‘You can’t just excuse all bad writing on the grounds that it’s Ciceronian—’
Ramy waved a hand dismissively. ‘That’s fine, Letty, I cranked that one out in ten minutes.’
‘But it’s not about speed. It’s about precision—’
‘The more I get done, the larger range I’ve acquired for the possible paper questions,’ said Ramy. ‘And that’s what we’ve really got to prepare for. I don’t want to go blank when the paper’s in front of me.’
This was a valid worry. Stress had the unique ability to wipe students’ minds clear of things they had been studying for years. During the fourth-year exams last year, one examinee was rumoured to have become so paranoid that he declared not only that he could not finish the exam but that he was lying about being fluent in French at all. (He was in fact a native speaker.) They all thought they were immune to this particular folly until one day, a week before exams, Letty suddenly broke down crying and declared she knew not a word of German, not a single word, that she was a fraud and her entire career at Babel had been based on pretence. None of them understood this rant until much later, for she had indeed delivered it in German.
Failure of memory was only the first symptom to come. Never had Robin’s anxiety over his marks made him so physically ill. First came a persistent, throbbing headache, and then the constant urge to throw up every time he stood or moved. Waves of tremors kept coming over him with no warning; often his hand shook so hard that he had difficulty gripping his pen. Once, during a practice paper, he found his vision blacking out; he couldn’t think, couldn’t remember a single word, couldn’t even see. It took him nearly ten minutes to recover. He couldn’t make himself eat. He was somehow both exhausted all the time and unable to sleep from a surplus of nervous energy.
Then, like all good Oxford upperclassmen, he found himself losing his mind. His grip on reality, already tenuous from sustained isolation in a city of scholars, became even more fragmented. Hours of revision had interfered with his processing of signs and symbols, his belief in what was real and what was not. The abstract was factual and important; daily exigencies like porridge and eggs were suspect. Everyday dialogue became a chore; small talk was a horror, and he lost his grip on what basic salutations meant. When the porter asked him if he’d had a good one, he stood still and mute for a good thirty seconds, unable to process what was meant by ‘good’, or indeed, ‘one’.
‘Oh, same,’ Ramy said cheerfully when Robin brought this up. ‘It’s awful. I can’t have basic conversations anymore – I keep on wondering what the words really mean.’
‘I’m walking into walls,’ said Victoire. ‘The world keeps disappearing around me, and all I can perceive are vocabulary lists.’
‘It’s tea leaves for me,’ said Letty. ‘They keep looking like glyphs, and I really did find myself trying to gloss one the other day – I’d even started copying it out on paper and everything.’
It relieved Robin to hear he wasn’t the only one seeing things, because the visions worried him the most. He’d begun to hallucinate entire persons. Once when hunting through the bookshelves at Thornton’s for a poetry anthology on their Latin reading list, Robin glimpsed what he thought was a familiar profile by the door. He walked closer. His eyes had not betrayed him – Anthony Ribben was paying for a paper-wrapped parcel, hale and healthy as could be.
‘Anthony—’ Robin blurted.
Anthony glanced up. He saw Robin. His eyes widened. Robin started forward, confused yet elated, but Anthony hastily pushed several coins at the bookseller and darted out of the shop. By the time Robin made his way out onto Magdalene Street, Anthony had disappeared from sight. Robin stared around for several seconds, then returned to the bookshop, wondering if it was possible he’d mistaken a stranger for Anthony. But there were not many young Black men in Oxford. Which meant either he’d been lied to about Anthony’s death – that indeed, all of Babel’s faculty had done it as some elaborate hoax – or he’d imagined the whole thing. In his current state, he found the latter far more likely.
The exam they all dreaded most was the silver-working test. During the last week of Trinity term, they’d been informed they’d have to devise a unique match-pair and engrave it in front of a proctor. In their fourth year, once they had finished their apprenticeships, they would learn proper techniques of match-pair design, engraving, and experimentation for magnitude and duration of effect, as well as the intricacies of resonance links and spoken manifestation. But for now, armed with just the basic principles of how match-pairs worked, they had only to achieve any effect at all. It did not need to be perfect; indeed, first tries never were. But they had to do something. They had to prove they possessed the undefinable stuff, the inimitable instinct for meaning, that made a translator a silver-worker.
Help from postgraduates here was technically forbidden, but sweet, kind Cathy O’Nell surreptitiously slipped Robin a faded yellow pamphlet on the basics of match-pair research one afternoon when she caught him looking dazed and scared in the library.
‘It’s just in the open stacks,’ she said sympathetically. ‘We’ve all used it; have a read through and you’ll be fine.’
The pamphlet was rather dated – it was written in 1798, and employed many archaic spellings – but did contain a number of brief, easily digestible tips. The first was to stay away from religion. This one they already knew from dozens of horror stories. It was theology that had got Oxford interested in Oriental languages in the first place – the only reason Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac had initially become subjects of academic study was the translation of religious texts. But the Holy Word, it turned out, was both unpredictable and unforgiving on silver. There was a desk in the north wing of the eighth floor that no one dared approach because it still occasionally emitted smoke from an unseen source. There, it was rumoured, some foolish graduate fellow had attempted to translate on silver the name of God.
More helpful was the second lesson in the pamphlet, which was to focus their research by looking for cognates. Cognates – words in different languages that shared a common ancestor and often similar meanings as well* – were often the best clues for fruitful match-pairs, since they were on such close branches of the etymological tree. But the difficulty with cognates was that often their meanings were so close that there was little distortion in translation, and thus little effect that the bars could manifest. There was, after all, no significant difference between the word chocolate in English and in Spanish. Moreover, in looking for cognates, one had to be wary of false friends – words which seemed like cognates but had utterly different origins and meanings. The English have did not come from the Latin habere (‘to hold, to possess’), for example, but from the Latin capere (‘to seek’). And the Italian cognato did not mean ‘cognate’ like one might hope, but rather ‘brother-in-law’.
False friends were especially tricky when their meanings appeared related as well. The Persian word farang, which was used to refer to Europeans, appeared to be a cognate of the English foreign. But farang actually arose from a reference to the Franks, and morphed to encompass Western Europeans. The English foreign, on the other hand, originated from the Latin fores, meaning ‘doors’. Linking farang and foreign, then, produced nothing.*
The third lesson in the pamphlet introduced a technique called daisy-chaining. This they vaguely recalled from Professor Playfair’s demonstration. If the words in their binary match-pair had evolved too far apart in meaning for a translation to be plausible, one could try adding a third or even fourth language as an intermediary. If all these words were engraved in chronological order of evolution, this could guide the distortion of meaning more precisely in the way they intended. Another related technique was the identification of a second etymon: another source that may have interfered in the evolution of meaning. The French fermer (‘to close, to lock’) was for instance quite obviously based on the Latin firmāre (‘to make hard, to strengthen’) but had also been influenced by the Latin ferrum, meaning ‘iron’. Fermer, firmāre, and ferrum could then, hypothetically, create an unbreakable lock.