![]() The characters’ conversation flies from theories of translation to quotations from Sanskrit, from Dryden to the authors of the Shijing they are pretentious, but vulnerable too, and the balance is lovely.Įven against a whole background of clever things, the triumph here is the narrator. The pages are heavy with footnotes not the more usual whimsical ones, in the style of Susanna Clarke or Terry Pratchett, but academic notes, hectoring and preachy in a parody of the 19th-century tomes Swift and his friends at Oxford must study. ![]() This is a scholarly book by a superb scholar – Kuang is a translator herself. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. We follow Robin Swift from his earliest childhood in China, through his time at Babel, and from his hope that translation is a way to bring people together, to the terrible realisation that, in this colonial framework, “an act of translation is an act of betrayal”. ![]() ![]() ![]() Bright children are taken from all corners of the empire, fluent in Chinese or Arabic, raised in England, and put to work at Babel to translate, thus finding new match pairs and making new magic – only ever used for the benefit of the rich in London, and to the detriment of those the translators must leave behind in their colonised homelands. ![]()
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