The Silence Between Languages
言語と言語のあいだの沈黙
I had been counting what translation loses, but I had never learned to read the losses themselves.
Between every original and its version there remains a that no effort ever dissolves.
Translators call it the , and for years I treated it merely as waste, as failure.
Now I began to wonder whether the was not the refuse but the .
For what resists crossing is often exactly what mattered most to the original tongue.
The is not empty; it is a fullness that language has agreed to leave unspoken.
Every culture wraps certain experiences in silence, and the wrapping is itself a kind of speech.
When I could not translate a word, the gap I left behind was not nothing.
It was a shape, a moulded exactly to the thing that would not come across.
A reader, encountering the gap, could feel the outline of what the language had withheld.
, the deliberate leaving-out, has always been among poetry's most powerful instruments.
What a poem declines to say presses on the reader more heavily than what it states.
I had been trained to fill every silence, to leave no blank unaccounted for.
But some blanks are not errors to be corrected; they are rooms the reader must furnish alone.
does the quiet work: meaning conveyed without ever being placed on the page.
The unsaid arrives by , carried in on the reader's own breath, not the writer's.
So a faithful translation must sometimes translate a silence with a silence, matching to .
To fill the foreign gap with fluent English chatter would be to shout over the very music.
I learned to leave certain absences intact, resisting the urge to explain them into .
A footnote, however learned, is a floodlight aimed into a room meant to be lit by candles.
The most honest thing I could do was to let the reader stand, briefly, in the dark.
In that darkness the untranslated word glowed with everything I had failed to say.
Meaning, I understood at last, lives as much in as in statement.
The spaces between the words were not the absence of the poem but its breathing.
And breath, though it carries no words, is what keeps the words from suffocating.
So I stopped fearing the and began, instead, to compose with it.
I shaped my silences as carefully as my sentences, letting each absence mean.
The poem, at last, spoke in two voices: what I had said, and what I had knowingly left unsaid.