The Translator’s Ultimate Turn to Violence to Gain Visibility in R. F. Kuang’s Babel

This article examines R.F. Kuangs novel Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence for its use of Lawrence Venutis translation strategies on translator in/visibility, domestication, and foreignization. It claims that Babel is not simply a novel where translators are protagonist but a significant fictionalization and radicalization of Venutis analysis of Anglo-American translation practices. The article shows how the novel makes ethnocentric violence as a concept into actual and magical energy in the hands of silver-workers (translators) used to stage colonial expansion for the British Empire. It examines how the translators are methodically made invisible and exploited as objects of a domesticating machinery. Their revolutionary turn is taken, then, to represent a radicalization of Venuti’s “foreignization,” from resistance as textual strategy to violent political insurgency in the pursuit of visibility. The article argues that the literary metaphor established through passive translators, which is then overturned by translators themselves, repositioning them as central and revolutionary actors in Babel, makes the inherently political and violent nature of translation undeniable. It thus concludes that Babel achieves a cultural intervention that is consistent with the fundamental aims Venuti’s theory.