Author Rebecca Kuang on her novel Babel, or on the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Revolution
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2022
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rebecca Kuang (who writes under the name R.F. Kuang), the author of the best-selling historical fantasy novel Babel. Set in the 1830s in England, the novel’s Chinese-born protagonist sets out to prevent a war with China over the opium trade. It’s a novel about the industrial revolution, labor activism, revolution, and — surprisingly — language, etymology, and translation.
2:28 – On Rebecca's own connections to China and her anxieties about losing the Chinese language
8:27 – What historical insights Rebecca hoped her readers would take away from Babel
14:37 – Parallels between the U.K. of the early 19th century and the U.S. of the early 21st
20:26 – Refections on revolution and revolutionaries
25:48 – Silver working: the magic system in Babel and its relation to language
30:37 – Issues with translation theory presented in the book
38:04 – How Rebecca’s background in debate influenced her writing style
45:03 – Rebecca's forthcoming novel Yellowface
A transcript of this podcast will be available soon at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Rebecca: The film Banshees of Inisherin and other works by its director, Martin McDonagh, including the dark comedy In Bruges (2008).
Kaiser: The new novel by Cormac McCarthy The Passenger, and a review of it by James Wood in The New Yorker.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with the China Project. |
| 0:15.3 | Subscribe to access from the China Project to get, well, access to not only our great daily newsletter, but to all of the original writing on our website at The China Project to get, well, access, access to not only our great daily newsletter, but to all |
| 0:22.2 | of the original writing on our website at the Chinaproject.com. We cover everything from China's |
| 0:27.7 | foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and |
| 0:32.4 | other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang region to Beijing's travails as it struggles to deal with a surging wave |
| 0:39.9 | of COVID-19. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is |
| 0:45.6 | reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you |
| 0:51.6 | from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Today on Cineka, I am thrilled to be joined by Rebecca Kwong, an amazing novelist and scholar |
| 0:59.0 | whose latest book, Babel, or on the necessity of violence and arcane history of the Oxford |
| 1:04.6 | Translators Revolution, was one of my absolute favorite books of 2022. |
| 1:09.6 | Rebecca, who writes under the name R.F. Kwong, was born in |
| 1:12.9 | Guangdong, grew up in Dallas and was educated at Georgetown and then at Oxford, which she has an |
| 1:17.9 | MSC, and an M-Phil from Cambridge. She is now a graduate student at Yale in East Asian languages |
| 1:23.3 | and literatures. Her trilogy, The Poppy Wars, which draws extensively on Chinese history, |
| 1:28.8 | from the Sung to the 20th century, won all sorts of awards and is next up on my list of two |
| 1:34.4 | reads. But today we're going to focus on Babel, which my daughter actually turned me onto, |
| 1:39.4 | and which was an immediate bestseller. It was named one of the best science fiction or fantasy novels |
| 1:44.8 | of the year by numerous media outlets and booksellers. It's a novel about so many things, |
| 1:50.1 | about colonialism, about the industrial revolution, about race and gender, about the global |
| 1:55.2 | north and the global south, the circumstances of the opium war. It's about translation. It's about the way academia has |
| 2:02.6 | been enlisted in the service of not always benign national ends. It's also about labor |
| 2:07.8 | activism, about revolution, and as the title suggests, the necessity of violence. If you |
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