then?’ Pendennis pressed. ‘We weren’t sure – I think you look English, but Colin swore you were an Oriental.’

‘I was born in Canton,’ Robin said patiently. ‘Though I’d say I’m English as well—’

‘I know China,’ Woolcombe interjected. ‘Kubla Khan.’

There was a short pause.

‘Yes,’ Robin said, wondering if that utterance was supposed to mean anything.

‘The Coleridge poem,’ Woolcombe clarified. ‘A very Oriental work of literature. Yet somehow, very Romantic as well.’

‘How interesting,’ Robin said, trying his best to be polite. ‘I’ll have to read it.’

Silence descended again. Robin felt some pressure to sustain the conversation, so he tried turning the question around. ‘So what – I mean, what are you all going to do? With your degrees, I mean.’

They laughed. Pendennis rested his chin on his hand. ‘Do,’ he drawled, ‘is such a proletarian word. I prefer the life of the mind.’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Woolcombe. ‘He’s going to live off his estate and subject all his guests to grand philosophical observations until he dies. I’ll be a clergyman, Colin a solicitor. Milton’s going to be a doctor, if he can find it in him to go to lectures.’

‘So you’re not training for any profession here?’ Robin asked Pendennis.

‘I write,’ Pendennis said with very deliberate indifference, the way people who are very conceited throw out morsels of information they hope become objects of fascination. ‘I write poetry. I haven’t produced much so far—’

‘Show him,’ Colin cried, right on cue. ‘Do show him. Robin, it’s ever so profound, wait until you hear it—’

‘All right.’ Pendennis leaned forward, still feigning reluctance, and reached for a stack of papers that Robin realized had been set out for display on the coffee table this entire time. ‘Now, this one is a reply to Shelley’s “Ozymandias”,* which is as you know an ode to the unforgiving ravaging of time against all great empires and their legacies. Only I’ve argued that, in the modern era, legacies can be built to last and indeed there are great men of the sort at Oxford capable of such a monumental task.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve opened with the same line as Shelley – I met a traveller from an antique land ...’

Robin leaned back and drained the rest of his Madeira. Several seconds passed before he realized that the poem had ended, and his appraisal was required.

‘We have translators working on poetry at Babel,’ he said blandly, for lack of anything better to say.

‘Of course that’s not the same,’ Pendennis said. ‘Translating poetry is for those who haven’t the creative fire themselves. They can only seek residual fame cribbing off the work of others.’

Robin scoffed. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Pendennis. ‘You’re not a poet.’

‘Actually—’ Robin fidgeted with the stem of his glass for a moment, then decided to keep talking. ‘I think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. That’s why Shelley writes that translating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible.* So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’

By the end of this spiel Pendennis and his friends were staring at him, slack-jawed and bemused, as if they weren’t sure what to make of him.

‘Dancing in shackles,’ Woolcombe said after a pause. ‘That’s lovely.’

‘But I’m not a poet,’ Robin said, a bit more viciously than he’d intended. ‘So really what do I know?’

His anxiety had dissipated entirely. He no longer felt concerned about how he presented, about whether his jacket was properly buttoned or he’d left crumbs on the side of his mouth. He didn’t want Pendennis’s approval. He didn’t care for any of these boys’ approval at all.

The truth of this encounter hit him with such clarity that he nearly laughed out loud. They were not appraising him for membership. They were trying to impress him – and by impressing him, to display their own superiority, to prove that to be a Babbler was not as good as being one of Elton Pendennis’s friends.

But Robin was not impressed. Was this the pinnacle of Oxford society? This? He felt a profuse pity for them – these boys who considered themselves aesthetes, who thought their lives were as rarefied as the examined life could be. But they would never engrave a word in a silver bar and feel the weight of its meaning reverberate in their fingers. They would never change the fabric of the world by simply wishing it.

‘Is that what they teach you at Babel, then?’ Woolcombe looked slightly awed. No one, it seemed, ever talked back to Elton Pendennis.

‘That and then some,’ Robin said. He felt a heady rush every time he spoke. These boys were nothing; he could decimate them with a word if he so desired. He could jump up on the couch and hurl his wine against the curtains without consequence, because he simply did not care. This rush of heady confidence was wholly foreign to him, but it felt very good. ‘Of course, the real point of Babel is silver-working. All that stuff about poetry is just the underlying theory.’

He was talking off the top of his head here. He had only a very vague idea of the underlying theory behind silver-working, but whatever he’d just said sounded good and played off even better.

‘Have you done silver-working?’ St Cloud pressed. Pendennis shot him an irritated look, but St Cloud persisted. ‘Is it difficult?’