Babel

Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

560 páginas

Publicado el 22 de agosto de 2022 por Harper Voyager.

ISBN:
978-0-06-302142-6
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Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization. For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to …

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Como dijo quien me lo regaló "Oxford y gramática... te tiene que gustar por cojones" y efectivamente es muy mi mierda (¡Gracias Juange!). Al borde del 5 sólo por el fascinante planteamiento del sistema de magia y las disertaciones sobre etimología.

Me gusta mucho que haya un momento en el que lo que menos importa sea la magia, pero el viraje que hace para conseguirlo es tan fuerte que arriesga a derrapar.

Hay dos peros grandes en este libro: El primero, los personajes. Valoro el trabajo de Kuang en insertar escena tras escena con el grupo principal a ver si encajan, pero cuanto más insiste en lo mucho que se quieren y lo bien que se llevan menos te lo crees tú. Con el giro del final los pone contra las cuerdas y he tenido que hacer un esfuerzo para sorprenderme o importarme.

El segundo es el más difícil: Colonialismo …

A magical alternative history of Oxford about the physical and cultural violence and slavery of empire and colonisation.

Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world. “The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.” Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, …