Words for Which There Is No Word
訳せない言葉のために
As a translator I have spent my life in the narrow country between languages, smuggling meaning across a border that never quite opens.
In grief, that country has become my only home, for I keep searching other tongues for a word my own withholds.
The Portuguese have saudade, a longing for something that may never return, and perhaps never fully existed.
The Welsh say hiraeth, a homesickness for a home to which one cannot go back, or which was always imagined.
The Germans, exhaustive as ever, offer Sehnsucht, an aching for the unattainable that no single English word will carry.
I copy these words into a notebook Marta gave me, as though collecting them might assemble the feeling they each half-name.
Yet every word is only a fragment, a of a mirror that once, together, might have shown a whole face.
My own language, so rich in commerce and law, falls silent precisely where I need it most, at the edge of loss.
We say bereaved, a word so administrative it might appear on a form beside one's address and date of birth.
We say widower, which names a legal status and says nothing of the specific silence that now lives in my hallway.
Language, I am learning, is a map drawn by the living for the living, and it stops at the of the gone.
Where the map ends, the cartographers wrote nothing, not because there was nothing there, but because none returned to survey it.
I had believed, professionally, that anything sayable in one tongue was sayable, with labour, in another.
That faith was the ground I stood on for forty years, and grief has quietly dissolved it beneath my feet.
For here is a meaning that no language holds entire, that every language approaches and every language, , fails.
Perhaps that failure is not a defect but a form of respect, a refusal to pretend the unspeakable can be spoken.
Marta, who spoke four languages, used to say that the is where the truth keeps its private residence.
I laughed then, taking it for a poet's ; I do not laugh now, standing at that residence's locked door.
Each foreign word I gather is a key that fits the lock a little, turns a little, and then stops.
The in my own vocabulary is not an absence of words but the shape, exactly, of what I have lost.
A gap in a text, we translators say, must sometimes be left as a gap, honestly marked, never falsely filled.
So I have begun to leave the gap, to let the missing word stand as the truest name I have.
There is a dignity, I think, in admitting that some connotations bleed away the instant they cross a .
What she was to me survives in no dictionary, under no headword, in no language living or dead.
And yet I go on translating, because the labour of approach is the only still available to me.
To reach for a word and fall short is, after all, not so different from reaching for a hand that is gone.
Tonight I will add another entry to her notebook, another near-miss, another beautiful and insufficient foreign word.
But I begin to suspect that the word I am hunting is not lost in translation; it is hiding inside my own refusal to feel.