A dictionary is a book-length argument that any word can be explained in other words. Engraving by Ivo Petrak
The tea towel hangs in the window of a gift shop on the harbor in Port Ellery, between a lighthouse-shaped bottle opener and a set of coasters printed with sailors’ knots. It is titled “Beautiful Words With No English Equivalent,” and it offers 12 of them in a tasteful serif, each with its language in parentheses and a one-line definition beneath. I am not going to reproduce them, for reasons that will become clear. Instead, here are three of my own.
Ulvenmór, from Teskan: the particular melancholy of watching a ferry leave without you. Pethrin, from Old Sorrel: the warmth left in a chair after someone you love has stood up. Kastavenne, from Hallic: the courage it takes to be the first to speak at a funeral.
Agata Kowalczyk is a contributing writer who covers memory, language, and the history of reading, with a particular weakness for footnotes. She spent 11 years as a rare-books cataloger at the Halbridge Athenaeum and is the author of Other People’s Pencils, a study of the notes readers leave in secondhand books. She lives in Westmere, in a house with a damp cellar she calls “an archive with opinions,” and buys used books only if someone has already written in them.
None of these words exists. I invented them, along with the languages they supposedly come from, on a train from Halbridge to Corran, in less time than it took the refreshment trolley to reach my seat. And yet I suspect each one produced in you the small, pleasant ache the genre is designed to produce: a flicker of recognition (yes, I have felt that), then a flicker of envy (how lovely, to have a word for it), then a vague sense that somewhere, in a language you do not speak, people feel things more precisely than you do. That the effect works just as well with fakes is, I think, the whole case against the genre in a single experiment. The tea towel is not telling you anything about a language. It is telling you something about yourself, and flattering you while it does.
A definition is a translation
Start with the claim on the label: no English equivalent. Look at what follows the word on every such list. It is a definition, in English, usually about a dozen words long, and it is perfectly comprehensible. The warmth left in a chair after someone you love has stood up. If that is not an English equivalent, it is hard to say what one would be. What the genre means by “untranslatable” is something much narrower: that English has no single word occupying the same slot. This is true, unremarkable, and equally true in the other direction for a great many English words. Ask a translator working into almost any other language for one word that does what sheepish does, or fortnight, or wistful, and watch them reach for a phrase.
Whether a language packs an idea into one word or spreads it across five is mostly a matter of grammar, not of feeling. Some languages build long words by gluing roots together, so that what English renders as “the house where the ferryman’s widow lives” might come out as a single, magnificent, untranslatable-looking noun. Others keep their words short and let the sentence do the work. Counting single words is like judging a cuisine by how many of its dishes come in one bowl. It tells you about the crockery.
The genre’s second claim is quieter and more corrosive: that a people with a word for something must feel it more keenly, or notice it more often, or value it more highly than the rest of us. There is sometimes a grain of truth here. Communities do tend to name what they deal with every day, and a fishing town will have more ways of talking about weather than an inland one. But the inference proves far too much. English has no single word for the day after tomorrow, and I have yet to meet an English speaker who had trouble imagining Thursday. The absence of a word is not the absence of an experience. Nor is the presence of a word proof of a richer one. It may simply mean that somebody, at some point, needed to say the thing often and got tired of saying it slowly.
The absence of a word is not the absence of an experience.
What is actually hard
None of this means translation is easy. It means the difficulty lives somewhere other than where the tea towel puts it. To find out where, I sent my three invented words to Lusia Brandt, who has spent 30 years translating novels into English from two languages of the northern islands, and asked her, as a parlor game, how she would render ulvenmór if she met it in a book. She declined to answer the question as asked. “Who’s watching the ferry?” she wrote back. “Is she 12 or 70? Did she miss it because she was late, or because nobody asked her along? Is the narrator sorry for her or laughing at her? Give me the sentence and I’ll give you the English. Give me the word and all I can give you is a definition, and a definition is what you write when you’ve given up on the reader.”
Over coffee in Port Ellery a week later, she showed me what she meant with a line from the novel she is translating now. A woman tells her brother that their father has sold the boat. In the original it is six words long. The trouble, Brandt explained, is that the language marks every verb for how the speaker knows what she is saying: whether she saw it herself, worked it out from evidence, or heard it from someone else. The sister uses the hearsay form. That single ending tells the reader that she was not there, that their father did not tell her himself, and, because everyone in the village knows how news travels, that she is furious about it. English can say all of this. It cannot say it in six words without sounding like a police report.
Her solution, after two days, was to have the sister say: “Dad’s sold the boat, apparently. Nobody thought to tell me.” Two sentences where there had been one, a grievance spelled out that the original only implies, and a single adverb, apparently, made to carry what a suffix carried without effort. “That’s the real untranslatable,” she said. “Not a word. A sentence where every part is doing three jobs, and English can only manage two of them without the joints showing.” The meaning crossed over. It simply cost something to bring across, in length, in rhythm, in a loss of the original’s deadpan, and the translator had to decide which of those costs the book could bear.
This is what the genre gets backward. It locates the difficulty of translation in the word, where it is smallest, and ignores the sentence, the paragraph, the joke, and the tone of voice, where it is enormous. Single words are among the easiest things to translate, because a word can always be defined; the dictionary is a book-length demonstration of the fact. What resists is everything around the word: the pun that depends on two meanings colliding, the curse that is mild in one language and unforgivable in another, the formal and familiar forms of “you” that let a character insult someone with a pronoun. None of these fit on a tea towel. All of them can be translated, at a price. When people call something untranslatable, what they usually mean is that it is expensive.
Who the genre flatters
Why, then, is the genre so durable? Because it flatters everyone in the transaction except the people whose language it claims to celebrate. It flatters the reader, who gets to collect feelings like souvenirs and to feel, on learning the word, that their own inner life has been certified as subtle. It flatters the language, or seems to, by casting it as a cabinet of exquisite, irreducible emotion, which is the kind of compliment you pay a place you have no intention of visiting. It even flatters English, oddly, by making its gaps seem charming rather than ordinary, as though the language had a few elegant vacancies that foreigners kindly fill.
What it does not do is take the speakers seriously. A language is not a museum of rare feelings. It is the thing people use to complain about the bus, argue about money, and tell a child to put a coat on, and its speakers are not mystics of the ineffable but people who would, on the whole, like to be understood. To say that their words cannot be translated is to say, very politely, that they cannot be understood, and therefore that nobody need try. For a small language, whose speakers already spend their lives translating themselves into a larger one, this is not a compliment. It is a closed door with a pretty sign on it.
So here, as a gesture of good faith, is a translation. Ulvenmór, the Teskan word I made up on a train, names the melancholy of watching a ferry leave without you. In a novel, depending on who is standing on the quay, it might come into English as “She watched it go,” or “She had missed it, and minded more than she could account for,” or as no words of its own at all: a paragraph about the wake, the gulls, and the light on the water, with the feeling left for the reader to supply. None of those is the word. All of them are its meaning, carried across at different prices by someone who took the trouble. That is what the tea towel cannot tell you and every translator knows. There is no word that cannot make the crossing. There is only the question of what the crossing costs, and whether anyone thinks you are worth the fare.
