The TLS blog

Untranslatable, that's what you are . . .

By MICHAEL CAINES

After the translation prizes, the angels of translation and IKEA’s “fluency” in thirty-one languages, it may be almost a relief to find that there are plenty of words people claim to be untranslatable. Untranslatable in a like-for-like, one-word-for-another way, that is; it seems that the idea behind the word can usually be explained with easy, Johnsonian concision.

For example – have a guess at the meanings of these words, their definitions, and which languages they belong to:

Cwtch (the third one on this list)

Komorebi (fourth paragraph . . .)

Mamihlapinatapai

Qualanquismo (the fourth one down)

Zhaghzhagh (the eighth one down)

If you scored five out of five, and as you’re reading this in English, congratulations – you’re more multilingual than Mario Vargas Llosa. And you have a very interesting and varied family background.

A complement to the helpful online collections for untranslatability from which these words are gathered comes courtesy of sometime TLS contributor Ollie Brock, who is currently a translator in residence at the Free Word Centre (on Farringdon Road, around the corner from the old TLS HQ). An edited version of the first event in a series on a theme of translation, Migration Stories, which I attended, is now available as a podcast. (See the embed above. Press play. Hear the poet Maria Jastrzebska revel in the excitement of the untranslatable! Marvel at the idea of growing up in Ghana, which speaks, “unofficially”, sixty-seven languages! Gasp as Sofia Buchuk permits us to glimpse the Quechuan spiritual world of her grandmother! etc.)

It was a good discussion, although it’s interesting to hear at the end of all this that Ollie Brock himself “doesn’t really believe in the idea of untranslatability”, despite some of his guests’ apparent delight at the irreconcilable differences between languages; that sounds like it might be the necessary attitude for a professional translator.

French with a safety net

By J. C.

Bilingual editions of literary works, with facing-page translation, are largely the province of poetry, and are generally unsatisfactory. If your French / German / Russian is good enough to have a go, you don’t want a contrived imitation distracting your other eye. The literal summary at the foot of the page, a method pioneered by Penguin in the 1960s, is a better solution. Anvil Press has reissued Rimbaud’s Poems (£14.95) and The Complete Verse by Baudelaire (£10.95), with accurate prose versions by Oliver Bernard and Francis Scarfe, respectively. The aim is “to help readers negotiate poems without constant recourse to a dictionary”. Both collections originated in Penguin in the 1960s.

Bingual editions of prose works are rarer, but perhaps more justifiable. Julian Green’s Paris is a series of short meditations on the city in which Green was born to American parents in 1900. The facing-page translation is by J. A. Underwood. If you fancy testing your French with a safety net, or seeing how English recoils from the subjunctive, Paris, first published in 1991, offers a pleasant way of going about it. “Quoi qu’il en soit, le vieillard en question a une barbe blanche”, Green writes, to which Underwood responds, “Anyway, the old man in question had a white beard”. A few pages later, the introductory phrase is repeated: “Quoi qu’il en soit, je demeurerai toujours à ma place invisible”. This time the translator opts for “Be that as it may . . .”.

Tomas Transtromer: Accept no imitation

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011 has today gone to the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer is the first poet to win the prize since Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, and the first Swedish recipient since 1974.

The Nobel Academy already stood charged of Eurocentrism, making Transtromer something of a defiant choice. Many TLS readers will associate his name with another controversy not of his own making.