Babel

Victoire only had Letty, who professed always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world.

A stranger in a strange land, who had to learn the local languages if he wished not to die

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

He greatly enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he could not say the same of the poems by her less talented husband, whom he found overly dramatic.

Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance

History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

But he had to try, really try, to make sure that he did not stop dreaming in his native tongue.

They had the keys to the kingdom; they did not want to give them back.