Robin goes along with Griffin’s plans, abetting thefts of silver bars to aid Hermes, but remains conflicted, torn between his distaste for British colonial excess and inequality and his potential comfortable future as an imperial translator. Griffin explains to Robin how Babel exploits the languages of foreign nations only in order to solidify the British Empire's dominance over them. In his first week, Robin encounters Griffin, his elder half-brother-another half-Chinese son of Professor Lovell-who recruits him into the Hermes Society, a clandestine organization seeking to undermine Britain’s silver supremacy. There they learn that the effectiveness of translating European languages into English is diminishing and that “exotic” languages like Mandarin, Haitian Creole, and Arabic are considered the future of translation magic. Robin quickly befriends the other members of his first-year cohort: Ramy from Calcutta, Victoire from Haiti, and Letty, a white British admiral’s daughter. Nevertheless, Robin excels in his studies and, after seven years, is accepted into Babel. One day, Robin embarrasses Lovell by being late to one of his lessons and is brutally beaten and threatened with being returned to Canton to live in poverty. It quickly becomes apparent that Lovell is Robin’s biological father, but neither is willing to discuss this out loud. Lovell has Robin tutored in Latin and Greek as well as Mandarin in order to prepare him for admission to Babel. At Babel, scholars work to find match-pairs between disparate languages, using their efforts to maintain Britain’s silver supremacy.Īn orphan from Canton is adopted by Richard Lovell, a Babel professor, and takes the English name Robin Swift. To harness the power of translation, Oxford University hosts the Royal Institute of Translation, nicknamed 'Babel'. Silver bars inscribed with such 'match-pairs' of words can thus manifest magical effects, which may increase agricultural production, improve the accuracy of bullets, heal injuries, and more. In this world, silver has magical properties tied to language: it is capable of capturing what is 'lost in translation' between words in different languages that have similar, but not identical, meanings. Kuang drew heavily from history and her own experiences as both a translator and an Oxford graduate.īabel is set in an alternate-reality 1830s England in which Britain's global economic and colonial supremacy are fueled by the use of magical silver bars. Thematically similar to The Poppy War, Kuang's first book series, the book criticizes British imperialism, capitalism, and the complicity of academia in perpetuating and enabling them. It debuted at the first spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, and won Blackwell's Books of the Year for Fiction in 2022 and the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution is a 2022 novel by R.

Babel arcane history