• 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...

• 巴别塔和翻译的开始
• 布莱恩·奥基夫（简介）

很久以前，圣经告诉我们，“全地都使用一种语言”（创世记 11 章）。想想地球上人们的太平岁月：通过语言的统一而和谐，和平地满足于透明的沟通期望，不需要翻译。在希纳尔平原上，人们建造了一座城市，然后建造了一座盘旋而上的塔楼。这座塔以及它所在的城市代表了社会的紧密团结。这些建筑构成了抵御人们“分散在整个地球表面”威胁的堡垒。然而，人们却希望那根通天的柱子能到达上帝的天堂，这是一种亵渎的假设：上帝对他的无名助手说：“让我们下去，在那里混淆他们的语言，使他们无法理解彼此的言语。” ”。建筑师们失去了通力合作的能力，分歧取代了合作，巴别塔——现在被称为巴别塔——变成了废墟。巴别塔成为了因共享一种语言而实现的全球社区梦想破灭的代名词。

随着巴别塔的灾难，我们彻底脱离了伊甸园，在那里亚当仍然可以运用上帝的话语。从此，面对语言的混乱，我们只能依靠翻译来缓解这种情况。乔治·斯坦纳关于翻译的权威著作名为《继巴别塔之后》，封面图像是勃鲁盖尔对巴别塔的描绘——塔基肥大，层层和阳台排列成螺旋状，蜿蜒在云底之上。这座塔的锯齿状残缺让人们可以看到内部像兔子窝一样的房间，这些房间被这座塔本来要容纳的人遗弃了。塔现在荒凉了，我们分散到了多种语言环境中，这种环境中的分歧根深蒂固——现在只有翻译才能弥合分歧。我们把在说外语的人们之间建立联盟的希望寄托在翻译身上。

但为什么上帝让我们遭遇语言混乱呢？讲希腊语的犹太哲学家斐洛·朱达乌斯 (Philo Judaeus) 在古代亚历山大的拥挤巴别塔中写作时，在《论语言的混乱》中提出了这个问题。[第 94 页] 我们建造一座接近天堂的世界城市的愿望是否威胁到上帝对创造的主权？拥有一种语言是否会增加合作邪恶的可能性？斐洛承认，语言混乱很难阻止人类和国家在战争和罪恶行为中合作。上帝实际上希望我们建造一座城市。当这座城市未能遵循他的建筑蓝图时，他才毁掉了这座城市，当它变成了巴比伦而不是上帝之城时。此外，正如斐罗所观察到的，上帝希望我们建造的“城市”存在于我们的灵魂之中。这些是“其他人的原型和模型，因为它们拥有更神圣的建筑，而其他人只是他们的模仿品，由易腐烂的物质组成。” 因此，用不朽的灵魂物质来建造城市，而不是用建造巴别塔的易腐烂的砖块和砂浆来建造。奥兹曼迪亚斯未能吸取巴别塔关于傲慢的教训：谨慎选择建筑材料。

菲洛说，城市有两种。一个城市“享有民主政府”，并拥有“尊重平等的宪法，其统治者是法律和正义；这样的宪法是一首对上帝的赞歌”。另一个城市的政治“掺假了这部宪法，就像在铸币中掺入了基础货币和短钱一样，实际上是崇尚不平等的谩骂政治”。也许上帝偏爱我们的民主，仿佛语言的混乱会化为一首共同的赞美平等之歌。但民主很容易被污染所污染：寡头政治和独裁政治已经够糟糕的了，但对菲洛来说，更糟糕的是贵族政治，即由类似于黑手党老大的总统怂恿或主持的暴民统治。我们仍然需要方法来检验真正民主的硬币，以便发现其欺诈性的对立面。因此，“巴别塔之后”描述了我们仍然缺乏这些方式的情况——真正的民主自由的硬币仍然很容易变成假币……