Babel and the Beginning of Translation

Abstract

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• Babel and the Beginning of Translation
• Brian O'Keeffe (bio)

Once upon a time, the Bible tells us, "the whole earth was of one language" (Genesis 11). Contemplate the halcyon days of the earth's people: harmonized by linguistic uniformity, peacefully complacent in the expectation that communications were transparent, there was no need for translators. On the Shinar plain, the people built a city and then a tower spiraling skywards. That tower, and the city from whose midst it arose, represented the compact unity of society. Those constructions formed bulwarks against the threat of the people being "scattered over the face of the whole earth." Yet the people wished that sky-reaching pillar to reach God's heaven, and that was a blasphemous presumption: speaking to His unnamed auxiliaries, God said, "Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." The architects lost the ability to comprehendingly work together, dissension replaced cooperation, and the tower of Babel—for that's what it was now called—fell into ruin. Babel became a name for the ruined dream of a global community achieved by the sharing of one language.

With the calamity of Babel, our fall out of Eden, where Adam could still wield God's Word, was completed. Henceforth, faced with the confusion of tongues, we depended on translators to alleviate that situation. George Steiner's magisterial work on translation is titled After Babel, and the front cover image is Bruegel's depiction of the Babel tower—fat around its base, tiers and balconies arranged in whorls winding above the cloud-base. The tower's jagged incompletion makes visible a rabbit-warren interior of rooms deserted by the people that tower was intended to house. The tower now desolate, we scattered into a multilingualism that entrenched differences—differences only translators could now bridge. It was in translators that we placed our hopes of building coalitions between peoples speaking foreign tongues.

But why did God visit linguistic confusion upon us? The Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus, writing amid the teeming Babel of ancient [End Page 94] Alexandria, asked this question in On the Confusion of Tongues. Did our desire to build a world-city that could loft itself into proximity with heaven's firmament threaten God's sovereignty over Creation? Did having one language enhance the prospect of cooperative wickedness? Philo admits that linguistic confusion hardly prevented men and nations from collaborating in deeds of war and sinful iniquity. And God actually wanted us to build a city. He only ruined that city when it failed to follow His architectural blueprint, when it became a Babylon rather the City of God. As Philo observes, moreover, the "cities" God desired that we build resided within our souls. These are "the archetypes and models of the others, inasmuch as they have received a more divine building, and the others are but imitations of them, as consisting of perishable substances." Build cities from the immortal substance of souls, therefore, rather than from the perishable bricks and mortar with which Babel was constructed. Ozymandias failed to learn the Babel lesson concerning hubris: choose your building materials carefully.

There are two kinds of cities, says Philo. One city "enjoys a democratic government" and has a "constitution which honors equality, the rulers of which are law and justice; and such a constitution as this is a hymn to God." The other is a city whose politics "adulterates this constitution, just as base and clipped money is adulterated in the coinage, being in fact ochlocracy, which admires inequality." Perhaps God favored democracy for us, as if the confusion of tongues would resolve itself into a common song of praise to equality. But democracy is easily adulterated by contaminants: oligarchy and autocracy are bad enough, but worse, for Philo, is ochlocracy, mob rule egged on by, or else presided over by presidents resembling mobster mafia dons. We still need ways to assay the coin of authentic democracy so as to spot its fraudulent opposites. "After Babel" therefore describes the circumstance where we still lack those ways—the coin of true democratic liberty is still too easily transmuted into the counterfeit...