#professor playfair

[inconsistentreading]

'Is faithful translation impossible, then?' Professor Playfair challenged. 'Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?' 'I suppose not,' Victorie said relunctantly. 'But what is the opposite of fidelity?' asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of the dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. 'Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?'

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"But what is the opposite of fidelity?" asked Professor Playfair. "Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?"

R. F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (Professor Playfair)

[simonespeaks]

don’t know that i trust professor playfair. surely most if not all the professors know about hermes and lovell could’ve told someone about robin’s affiliation with them. i wouldn’t be shocked if he’s lying out his ass rn to get info out of robin about lovell

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"It pays well to perform what the general public thinks of as magic, doesn't it?"

R. F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (Professor Playfair)