Page 66 of Babel

Chapter Eleven

But slaves we are, and labour in another man’s plantation; we dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s.

JOHN DRYDEN, extract from the ‘Dedication’ to his translation of the Aeneid

Robin saw none of Griffin for the rest of Hilary Term, or Trinity. In truth, he hardly noticed; his second-year coursework only got more difficult as the weeks went on, and he barely had time to dwell on his resentment.

Summer came, though it was not a summer at all but rather an accelerated term, and his days were occupied with frantically cramming Sanskrit vocabulary for an assessment the week before next Michaelmas began. Then they were third-year students, a status that entailed all the exhaustion of Babel with none of its novelties. Oxford lost its charm that September; the golden sunsets and bright blue skies replaced by an endless chill and fog. It rained an inordinate amount, and the storm winds felt uniquely vicious compared to previous years. Their umbrellas kept breaking. Their socks were always wet. Rowing that term was cancelled.*

That was just as well. None of them had time for sports anymore. The third year at Babel was traditionally known as the Siberian winter, and the reason became obvious when they were issued their courses lists. They were all continuing in their tertiary languages and in Latin, which was rumoured to become devilishly difficult when Tacitus entered the picture. They were also continuing in Translation Theory with Professor Playfair and Etymology with Professor Lovell, though the workload for each course had now doubled, as they were expected to produce a five-page paper for each class every week.

Most importantly, they were all assigned supervisors with whom they would pursue an independent research project. This counted as their proto-dissertation – their first piece of work that would, if completed successfully, be preserved on Babel’s shelves as a true piece of scholarly contribution.

Ramy and Victoire were both immediately unhappy with their supervisors. Ramy had been invited by Professor Joseph Harding to contribute to an editorial round of the Persian Grammatica, which was nominally a great honour.* But Ramy couldn’t see the romance in such a project.

‘Initially I proposed a translation of Ibn Khaldun’s manuscripts,’ he told them. ‘The ones Silvestre de Sacy’s got hold of. But Harding objected that the French Orientalists were already working on that, and that it was unlikely I could get Paris to lend them to me for the term. So then I asked if I might just translate Omar ibn Said’s Arabic essays into English, given that they’ve just been sitting around for a near decade in our collections, but Harding said that was unnecessary because abolition had already passed into law in England, can you believe it?* As if America doesn’t exist? At last Harding said if I wanted to do something authoritative, then I could edit the citations in the Persian Grammatica, so he’s got me reading Schlegel now. Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. And you know what? Schlegel wasn’t even in India when he wrote that. He wrote it all from Paris. How do you write a definitive text on the “language and wisdom” of India from Paris?’*

Yet Ramy’s indignation seemed trivial compared to what Victoire was dealing with. She was working with Professor Hugo Leblanc, with whom she’d studied French for two years with no trouble, but who now became a source of ceaseless frustration.

‘It’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I want to work on Kreyòl, which he’s not wholly opposed to despite thinking it’s a degenerate language, but all he wants to know about is Vodou.’

‘That pagan religion?’ Letty asked.

Victoire shot her a scathing look. ‘The religion, yes. He keeps asking about Vodou spells and poems, which he can’t access, of course, because they’re in Kreyòl.’

Letty looked confused. ‘But isn’t that just the same thing as French?’

‘Not even remotely,’ said Victoire. ‘French is the lexifier, yes, but Kreyòl is its own language, with its own grammatical rules. French and Kreyòl are not mutually intelligible. You could have studied French for a decade, but a Kreyòl poem might still be impossible to decipher without a dictionary. Leblanc doesn’t have a dictionary – there is no dictionary, not yet – so I’m the next best thing.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’ asked Ramy. ‘Seems like you’ve got a pretty good project, there.’

Victoire looked uncomfortable. ‘Because the texts he wants translated are – I don’t know, they’re special texts. Texts that mean something.’

‘Texts so special that they shouldn’t even be translated?’ Letty asked.

‘They’re heritage,’ insisted Victoire. ‘They’re sacred beliefs—’

‘Not your beliefs, surely—’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Victoire. ‘I haven’t – I mean, I don’t know. But they’re not meant to be shared. Would you be content to sit hour after hour with a white man as he asks you the story behind every metaphor, every god’s name, so he can pilfer through your people’s beliefs for a match-pair that might make a silver bar glow?’

Letty looked unconvinced. ‘But it’s not real, is it?’

‘Of course it’s real.’

‘Oh, please, Victoire.’

‘It’s real in a sense you can never know.’ Victoire was growing agitated. ‘In a sense that only someone from Haiti could have access to. But not in the sense that Leblanc is imagining.’

Letty sighed. ‘So why don’t you tell him just that?’

‘You don’t think I’ve tried?’ Victoire snapped. ‘Have you ever tried to convince a Babel professor not to pursue something?’

‘Well anyhow,’ said Letty, annoyed and defensive now and therefore vicious, ‘what would you know about Vodou? Didn’t you grow up in France?’

This was the worst reply she could have made. Victoire clamped her mouth shut and looked away. The conversation died. An awkward silence descended, which neither Victoire nor Letty made any attempt to break. Robin and Ramy exchanged a glance, clueless, foolish. Something had gone terribly wrong, a taboo had been breached, but they were all too afraid to probe at precisely what.

Robin and Letty were passably happy with their projects, plodding and time-consuming as they were. Robin was working with Professor Chakravarti to complete a list of Sanskrit loanwords to Chinese, and Letty was working with Professor Leblanc to wade through French scientific papers for possibly useful and untranslatable metaphors in the realm of mathematics and engineering. They learned to avoid discussing the details around Ramy and Victoire. They all used platitudes with each other; Robin and Letty were always ‘making good progress’ while Ramy and Victoire were ‘struggling on as usual’.