On the topic of translation, R. F. Kuang's truly stellar Babel is an amazing read. It's fantastic! It's a fantasy novel about race and gender and unions and c

On the topic of translation, R. F. Kuang's truly stellar Babel is an amazing read. It's fantastic! It's a fantasy novel about race and gender and unions and colonialism, and it's also about language, about translation. About how you can never be truly faithful. Do you translate a work as a stilted product of its time, or something more familiar to the modern era? To quote Kuang paraphrasing Roland Barthes (from another novel, Yellowface): "An act of translation is an act of betrayal."