Lost and found in translation; words, feelings and foreign language. (Part I)

(Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Painting by Gustav Klimt, 1907)

I am reading The Outsider by Albert Camus on a lazy Sunday afternoon. ‘The sky seemed to rip apart from end to end to pour down upon me,’ he writes as Meursault, the apathetic man who refuses to conform. I have always liked Camus, but until recently, I was unaware that his name is pronounced as Kah–moo as opposed to Kay-mus like I used to say it. French names are confusing to non-native speakers, I presume.

As I read the Translator’s Note, Sandra Smith, who translated the novel from French to English, writes; “…. Camus uses the metaphor of knocking on the door of malheur. In French, this single word has a wealth of associations: destiny, disaster, unhappiness, misfortune, ordeal, accident, mishap, tragedy. To convey this destiny of interpretation, I chose to expand the phrase, translating it as ‘the fatal door of destiny’.” When I read that, I wonder if words really lose their sentiments and emotions when they are translated in a different language. All languages have distinct alphabets, grammar, syntaxes, dictions and in a way, a disparate yet novel interpretation of life. I realize how constricted our world is, defined by the boundaries of speech, limited by words, sentences, articulation of our vocabulary and our flair of expression. Our existence really, rests upon the alphabets we learn in kindergarten, only assorted in different ways and then validated by a dictionary.

We all have been in situations when we ran out of words to describe how we felt. Not necessarily because our vocabulary was weak, but simply because there were no testimony, no assertion for their actuality; those certain feelings lay beyond the realm of human expression. Maybe they, like ghosts, had no basis for their existence. After all, inexplicable is a real word, isn’t it?

I like to wake up early. I like the feeling I get when the first faint rays kiss my cheeks, while the birds chirp and the morning air fills in my lungs. The closest word I can find to describe it is alive. I feel alive. However, there is a word in Swedish language, Gökotta, which means ‘“to have a picnic at dawn to hear the first bird’s song,” or to simply appreciate nature in the morning. What a beautiful way to define the apparently plain act of waking up early to enjoy the morning! I thought it was insignificant, nothing special until I learnt a word that ameriolated my thinking and my perspective.

In a song called ‘Anthem’ Leonard Cohen sang;

‘Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.’

A wonderfully expressed thought. That everything in life has imperfections, the ‘crack’ and that is what makes it beautiful. As they say , “Imperfection is beauty.” In Japanese there is a phrase, wabi-sabi defined as a way of life that aims to look at flaws from a different perspective; “a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection” (wabi-sabi ).