Welcome to Babel: the great Oxford translation institute in an alternative version of Victorian England, where translators hold the keys to the British empire. Every device and engineering technique there is, from steam trains to the foundations of buildings, relies on silver bars enchanted with “match pairs”; words in two different languages that mean similar things, but with a significant gap between them. The bars create the effect of the difference: feelings, noises, speed, stability, colour, even death. The magic comes from “that sublime, unnameable place where meaning [is] created”.
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. 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”.
