The Third Language
第三の言語
Somewhere between the poem's language and my own, a third language had quietly begun to form.
It was neither the tongue I had received nor the tongue I had been given at birth.
It was the strange dialect that every translation secretly speaks, native to no country on earth.
, the critics call it, and they mean the word as an insult, not a description.
Yet I had come to suspect that this homeless was the true residence of meaning.
In it, a sentence carried the grammar of one world and the breath of another simultaneously.
The result was , standing forever in a doorway, belonging to neither the room nor the hall.
A translated text inhabits an , a thin crack between two solid walls of language.
Most readers, hurrying through, never notice that they are walking on a bridge, not on ground.
But the bridge has a character of its own, a sway and a music unlike either shore.
is not weakness here; it is the very substance the translated work is made of.
To purge every trace of the foreign would be to pretend the bridge had been dry land all along.
I began, deliberately, to let a little foreignness remain, a faint accent in the English.
A syntax slightly tilted, an image imported whole, a rhythm that had crossed the border with its luggage.
is the constant temptation: to treat this floating third language as if it were a fixed place.
We speak of the target language and the source as though each were a country with firm borders.
But borders, in language as in geography, are conventions drawn over a continuous, unruly ground.
My third language was the ground itself, glimpsed briefly where the two conventions failed to meet.
It could not be spoken outside the act of translation; it existed only in the crossing.
The moment I stopped translating, the third language folded up and vanished like a tent at dawn.
Perhaps every act of understanding another person raises the same temporary, invisible structure.
We meet, always, in a third language, neither wholly yours nor wholly mine, improvised between us.
Meaning, then, is less a possession than a conducted in a country that does not exist.
I stopped apologising for the strangeness of my draft and began to regard it as evidence.
Evidence that two worlds had touched, briefly, and left a mark on the thin skin between them.
The reader who felt was feeling, precisely, the of that meeting.
To smooth it entirely away would be to erase the very event I had been hired to record.
So I let the third language stand, unhoused and honest, the only place the poem could now live.