Tower of Babel

DOUGLAS ROBINSON

The biblical story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) has long fascinated translators and students of translation. It contains the Old Testament story of the fall into linguistic diversity, which has often been read as a myth of the origin of translation: Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel [meaning 'confusion']' because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. (Revised Standard Version) Exit the LORD, or that group of gods that the Old Testament calls the Elohim ('let us go down' not a royal or a divine 'we', but a group), exit also the people dwelling in the land of Shinar and enter the translator, the only person capable of remedying, even slightly, the scattering of tongues at Babel. Hence the title of FIT'S journal, Babel; hence the title of George Steiner's book on translation, After Babel (1975); hence the title of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Walter Benjamin, 'Des Tours de Babel' (1980) and the list goes on and on. But the story raises more questions than it answers, which is undoubtedly one of its attractions. What are we to do with the myth of one language? Some writers, notably the German Romantics from Herder and the Schlegel brothers through Humboldt and Goethe and various post-Romantics from Benjamin to Heidegger and George Steiner, have wanted to believe in a primordial language that was lost in the scattering of tongues at Babel, and

that might be regained through perfect (or even, for Benjamin, imperfect) mystical translation. The translator thus, in this vision, becomes the World Saviour, restorer of the original linguistic unity that the gods smashed on the plains of Shinar. A related myth, developed' scientifically' in the mid-nineteenth century by August Schleicher (1821-68) under the inspiration of the German Romantics, is that of an original Indo-European people, who spoke a single pure primordial language or Ursprache called Proto-Indo-European. As Schleicher and all of his philological followers since recognize, there is no evidence that such a language ever existed, and the idea is rather far-fetched: that all of the modem languages from Europe to India developed from a single language; that things were once simple, pure, unified, but now are complex, mixed, diverse. Still, having admitted that the whole notion of an Indo-European people and language is pure speculation, most historical linguists continue to find it fruitful to speculate on where these hypothetical people lived, what kind of economy they had, what gods they believed in, and so on. Etymologists still trace words back to hypothesized Indo-European roots. And, of course, in the 1930s the Nazis speculated that the Indo-Europeans or Aryans were blond Scandinavians, tall, fair, longheaded creatures who were the pure and original race of Europe, later contaminated by dark blood from elsewhere. The problem is that the myth of a pure original Ursprache, whether set on the plains of Shinar or somewhere in Europe or the Indian subcontinent, is inherently nostalgic and eschatological-implicitly biased toward a conception of language as having degenerated from a primeval purity and thus in need of restoration to that purity. The parallels among the Indian and European languages are objective facts, which might be explained any number of ways; the hypothesis of an original Indo-European language that was scattered across two continents is an explanatory myth, and only one such myth, and one with disturbing implications. The story of the tower of Babel is also far from a divine mandate for translators. The gods do not say, 'Let us confuse their language, that there may be translation.' They say 'Let us ... confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech', which is quite a different matter one that seems almost to ban translation, along with any other means of communicating across linguistic barriers (including, one supposes, foreign language learning) and thus of once again threatening the security of the gods on high. The story conceives linguistic unity, and thus human beings' ability to communicate with each other everywhere in the world, as a potential threat to divine hegemony, and thus something to be smashed. In an ironic twist, this deep-seated biblical ideology also feeds the attack on linguistic diversity launched in the United States by the English Only Movement: the attempt to define English as the official language of the United States and thus to prevent bilingual education in the schools, the need for interpreters in the courts, and so on. There is a fear among many Anglophone Americans that Hispanics are taking over the country (demographically if in no other way), and that they are plotting that takeover in Spanish, a

language which the Anglophone powers that be cannot understand. Hence the drive to 'scatter' or 'confuse' their Spanish citizens by forcing them to learn English. But the irony in this is only superficial, for ultimately the tower of Babel myth is itself an attack on linguistic diversity. In it linguistic unity is explicitly portrayed as the danger, but only from the gods' point of view, and the story tacitly encourages readers to identify with the people dwelling in the land of Shinar, the builders at Babel whose unitary language was scattered and confused. Everyone once spoke a single language, is the story's subtext, and everyone should speak a single language again say, Esperanto, or English, or whatever the next lingua franca may be. Compared with this nostalgic longing, all translation efforts will seem pathetically inadequate: traduttore traditore, the translator is a traducer, because s/he fails to restore us to a pristine state before translation was necessary.

Further reading Baron 1990; Burke 1976; Derrida 1980/1985b; Harris and Taylor 1989; George Steiner 1975.

Baker M. (ed.) (1998/2001). Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London: Routledge.