Volume 3, No. 19: In Praise of the Untranslatable

Greetings, book people! Last Sunday, I got all set up on my breezy porch with my pot of tea and my stack of books, excited to spend the day reading. But about 20 pages into Zami, I was so distracted I was reading sentences four or five times in a row. I was daydreaming about cleaning. So I put Zami aside, popped in my audiobook (Losing Music by John Cotter), and cleaned and reorganized my tea cabinet. Then I took all the dishes out of the hutch and cleaned it. I swept the whole house. I emptied my massive cookbook shelf, sorted and catalogued my cookbooks, dusted and cleaned the shelf, and put it back together.

I cleaned for six hours and afterward I was sore and happy. I am not a miraculously new person this week. There’s a lot in my life that’s still hard and messy. But I feel lighter. I didn’t do any cleaning in my office, but even so, when I sat down to work this morning, the space felt new. I’m grateful for the refresh. I often feel a lot of dread this time of year (summer is coming, and I hate it), so there’s something especially joyful about finding comfort and possibility in spring rituals.

It is in this spacious frame of mind that I finally bring you this essay about translation and un-translation. Honestly, I could talk about it all day.

I’ve recently read several books full of untranslated language—Tagalog, Chinese, Hawaiian, Spanish, Yiddish. I’ve always loved books that refuse and resist translation. I’m drawn to works that invite complexity and recognize multiplicity. I like books that make space for a multiverse of experience, that create different pathways for different readers, that are both intimate openings and closed windows.

Untranslated language feels to me like a visceral, on-the-page representation of what we each bring to the books we read. When I encounter a language I do not speak or understand, it reminds me that not all books are not written for me or about me. Many books exist outside my lived experiences. They are centered in the cultures, geographies, histories, and art traditions of communities to which I do not belong. Untranslated language is an artistic choice and a signifier. It points to what is most miraculous to me about reading: that we all have wildly different experiences of the books we read, and that we should, and that it’s okay—it’s beautiful, even. Untranslated words never feel like barriers to me—they feel like invitations.

Brandy Nālani McDougall’s beautiful collection ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is full of untranslated Hawaiian. McDougall is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi poet who writes about her land and her people, the injustices they’ve faced, the continuing violence of colonialism, the deep love she has for the land and ocean and ecosystems that have raised and shaped her. Many of the poems are long and lyrical, blending a directness full of anger and pain with imagery of creatures and plants, weather and mountains, lava and fire. There is a lot about motherhood, maps, the power of ancestral Kanaka ʻŌiwi storytelling, the loss and joy of giving birth and mothering—both of humans and of land.

Sometimes there’s one untranslated word nestled into a line of English. Sometimes it’s a whole stanza or poem. All of these words and phrases and poems are an invitation to me, a white outsider, a settler on stolen land, someone to whom the landscapes about which McDougall writes are not home, to sit with what does not belong to me. To take myself out of the equation. To honor the music and rhythm and mystery of unknown words and worlds.

The Hawaiian words in this book are like rivers carrying different meanings. A Native Hawaiian person who speaks the language will read a different book than the one I read. So will a white Hawaiian reader, more familiar with the language than me, but still an outsider. So will Native Hawaiian readers without a deep knowledge of their ancestral language. So will other Indigenous readers, who may not understand the untranslated words any more than I do, but whose experience of land, language, and history is so different from mine.

This is what I mean about untranslated language as visceral, as something true made visible. All of these different experiences have to do with identity, homeland, memory, privilege. They exist implicitly in the text. Take away all the untranslated words in this book and it is still not for or about me; it still has a beautiful beating heart that I can’t touch. When authors choose not to translate all the pieces of those beautiful beating hearts, it forces all of us to confront how we’ve arrived at the text and what we bring with us. It allows for infinite entries.

***Poetry often feels like an attempt to translate what is not translatable, to put into words feelings that exist in the body, that are not easily legible or definable in any language. Emily Lee Luan’s astonishing debut Return directly addresses this tension: how does one write and live between languages and cultures? “Is there forgiveness / for us in either of our languages?” asks the speaker in ‘Anger Diaries’.

Luan’s poems are full of Chinese. Chinese characters sit next to English words in dozens of poems. There are a few written entirely in Chinese. The way Luan blends language feels both playful and heartbreaking. She centers language—not just the idea of language, but the mechanical fact of it—in a book that is deeply concerned with ancestral loss and with the complicated longing to return to homeland, to memory, to the language of before. She excavates and illuminates so many in-between spaces: the space between home and homeland, memory and experience, spoken and written language. How could she have written this book any other way? How could she have written it in only one language?

This collection moved me, and it also challenged me. In a book like ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land, or Trace by Brenda Cárdenas, which is full of Spanish, I can sometimes guess at meaning from context. I can also choose to let the sounds of unknown words wash over me. I can sound them out and speak them aloud, revel in their shapes. Or I can choose to look them up. This is easy with a language like Spanish, which I’m already somewhat familiar with, and certainly still possible with a language like Hawaiian. This, too, is something I love about untranslated words in books: no one is stopping me from looking them up. I can settle in with Google. It will break up the flow of my reading, and the definitions I get won’t be deep or perfect, but it will change my experience of the book. Most importantly, it will put the burden of work where I think it belongs: on those of us on the outside. It’s another kind of invitation.

But with a book like a Return, I have no frame of reference. I cannot read Chinese, so I cannot even say the words aloud. I could look up the characters—the internet makes almost anything possible—but it would require a different level of attention, a different kind of work. So, for me, one of the invitations in Return is to completely rethink how I read poems. What a beautiful gift—to consider the spaces between words and between meaning, to tangle with the poetics of mystery.

***

A few weeks ago I listened to Sasha Lamb’s utterly irresistible, deeply queer, and very Jewish novel When the Angels Left the Old Country. It’s a historical fantasy about an angel and a demon, study partners, who leave their shtetl in Poland for America in search of a girl who’s gone missing. It is warm and joyful and deeply hopeful. It’s also full of untranslated Yiddish and Hebrew. I am Jewish, but I am not deeply connected to my Jewish heritage. I knew some of the words (mezuzah, mikveh), but many of them were foreign. Sometimes Lamb’s descriptions of Jewish theology and ritual felt like coming home; sometimes they felt like being immersed in an unfamiliar world.

Perhaps the most complicated invitations untranslated language offers are to those of us in between. As a queer Jew reading this deeply queer and Jewish book, I felt seen and delighted and sad. I thought about my great-grandfather, who came to the U.S. on a ship that was probably very similar to the ship Uriel and Little Ash took, from the same part of Eastern Europe. And I thought about what reading it would have felt like if my Jewishness was more central to my identity (something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently). I wondered how it would have landed if I had gone to Hebrew school, had a bat mitzvah. I felt a little bit bereft, like the book was offering up missing pieces of myself that I wanted, but couldn’t hold. None of these complicated and conflicting feelings lessened my love for this novel—they only deepened my experience of it.

The infinite invitations that live inside untranslated language make books richer for all of us. In her incredible collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts, Cynthia Dewi Oka posits that narrative clarity is not useful, and that writing toward it can be a form of violence:

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this idea, that coherence is not “the best thing we have to offer each other.” Untranslated language is a way to resist narrative clarity, to resist coherence. Perhaps understanding, in its simplest, most obvious, most reductive form—knowing the meaning of each word on the page—shouldn’t be our goal. What happens when we let go of coherence? What richness, what feeling, lies beyond coherence? What worlds open up when we accept that neither language nor meaning is linear, and that both exist beyond and outside of words?