Words That Don't Translate

Some of the things I want to say in English have no shape in English. They were born in another language and they refuse to leave it.

I notice this most when I am trying to describe a feeling to someone who only speaks one of my languages. There will be a Nepali word sitting at the center of what I am trying to say, and I will go around it in three or four English sentences, and the person will nod, and I will know that they have understood something — but not the thing.

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Take maya. The English translation is love, which is not wrong, but it is the way a photograph of a meal is not wrong. Maya is closer to a soft, durable affection — the kind you feel for a younger sibling, or a grandmother, or a place you have been away from for a long time. You can have maya for a city. You can have maya for an old shawl. The word does not need a person at the end of it.

English makes you choose. Love is too big and too small at the same time. It demands romance, or it gets diluted into politeness — I love this coffee, I love this song. Maya does not have that problem. It sits steadily at one temperature.

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Or ramailo. The dictionary says fun, enjoyable. This is technically true and entirely insufficient. Ramailo is what a good evening with cousins is. It is the quality of being together when there is nothing in particular to do. It includes the food, and the teasing, and the music in the next room, and the slight chaos, and the fact that nobody is checking the time.

You cannot have ramailo alone. You cannot have it in a hurry. It is, in its bones, a communal and slightly slow thing. English has no single word for this, which says something about English, or about the kinds of evenings the language was designed for.

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I am not making a case that one language is better than another. Every language has these — words that hold a specific shape of feeling that another language cannot quite cup in its hands. Portuguese has saudade. German has sehnsucht. Japanese has half a dictionary of them. The point is not which language is richer. The point is that translation, when you look at it closely, is always a small act of loss.

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What I have started to think is that we carry, in whatever languages we speak, slightly different versions of ourselves. The me who thinks in Nepali notices things the me who thinks in English does not. She is softer in some places. She is more patient. She is willing to use a word that means several things at once and to trust the listener to feel which one is meant.

When I write in English, I miss her a little. I try to leave room for her — a sentence shaped strangely, a rhythm that is not quite English's rhythm, a word that I let stand untranslated because there is no honest way to translate it.

If you have read this far in English, then somewhere in here you have also been reading a little bit of Nepali. I hope you felt it, even if you could not name what you felt.

That is, after all, what these words do.