‘I only...’ Robin faltered. It sounded silly as he said it, a child’s fancy, not a serious scholarly query. Letty and Victoire were frowning at him; even Ramy was wrinkling his nose. Robin tried again – he knew what he meant to ask, only he couldn’t think of an elegant or subtle way to phrase it. ‘Well – since in the Bible, God split mankind apart. And I wonder if – if the purpose of translation, then, is to bring mankind back together. If we translate to – I don’t know, bring about that paradise again, on earth, between nations.’
Professor Playfair looked baffled by this. But quickly his features reassembled into a sprightly beam. ‘Well, of course. Such is the project of empire – and why, therefore, we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.’
Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays they had language tutorials, which, after Professor Playfair’s lecture, felt like reassuring solid ground.
They were required to take Latin together three times a week, regardless of regional speciality. (Greek, at this stage, could be dropped for anyone not specializing in Classics.) Latin was taught by a woman named Professor Margaret Craft, who could not have been more different from Professor Playfair. She rarely smiled. She delivered her lectures without feeling and by rote memory, never glancing once at her notes, although she flipped through these as she spoke, as if she’d long ago memorized her place on the page. She did not ask their names – she only ever referred to them with a pointed finger and a cold, abrupt ‘You.’ She came off at first as utterly humourless, but when Ramy read aloud one of Ovid’s dryer injections – fugiebat enim, ‘for she was fleeing’, after Jove begs Io not to flee – she burst out in a fit of girlish laughter that made her seem twenty years younger; indeed, like a schoolgirl who might have sat among them. Then the moment passed, and her mask resumed its place.
Robin did not like her. Her lecturing voice had an awkward, unnatural rhythm with unexpected pauses that made it hard to follow her line of argument, and the two hours they spent in her classroom seemed to drag for an eternity. Letty, however, seemed rapt. She gazed at Professor Craft with shining admiration. When they filed out at the end of class, Robin hung by the door to wait as she collected her things so they could all walk to the Buttery together. But she instead went up to Professor Craft’s desk.
‘Professor, I was wondering if I could speak with you for—’
Professor Craft rose. ‘Class is over, Miss Price.’
‘I know, but I wanted to ask you for a moment – if you have spare time – I mean, just as a woman at Oxford, I mean, there aren’t so many of us, and I hoped to hear your advice—’
Robin felt then he should stop listening, out of some vague sense of chivalry, but Professor Craft’s chilly voice cut through the air before he could reach the stairs.
‘Babel hardly discriminates against women. It’s simply that so few of our sex are interested in languages.’
‘But you’re the only woman professor at Babel, and we all – that is, all the girls here and I – we think that’s quite admirable, so I wanted—’
‘To know how it’s done? Hard work and innate brilliance. You know that already.’
‘It’s different for women, though, and surely you’ve experienced—’
‘When I have relevant topics for discussion, I will bring them up in class, Miss Price. But class is over. And you’re now infringing on my time.’
Robin hastened around the corner and down the winding steps before Letty could see him. When she sat down with her plate in the Buttery, he saw her eyes were a bit pink around the edges. But he pretended not to notice, and if Ramy or Victoire did, they said nothing.
On Wednesday afternoon, Robin had his solo tutorial in Chinese. He’d half expected to find Professor Lovell in the classroom, but his instructor turned out to be Professor Anand Chakravarti, a genial and understated man who spoke English with such a pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent that he might have been raised in Kensington.
Chinese class was a wholly different exercise from Latin. Professor Chakravarti didn’t lecture at Robin or make him do recitations. He conducted this tutorial as a conversation. He asked questions, Robin tried his best to answer, and they both tried to make sense out of what he’d said.
Professor Chakravarti began with questions so basic that Robin at first couldn’t see how they were worth answering, until he picked apart their implications and realized they were far beyond his scope of understanding. What was a word? What was the smallest possible unit of meaning, and why was that different from a word? Was a word different from a character? In what ways was Chinese speech different from Chinese writing?
It was an odd exercise to analyse and dismantle a language he thought he knew like the back of his hand, to learn to classify words by ideogram or pictogram, and to memorize an entire vocabulary of new terms, most having to do with morphology or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him.
Then came the harder questions. Which Chinese words could be traced back to recognizable pictures? Which couldn’t? Why was the character for ‘woman’ – ? – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’?
‘I don’t know,’ Robin admitted. ‘Why is it? Are slavery and goodness both innately feminine?’
Professor Chakravarti shrugged. ‘I don’t know either. These are questions Richard and I are still trying to answer. We’re far from a satisfactory edition of the Chinese Grammatica, you see. When I was studying Chinese, I had no good Chinese-English resources – I had to make do with Abel-Rémusat’s Elémens de la grammaire chinoise and Fourmont’s Grammatica Sinica. Can you imagine? I still associate both Chinese and French with a headache. But I think we’ve made progress today, actually.’
Then Robin realized what his place here was. He was not simply a student but a colleague, a rare native speaker capable of expanding the bounds of Babel’s scant existing knowledge. Or a silver mine to be plundered, said Griffin’s voice, though he pushed the thought away.
The truth was, it felt exciting to contribute to the Grammaticas. But he still had much to learn. The second half of their tutorial was spent on readings in Classical Chinese, which Robin had dabbled in at Professor Lovell’s home but had never tackled in a systematic manner. Classical Chinese was to vernacular Mandarin what Latin was to English; one could guess at the gist of a phrase, but the rules of grammar were unintuitive and impossible to grasp without rigorous reading practice. Punctuation was a guessing game. Nouns could be verbs when they felt like it. Often, characters had different and contradictory meanings, either of which produced valid possible interpretations – the character ?, for instance, could mean both ‘to restrict’ and ‘large, substantial’.
That afternoon they tackled the Shijing – the Book of Songs – which was written in a discursive context so far removed from contemporary China that even readers of the Han period would have considered it written in a foreign language.
‘I propose we break here,’ Professor Chakravarti said after twenty minutes of debating the character ?, which in most contexts meant a negative ‘no, not’, but in the given context seemed instead like a word of praise, which didn’t track with anything they knew about the word. ‘I suspect we’ll have to leave this as an open question.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Robin said, frustrated. ‘How can we just not know? Could we ask someone about all this? Couldn’t we go on a research trip to Peking?’
‘We could,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘But it makes things a bit hard when the Qing Emperor has decreed it punishable by death to teach a foreigner Chinese, you see.’ He patted Robin’s shoulder. ‘We make do with what we have. You’re the next best thing.’
‘Isn’t there anyone else here who speaks Chinese?’ Robin asked. ‘Am I the only student?’
A strange look came over Professor Chakravarti’s face then. Robin was not supposed to know about Griffin, he realized. Probably Professor Lovell had sworn the rest of the faculty to secrecy; probably, according to the official record, Griffin did not exist.