Babel - R.F. Kuang
Chapter Two > Page 26 · Location 496
“But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.”
I feel that I understand English so much better, after teaching myself Spanish (to a certain level). When I look at Chinese or Japanese I feel this intimidation, think “Why did this end up so complex”. But surely those learning English feel the same?
Chapter Six > Page 104 · Location 1796
“The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another.”
Sadly there are no bijections between languages :(. That would make it too easy. Although I feel there are some injections and even homomorphisms between the Romance Languages.
Chapter Six > Page 105 · Location 1804
“Language does not exist as a nomenclature for a set of universal concepts,’ Professor Playfair went on. ‘If it did, then translation would not be a highly skilled profession”
There are such messy overlappings and disjointed sections when mapping from language to language. Sometimes there literally are not words to convey the meaning.
Chapter Six > Page 106 · Location 1819
“And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases. After all, the Latin translatio means “to carry across”. Translation involves a spatial dimension – a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered like spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tearooms of today’s Britain.”
Chapter Eight > Page 153 · Location 2648
“How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
Traduttore, traditore. Translator, traitor.
Chapter Nine > Page 167 · Location 2893
“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
There is so much metaphor and symbolism throughout the text with languages representing what has been taken from countries through colonialism. The knowledge, resources, wealth.
Chapter Twenty-Five > Page 432 · Location 7217
“They’d thought they could win this with pamphlets. He almost laughed at the absurdity. Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”
A striking antithesis to “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Robin recognises the cruelty and injustice of the world in which he lives.
Chapter Twenty-Eight > Page 497 · Location 8260
“But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
Illuminating commentary on victim-blaming culture.