Babel: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

After the first year, in the summer, Ramy goes to Spain to study, Letty goes to Germany, Victoire goes to France, and Robin goes to Malaysia. When they come back, they’re all excited to see one another. In their first class session of the year, Professor Playfair gives an introductory lecture delving into the ins and outs of silver-work. They cannot make their own engravings until their fourth year, but they start learning the basics of silver-work during their second year.

In the lecture, Professor Playfair reiterates that the foundational principle of silver-work is untranslatability. When one translates a word to another language, the silver bar harnesses the power of what is lost in translation. For example, the word kárabos can be translated to the English word “caravel,” which is a type of ship. Kárabos, though, can also be translated as “crab.” When one affixes a silver bar with the engravings of kárabos and caravel to a fishing ship, the bar is infused with the power of what is lost in translation—the word crab. That leads fishing boats affixed with those bars to have higher fishing yields. Playfair says that one must never engrave a bar with the word “translation.” If one does that, it creates a paradox, and the silver bar will self-destruct. If that silver bar touches other bars, then those bars will become contaminated and unusable.

After Professor Playfair’s lecture, Robin and his cohort go to lunch. They’re joined by Anthony, the postgraduate student who gave them a tour of Babel during their first year. Anthony says that he has been working to find match-pairs of words for silver-work. He says that in England there are only 1,200 such pairs at this point. Robin and his cohort are surprised. Anthony explains that Romance languages have become too similar to one another, so the match-pairs between those languages are beginning to lose their power. The valuable words, Anthony says, now come from countries like China and India. 

That year, Robin, Ramy, Letty, and Victoire also take a class on Etymology with Professor Lovell. The class turns out to be less awkward for Robin than he thought it would be. Professor Lovell isn’t a natural lecturer, but everything he says is fascinating. In that class, they use English to study how languages transform over time. The cohort also begins learning another language, not to acquire fluency necessarily, but to deepen their knowledge of the languages they are already fluent in. Robin studies Sanskrit. As the year progresses, Oxford feels more and more like home to Robin, and he and his cohort become closer and closer. Robin also takes up rowing. 

At one point, a chemist named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre comes to Babel, looking for help with a camera obscura he has been working on. He can’t figure out exactly how to get it to work. Ultimately, it becomes a competition between those who do silver-work to see who can figure out how to make the contraption work. Anthony ends up winning the competition and therefore gets a cut of the profits from the invention, which is the first daguerreotype. Robin and his friends have their picture taken with the device. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire find the resulting image unsettling, but Letty likes the picture of them together.