01
British EnglishEN-GB
Could we have the bill, please?
The usual British restaurant wording.
AUTHOR NARRATION
Hear the poem.
Read by the author in the original English.
Brasserie of BabelEnglish narration
POEM + LANGUAGE
Brasserieof Babel
LE MARAIS, PARIS
A neighborhood of many voices.
The poem’s Parisian setting sits within one of the city’s most layered and animated neighborhoods.
Le Marais stretches across parts of Paris’s third and fourth arrondissements on the Right Bank. Its narrow streets bring together traces of medieval Paris, grand historic townhouses, Jewish life around the Rue des Rosiers, LGBTQ+ culture, museums, galleries, cafés, and the everyday traffic of residents and visitors.
LANGUAGE SAMPLES
Hear the linguistic field.
Five ways to ask for the bill—the same everyday need carried by different words, rhythms, and sounds.
Select a phrase to hear its recorded pronunciation.
02
American EnglishEN-US
Could we have the check, please?
The usual American restaurant wording.
03
FrenchFR-FR
L’addition, s’il vous plaît.
The request as one might hear it in Paris.
04
FlemishNL-BE
De rekening, alstublieft.
“The bill, please” in Belgian Dutch.
05
FinnishFI-FI
Saisimmeko laskun, kiitos?
“Could we have the bill, thank you?”
THE TITLE'S OLDER STORY
The Tower behind the brasserie.
An ancient story about linguistic diversity—and a tower whose imagined form has kept changing across the centuries.
MEDIA PLACEHOLDERThe Tower of Babel, 1563
/media/brasserie-of-babel/tower-of-babel.jpgThe Tower of Babel, 1563
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · public domain
GENESIS 11:1–9
In the biblical story, humanity begins with one language and sets out to build a city and a tower. Speech is then confused and the builders are scattered, making Babel an enduring image of a world in which words no longer pass easily from one person to another.
The name itself contains an ancient play on words. Genesis connects Babel with the Hebrew verb balal, “to confuse,” while the Babylonian name was traditionally understood to mean “Gate of God.”
A possible model
Scholars have often connected the story with Etemenanki, the enormous Babylonian ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk. Its ceremonial name means “House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.” No evidence identifies it conclusively as the biblical tower, but it offers a plausible historical model for this kind of tiered monument.
Bruegel’s Babel
Bruegel’s painting is therefore not an archaeological reconstruction. He imagines Babel as a vast sixteenth-century construction site, alive with workers, cranes, and spiraling arcades reminiscent of Roman architecture. The impossible tower looks magnificent even as its unfinished levels reveal the conditions of its own failure.
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