I recently sat down with my old college friend, Moid Alwy, to go over the Urdu texts I’m setting for my next piece. He's originally from Pakistan but currently lives in the Twin Cities with his wife, Amanda, and their hilarious 2-year-old daughter, Kiran. We drank good beer and, over the course of a few hours (and more good beer), translated a 150-year-old text by Mirza Ghalib. It wasn't easy and, at one point, he actually called his mother in Karachi to get help on a particularly antiquated word that he didn’t know but it was a lot of fun and I’m really excited to start in on this new piece.
One of the interesting things you come to find out in translating something so far removed from English is how mechanical our language can be sometimes. I’m not knocking my mother tongue by any means but there have been way too many cases of “there isn’t a literal translation” for me to ignore the fact that English can be somewhat pedestrian when trying to describe things.
I’ll put an example to you:
When he and I were translating the fifth stanza of Deeda-e-tar he hit a word that he had a really hard time explaining. This word was "weeraanee" and resulted in this exchange taking place:
Moid: “It sort of means loneliness…but more than that. Kind of an eery kind, maybe? I’m not really sure how to describe it.”
Me: “There’s no literal English translation?”
Moid: “Yeah. It’s hard to describe. When all my family had finally left the house this was the word that my grandmother used to describe how she felt.”
Now, how about that? That is incredibly descriptive of the emotional context of that particular word. Why don’t we have something like that in English?
Then I started to remember all sorts of words from other languages that I’ve had lodged in my brain over the years that had very precise emotional descriptions but no literal translation:
Schadenfreude: this one is sort of well-known but it means taking pleasure in someone else’s pain. That's 6 words in English to just 1 in German.
Weltschmerz (German): the sort of pain felt by someone who understands that physical reality (i.e. the evils of the world) can never satisfy the Utopian desires of the mind. A ratio of 21 to 1.
Han: “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered.” 63 letters and spaces in English to just 3 letters in the original Korean.
Do we have any words like that in English? Something that explains another thing fairly precisely in terms of a definition but then colors it just a little bit more with something else. I’ve got two at the moment:
Ubiquitous: it means that something is everywhere but in a negative way. “Starbuck’s is ubiquitous.”
Pollyanna: someone who is optimistic but in an excessive or negative way.
I’m nowhere near the end of this thought but I figured I would eject it into the blogosphere and see what I get if anything. Thoughts?
One of the interesting things you come to find out in translating something so far removed from English is how mechanical our language can be sometimes. I’m not knocking my mother tongue by any means but there have been way too many cases of “there isn’t a literal translation” for me to ignore the fact that English can be somewhat pedestrian when trying to describe things.
I’ll put an example to you:
When he and I were translating the fifth stanza of Deeda-e-tar he hit a word that he had a really hard time explaining. This word was "weeraanee" and resulted in this exchange taking place:
Moid: “It sort of means loneliness…but more than that. Kind of an eery kind, maybe? I’m not really sure how to describe it.”
Me: “There’s no literal English translation?”
Moid: “Yeah. It’s hard to describe. When all my family had finally left the house this was the word that my grandmother used to describe how she felt.”
Now, how about that? That is incredibly descriptive of the emotional context of that particular word. Why don’t we have something like that in English?
Then I started to remember all sorts of words from other languages that I’ve had lodged in my brain over the years that had very precise emotional descriptions but no literal translation:
Schadenfreude: this one is sort of well-known but it means taking pleasure in someone else’s pain. That's 6 words in English to just 1 in German.
Weltschmerz (German): the sort of pain felt by someone who understands that physical reality (i.e. the evils of the world) can never satisfy the Utopian desires of the mind. A ratio of 21 to 1.
Han: “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered.” 63 letters and spaces in English to just 3 letters in the original Korean.
Do we have any words like that in English? Something that explains another thing fairly precisely in terms of a definition but then colors it just a little bit more with something else. I’ve got two at the moment:
Ubiquitous: it means that something is everywhere but in a negative way. “Starbuck’s is ubiquitous.”
Pollyanna: someone who is optimistic but in an excessive or negative way.
I’m nowhere near the end of this thought but I figured I would eject it into the blogosphere and see what I get if anything. Thoughts?
1 comment:
hi, i'm pete's sister, and i am a langophile and this post reminded me of when i took a non-violent communication workshop and there was a spanish speaking woman there. part of the lit given out was a list of feelings and she had taken the workshop before and said that in spanish there were so many more words for all of the feelings that you could have--it made me think the english language is sort of, well, lacking... btw, pete directed me to your blog because of the macgyver post--my husband is a huge (if late-coming) macgyver fan (he's a stargate fan, and didn't even know about macgyver until i told him about it--now he is constantly saying things like, 'remember the episode when...' and of course i do not. r.d.a. is a hotty, even with a mullet.) i was pleased to find the theme song out there in so many different varieties. i wish there was an english word for that kind of happiness. apparently macgyver has become a verb, whereby one uses common household objects to perform some feat of unbelievable ingenuity. AND there is a book (which said husband just received from me) called What Would MacGyver Do? about people who have macgyvered their ways out of tough situations.
gambatte on the urdu (that's 'good luck' in japanese, but the literal translation is actually 'perservere' shows ya what the japanese think of luck to get stuff done.)
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