Try to think without words in your mind. It’s pretty difficult, isn’t it? Even if you think of something that you don’t know the name of; you still describe it to yourself in words. Even emotions that don’t fit into the simple happy, sad, angry categories can be described with adjectives or other words- apathetic rage, bitter contempt, seething resentment (I only chose those just because they are so deliciously reflective of those incredibly pompous books that feel the need to throw in an obscure classical reference or half of the dictionary every two pages). We have such a wide range of words on offer, but is it enough? There are always some things that we can never express fully, even in description, and even the meaning of these abstract concepts often varies from person to person. Take the classic example of Love: it can’t effectively be defined in words because it doesn’t exist that way. It exists outside the boundaries of what we can define- even babies can show what we would call love towards their family, without language. The Ancient Greeks had split love up into multiple words- eros, agape, philia and storge; the words all denote different kinds of love. But even this expansion of language can never reach the true root of the problem. We cannot say for sure what love is since we all feel it differently (and for some people it seems not at all…)
The untranslatable quality of abstract concepts into reality also links to the difficulty of translating poetry. Poetry as an art form is designed to elicit emotions from its reader, to make them feel what the poet wanted them to. Perhaps it is a way of getting around the problem of abstract concepts: Poetry explains and defines through metaphor that which we cannot define with certainty. Everyone interprets poems differently, reflecting their own views and experiences onto what they are reading, drawing a completely different conclusion from anyone else. This shows the ambiguity of language, and how useful it can be; people can have the freedom to decide for themselves exactly what the poem means and is trying to say. This metaphorical language, however, can often be lost in translation.
There is something personal about reading poetry in your own language, like an old house that you’ve lived in for years. You know every corner of the house, and in your native tongue, every little nuance; the words carry a deeper meaning for you. You know how it all fits together, in a blend of imagery and sound and syntax. But in another language that you don’t know so well, the poetry is just a jumble of words that you remember from 3rd form vocab tests. It always makes me feel slightly wistful, that I will never truly access such a great wealth of beautiful poetry. Even books that have been translated lose something in translation. There is a great book called 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated from Japanese, which I have always wanted to read in its original language (if I could actually read Japanese), but would it even be the same? Would it have the same meaning to me as it did to a native speaker? Probably not, and so for now it is best just to read the watered-down English versions (even though the translation was very good), only unearthing half of the whole story, never fully appreciating the masterful penmanship of the original author. Maybe one day everyone will be raised as polylingual, swapping between languages to express different things, using the strengths of each one to reach a higher level of meaning. Or of course, all languages except one could die, and the world would be a much less diverse and interesting place.
thephoebeofknowledge 