00:10
Hello Len. Hello Asami. We are squeezing our busy schedule time right now to talk about the most important topic of our discussion as of late.
The book by R.F. Kwan titled 【Babel】. Yep, indeed.
I hope I'm pronouncing it right. It's kind of an awkward word to say.
I'm pretty sure it's Babel.
Okay.
Now that you've said it, I am internally attempting to check if I've ever heard it said as like Babel. But Babel, at least to me...
That sounds weird.
Sounds weird, yeah. So, let's go with Babel because...
Babel. Yeah.
If you don't think this is a spoiler, we're trying to do a spoiler-free episode.
Yes, so this episode is going to be spoiler-free.
So if you haven't heard about it and you might potentially want to read it or watch a movie or TV show or whatever other franchise that they come up with, you are free to listen to this.
The next episode, probably you want to stay away because we were probably going to go dive deeper into it.
Just going to talk about all the little bits and bobs.
But yeah, so the nickname, because I think it's fair to, you know, the synopsis of the book being essentially that these kids, you know, university-aged by the time the story gets rolling,
go to university and they enter a translation institute, essentially, which is, you know, the tower of Babel, but not the biblical kind.
A lot of biblical references, for sure, but not that.
And that's addressed, but maybe next time.
And the nickname for them, right, is the Babelers.
And so I think this, you know, is it pronounced Babel or Babel or something else?
It only works if it's pronounced Babel.
Because then they're Babelers, right?
That's the joke, right, is that they babble.
They talk, right?
Yeah, they like to talk.
They like words.
Exactly.
But here is a little plug, and we are not getting paid for any of this.
So I picked this book up a couple weeks ago and found out that the Japanese translation of Babel is coming up on Valentine's Day.
Oh, really?
Okay.
I knew it was in like two weeks, but okay.
Yeah.
February 14th, 2025.
What a gift for your Valentine.
Honestly, I cannot think of better ways to spend your Valentine's Day.
03:03
I certainly can't.
Hey.
Sorry, maybe I riffed off that too hard.
Don't poke my bubble.
No, no, I think I riffed off that too hard.
Bubble?
See what I did there?
Oh, man.
No.
Okay.
I've just been outdone.
We're going to talk about sound and words and things next time for, you know, Kaga.
Yeah, but okay.
So anyways, if you want to read this in Japanese, you will be able to probably shortly after this episode.
And I hope that, you know, this couple of episodes will prompt you to at least get curious about it.
Yeah.
Because I certainly think it was very worth my time of having read this.
And let me just read a synopsis that this publisher has in Japanese.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good idea.
So, it's very short.
ハンキーをひるがえす秘密結社があった。
言語の力をめぐる本格ファンタジー。
ネビラ賞、ローカス賞受賞作。
Done.
Nice.
そうです。
ハンキーであってるのかな。
There's like one section, I'm not sure if I read it right.
Like, because it's like a difficult character.
I want to say it's ハンキー.
ハンキーをひるがえすだと思うんだよね。
でも、この漢字で見たことないから。
It's like a harder character of what I'm normally used to seeing this word written as.
So, I'm hoping that I did it right.
But if I didn't, please call me out.
Yeah, we can leave the show notes, right?
The link to whatever it is.
Maybe somebody can, you know, please teach us, I guess.
If somebody is more versed in the literary world.
Yeah, and in Japanese, this is a two-part volume.
It's a pretty hefty book, even in English.
But typically, Japanese translation ends up taking up like twice as much character counts than the word counts of English.
So, that is not surprising.
And yeah, so they already showed in the synopsis.
I don't know how much of that you caught.
I went pretty quickly.
But they already talk about the fact that translation is a source of magic in this book.
And yeah, maybe for this spoiler-free episode, I want to kind of talk about why I was interested.
06:08
But like the big part of this mechanism, this translation being the magic or like source of the magic in this.
I think that's okay.
If you want to touch on that, we can try to avoid any like specific things that occur with it.
Yeah, we don't need to go into details.
But we can talk about essentially the magic system.
And I did catch the words around that.
It was interesting, maybe later we'll talk about this, that idea of since I read it in English,
the little bits of words and phrases I could catch, I could fill in most of the gaps, right?
So it was like, yeah.
Oh, that's true.
At the end, I was like, hold on, wait a minute.
That's actually very interesting.
Yeah.
But...
So magic and translation and this idea.
Yes.
So then your prior knowledge to this book was maybe me and a couple other friends recommending
I'm being the sort of most recent one of them.
Right, yes.
Because I only picked this book up, yeah, two, three weeks ago.
But I have been recommended this book when it first came out.
I want to say a couple of years ago.
Okay.
By friends who I trust their taste in books.
And both our mutual friends and someone you also don't know as well then.
Sure, great.
Yeah, I trust generally their book tastes.
And both of these people said I should read it.
So I promptly put that up on my mental tsundoku list.
Because what do you do when you are like fourth year grad student?
You do not start a massive fantasy novel.
But why not?
No, I mean, yeah, we understand why we talked about this reading.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I could have.
I didn't.
And that's my fault.
Yeah, well, you know, it's not your fault.
But anyway, continue.
So you were given this nudge.
Yeah, so when this came back into my mental zeitgeist again a couple weeks ago,
I had zero hesitation clicking that stuff on my e-book.
And didn't even think about not knowing anything about this book other than that
I was recommended this book by multiple people.
Right.
And completely forgot that this was a book that had anything to do with translation at all.
So I'm kind of surprised.
Because to me, that was like a source of big surprise.
Like the kind of key part about the world building, the magic of words, magic of translation.
And they already kind of share that in the synopsis.
09:02
I know that it's not everything.
But to me, that was kind of surprising.
Oh, you're already going to share that?
That this world is built on the magic of translation?
That's a good point.
Well, maybe I should look at the English one while we're here.
Synopsis, yeah, maybe.
Maybe it's different.
Because that definitely, that's been known to change.
That changes within language, too, because the synopses are...
And also, it's been like two years since the first publication.
So it's possible that they've decided that they can include more information in the synopsis.
Right, exactly.
Where is, why is it so hard to find a book when I want to find it?
Let me do, instead of doing this, let's just do Babel book.
Because I think Babel, I know it mentioned, I think it mentioned translation.
Oh, yeah?
But it, okay.
So here is, here's the Goodreads one, which, you know, owned by Amazon.
But here we go.
I'm not going to read the whole thing out, because it is two paragraphs.
But do they mention translation?
It actually starts with what appears to be either a quote or some sort of piece,
which is tragitore, traditore.
Which is, I assume, right, the iterations may be in Latin.
And then it says an act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
So that is sort of, okay, translation is a key part.
We see the title of Babel.
It does then later mention the magic and the idea of silver working.
It's sort of just hinting.
Maybe we want to reserve that until the spoiler-free episode.
Yeah, it's sort of just hints at things.
Yeah, so they're in there.
It starts hinting.
I don't know if it's either more or less in the Japanese or the English version.
But there's kind of, it's there.
We're talking about translation.
And we're talking about it at a university with this tower.
Okay, so I went in with no knowledge about this book being a translation.
And that was good in a way, because I was immediately fascinated by it
when it was revealed to me that that's what it is.
Also, I now want to recommend this to all of my friends
who speak more than one language or are learning their second or third or whatever languages.
Because I think as a bilingual, as sort of like a 高天的バイリンガル,
not like I was born into it, I'm a learned bilingual.
As someone like that, I think this captures the really difficult to fill in gaps of translation.
12:01
And the translation being an act of betrayal is something that,
in the name of convenience, I have ignored.
And at this point, I certainly don't feel like I'm a fake version of myself if I'm speaking English.
Like I certainly wouldn't say that you, Len, only know me, 50% of me,
because you only know me in English.
Okay, sure, yeah, I see what you're saying.
And I would never say that to my Japanese friend also,
that they only know me, 50% of it, because they've only interacted with me in Japanese.
It's not that, but there is that incomplete translation that happens inevitably.
And I have, I guess, at this point, kind of became fluent enough in both languages
that on a daily basis, I don't feel that, or I'm not inconvenienced by that too, too much.
I feel like I have, on average, adequate skills to convey what I'm thinking
in whichever language that I'm in at that moment.
Although people who know me also know that I tend to kind of mix and match.
Sometimes one language comes more easily than the other ones.
Reading this book really made me aware again of that gap.
And maybe that gap is not necessarily to be frustrated about.
And that gap is actually something to kind of enjoy and engage in a different way.
Okay, yeah.
Maybe there is an advantage and a huge privilege
that comes with having two or more languages inhabiting your head.
Because, yeah, like, yes, you are always aware of this kind of incompleteness.
But, you know, the fact that you cannot map one to one all the time, there's always there.
But at the same time, you are able to kind of relatively fluidly, you know,
go back and forth between the two languages.
That really trained me to hold multiple ideas in my head simultaneously,
which I think is very important for critical thinking and sort of like meta-perceptive thinking.
I certainly agree.
And, yeah, like I always thought of this kind of lack of one-to-one mapping as a disadvantage.
15:01
It's like something that I need to reconcile with.
But reading this book made me think maybe there is a strength in it.
Maybe there is a richness to it in the fact that I cannot map one to one.
Yeah, I think you've put that rather nicely.
That is, yeah.
Yeah, end of my TED talk.
Yeah, no, beautiful TED talk.
Well done.
I would clap, but it would blow out my microphone.
So, no, I really do like that.
The way you've described it in particular, right?
Because it feels very real and very visceral to kind of how you experienced.
Not like how you experienced translation right away, because it was, as you said,
you're like, well, I guess, yeah, you were acquiring.
It's called Tenteki, right?
You were acquiring this language and this bilingualism,
and you had to sort of put it to the side for a bit that it wasn't perfect, right?
You weren't just going to magically know each side, but you had to sort of go,
well, I've got both, and I have both.
I don't have a next, right, for that, right?
I'm holding both and kind of running with both.
And I use them to whatever extent that I can at that time.
And now by, which is actually one reason that we all probably recommend reading
and trying to see what other people are talking about.
By reading this, it's helped you be like, oh, well, I can actually look at that again.
And I really appreciate more the holding, but also, like you said, this,
I'm not going to do it justice,
but just the holding of that space for both context being true,
and yet there's like a depth of understanding or feeling there.
It's not the same. It's not the duplicate of two ideas.
But it's two very similar ideas that I can kind of,
it's like increasing a bit depth in your imaging.
I have 16-bit depth image, not like your regular 8-bit image.
It's been a while since I became comfortable in both languages,
and I kind of started to take it for granted, right, I guess.
You're like, it's just 8, it's 8-bit, it works.
Right, and it's not even, I don't know, being fluent in English is cool,
it's useful, but I wish I could be fluent in some more obscure languages,
like Icelandic or something, that sounds cool.
But a lot of people speak English as a second language,
so I didn't really necessarily think I was any special by any way,
or at least the sort of special feeling started to fade away,
18:00
now that it's been a while.
But the way that this book invites me to wrestle with that,
and the way these characters learn how to inhabit that kind of hybrid space
between different languages, and at least the main character, Robin,
he is learning, he's not born into bilingualism,
he definitely has to learn and study.
I mean, he's talented, he has this innate talent,
but he had to put an effort to maintain his native language
after he moves to different places.
So things like that, I really appreciate that the author took time
to kind of put it in, because that was a creation.
To craft and to design into the character.
It's not automatic, it's hard no matter how talented you are.
And I also think she didn't explicitly say this in the book,
but I think there's a difference between being fluent
and not being inconvenienced by the language,
and being a master of that language.
And I don't think I can claim the master level fluency.
I see what you're saying.
You would immediately know, I cannot compose poetry in English,
nor in Japanese, to be honest.
I mean, it's hard, right?
Yeah, I don't possess that kind of talent.
Language acquisition is hard, and even if you're super talented,
this elite of the elite, like Robin,
you would still need to put hours and hours and hours for years
on getting better.
And that I appreciate that she didn't just make it sound like,
oh, this was all part of his natural talent,
and everyone is multilingual casually.
She really put an emphasis that it's hard.
And I hope that that's an encouraging portrayal
and not discouraging portrayal for people
who are trying to learn new languages, myself included.
I feel like it's about time I start something else.
But I need to remind myself that it's not easy.
None of this is natural.
And it comes with an immense privilege
and immense richness that I really appreciate now.
But I also worked hard.
A 14-year-old me worked super hard
and worked her butt off to make this happen.
Yeah, and those topics are definitely also in detail,
kind of represented in the book, right?
21:01
In a very grueling detail, also.
Working hard and the need for it
because it is complicated and challenging,
and the recognition that privilege exists
for you to essentially have the space
to exert such a challenge, and we can go into that.
But like, yeah.
Yeah, that's like a whole other theme of this book, right?
Like privilege, classism, all of these things.
I've got a great highlighted quote somewhere.
Which I guess we should save for the spoiler-friendly episode.
We'll save it for the spoiler-friendly episode,
which is such a great name.
I think this is a good place
to end our spoiler-free episode.
I hope that's still enough to pick this book up.
I think it should be.
It should be inspiring, right?
It's, I think, a realistic representation, by the way,
if you're looking for that word, right?
Is it necessarily like the,
yeah, you should all go and do other languages?
Yes, but you also are recognizing
how much challenge and struggle there is in doing so.
Yeah.
Yep.
So I guess in the following episode,
we will talk spoiler-friendly version.
Maybe we'll pull out some quotes,
go into specifics of the theme
and sort of the mechanics of what happens in this world.
Yep.
We'll get into it.
Are we happy with the ending?
Whatnot?
Style?
Okay, well, look, don't get me started.
Because I think there's a lot to say,
especially with like her other book context
and the way that she tends to write.
Yeah, you would know better.
It's just, yeah.
Let's save that for the next episode.
Okay.
So for now, go get the book if you haven't already.
Yeah.
Done.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening.
And find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C.
See you next time.
