The Untranslatable

Mira had spent forty years carrying meaning across the border between two languages, and only now, with her mother dying, did she discover the one word she could not smuggle through.

The word was saudade, or it was its cousin in the language of her childhood — she had begun, alarmingly, to confuse the two — and the dictionaries rendered it, with the flat complacency of dictionaries, as longing, or nostalgia, or a melancholy yearning for an absent thing. All of which were true and none of which were the word. Translation, she had taught her students for three decades, is not the transfer of meaning but its betrayal — a betrayal one commits with love, the way one paraphrases a friend's grief to a stranger and watches it shrink to fit the stranger's smaller cup. Every act of translation is a small funeral: the original dies a little so the copy may live.

She sat at her mother's bedside in the hospice, and the old woman drifted between the two tongues like a swimmer between two shores, and Mira realised that her mother was performing, in extremis, the very thing Mira had built a career upon — moving between worlds — except that her mother was not translating. Her mother was simply being in two languages at once, with no border guard, no customs, no duty levied on the meaning as it passed. To the dying, it seemed, the partition between languages thins to nothing, and Mira felt a pang of something close to envy.

There is a heresy among translators, whispered late at the conferences after the wine, that some things are simply untranslatable — not difficult, not thorny, but constitutionally sealed, like a room with no door. The professionals dismiss it as defeatism, and Mira had dismissed it too, briskly, for forty years. Everything carries across, she had insisted; it is only a question of how much you are willing to lose in the carrying. But now, holding the parchment hand of the woman who had given her her first language and was now taking it quietly back, she wondered whether the heresy had been the truth all along, and her whole vocation an elaborate refusal to admit it.

For what could she possibly carry across, now? Her mother said a word — a soft, diminutive word, a pet name from a village that no longer appeared on maps — and the word contained a whole vanished world: a particular kitchen, a particular dialect of light, a grandmother's hands doing something with dough that had no name in any language because the gesture had died with the hands. To translate the word, Mira would have had to translate the kitchen, and the village, and the century, and the particular timbre of a love that had used that word and no other. The word was not a window but a door that opened only inward, into a house where Mira had once lived and to which she could no longer find the road.

She thought of all the texts she had carried over — the poems, the contracts, the love letters of strangers, the testimony of asylum-seekers whose terror she had rendered into the calm register the tribunals required, smoothing the jagged cry into something the law could digest. Had she helped them, or had she domesticated them — filed off the very strangeness that was the proof of what they had survived? The thought arrived with the cold clarity that comes only at deathbeds and in the small hours, the twin confessionals of the soul.

Her mother slept. The machines kept their patient vigil. Mira took out the notebook she had carried for forty years, in which she recorded the intractable words, the ones that had defeated her, a private catalogue of her failures, and she found that she could not write down saudade because to write it under a heading marked untranslatable was itself a kind of translation — a classification, a domestication, a placing of the wild word in a cage labelled wild. So she did the only faithful thing. She closed the notebook. She leaned toward the sleeping woman and she said the word back to her, in the old tongue, the diminutive, the pet name, not translating it, not glossing it, simply returning it — handing the meaning back across the border to the only customs house that had ever truly held its warrant. And the dying face, without waking, moved into the faint topography of a smile, having understood, at last and as always, the one thing that did not need to be carried anywhere because it had never left.