Maeve’s Reviews > Babel: An Arcane History > Status Update

“But who, in living history, ever understands their part in the tapestry?”

“There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation - a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”

“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.”

“It still looked like a city carved out of the past […] Its buildings were still so reassuringly heavy, solid, ancient and eternal. The lights that shone through arched windows still promised warmth, old books, and hot tea within; still suggested an idyllic scholar’s life, where ideas were abstract entertainment that could be bandied about without consequences.”

“They were speaking not in terms of ethics, but of logistics, and this made Robin feel as if they’d stepped into an upside-down world where nothing made sense, and no one had a single problem with it but him.”

“But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.”

“You’ve made at least twelve errors on this page, and your sentences are far too long —“
“They’re not long; they’re Ciceronian.”
“You can’t just excuse all bad writing on the grounds that it’s Ciceronian —“

- me with Ciceronian sentences, poetic license and the Oxford comma XD

“Well, it’s a particular kind of mental state. You do speak the words, but more importantly, tou hold two meanings in your head at once. You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine traversing them.”

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular.”

“But what is the opposite of fidelity? […] 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?”