Translating Silence
沈黙が語る非言語の理解
The guide who led me over the pass rarely spoke.
His silences, however, were not empty; they were carefully addressed to me.
When I asked how far remained, he looked at the sky and said nothing.
The answer, I understood, was: as far as the weather allows.
Meaning, among these people, lived in the spaces between words.
To speak too much was to admit you had understood too little.
A could carry more argument than a paragraph.
When I praised the view, he merely nodded, once.
That nod conceded my enthusiasm without quite sharing it.
What he left unsaid, I slowly learned to hear.
His refusal to me was itself a kind of respect.
He assumed, generously, that I could read the mountain myself.
, so prized at home, would have insulted him here.
To name a danger aloud was, in his world, to invite it closer.
So warnings arrived sideways, in a , in a slowing of the pace.
Once, before a hidden drop, he simply stopped walking.
The said: look, and decide for yourself.
I had always treated language as the whole of communication.
Now the seemed the larger, richer country.
A map, too, I realised, speaks mostly through what it omits.
Its blank margins more than its crowded centre confesses.
To read them well is to trust the mapmaker's silences.
My guide would have made, I thought, a superb cartographer.
He knew precisely which things not to say.
On the descent, he finally spoke a single sentence.
The mountain, he said, keeps what you do not measure.
I wrote the words down, then, understanding, crossed them out.
Some truths, I was beginning to accept, resist every we impose.