Week Ten: Babel 17

“You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express – and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn’t hurt anymore: that’s my poem.”

Babel-17 seemed like the perfect example for a topic tackling the "fiction of ideas" and indeed it was exactly that. Samuel Delany's creates an immersive world where the main course of control is language itself. In it, he sells the idea that language is much more powerful than we can imagine, even to influence the behavior of an entire society, offering fascinating theories and applications.

The discussion of language and communication in the book was very intriguing, and a very predominant idea all throughout. It is interesting to see how the author managed to create a story tackling a very specific sensation/idea: trying to put words to things that don't (or feel like they don't) have words for. And he did so by creating a very interesting and quite advanced for the era in which this story was made: Our main character is not only a women, but a clever, witty, intellectual Asian women that not only has beautiful looks, but a beautiful brain as well. The story even tackles homosexuality and things that are considered "out of the norm" but does so in a very ordinary and simple way that doesn't feel forced at all, something that is quite spectacular for a work from a time in which these things weren't seen in the best light.

Reading this work made me recall a conversation that I had with my dad the other day, about a book that he is reading called How to win friends and influence people, by Dale Carnegie. In it, he told me that the author states that the name of someone is the thing that matters to them the most to them, the most pleasing sound to our ears, because it fully belongs to us. It gives a sense of belonging, of worth. Calling people by their name is what brings them the most joy, and an experiment was made where a man built a business of coal for example, and named it after a certain person. Years later, that same person with that same name was looking for coal to buy, and found out that there was a business of coal with his own name, thus deciding to go to that business.

I bring that up because, similar to how a name works for a person, a language to a society is also their identity. Studies even state that a person's personality might be influenced by their names. My mom is a true believer of that, as she told me that before I was born, she searched the help of a linguistic professional to find the perfect name with the perfect amount of letters and tones to match a personality that she wished her child had. Interesting enough, Babel 17 seems to target this very same idea, just in a bigger (very big... like, universe big) state.

I personally found this book incredibly interesting to read. I also think that was due more to the fact that I come from another country, with a whole other language, and thus often struggle with finding the right words when translating back and forth because, in truth, sometimes some words don't exist in some languages. 

The other day I was having a conversation with my international friends from all around the world, and we were playing a game where we say a word in our native-language and go around in a circle saying it in different languages, however we saw ourselves facing a similar dilemma very frequently: some words simply don't exist in other cultures. It became funny after that, because some of us where trying to actually create a word in a language to translate from another. An example of it is the word saudade in Portuguese, and that does not have a direct translation to english. You could say it could be "I miss you" or just the feeling of "longing" but it still doesn't feel right to me. Saudade is a word that holds a big meaning, something that is way bigger than "miss you" but simpler than "longing". 

I loved to see how Delany's managed to portray a single "idea" into a whole story, with plots and characters that worded things that were simply floating thoughts into a very visual drama, and thus shaping an entire world around the simple idea that a word only exists if there is feeling behind it.