An affair with untranslatable words
I love words. They are everywhere. Ironically, their presence is a silent thank you note to the poets who shaped them for us. A quick reminder: We didn’t create them. We merely borrow them. John Nash once claimed that he saw the world in numbers. I’m not a genius like him but i find myself dedicated to words. Sameer, a school days friend of mine, once asked me what would i like to be when i grow up. Poet was my self-assured reply. This was more than half my lifetime ago. This was before i quit engineering (BE) to embrace arts (BA). As of today, i’d say i’d like to pen a poetic book that’s not exactly an anthology but wouldn’t be a novel either. Different people have different reasons for their fascination with stuff that don’t exist. I love words because they are almost like God; so powerful that they don’t even have to exist to prove their power. You utter a word and poof, it’s gone. You write down a word, it embodies timelessness.
Speaking of writing, i worship books. A blank page on the screen may scare the shit out of me but nothing can beat the innocent smell of a printed page. Similarly, languages interest me a lot but words take an indisputable precedence. I am always seeking words. Describing something accurately is a dying art form, mainly due to our lack of curiosity, not vocabulary. I try describing pictures on my Instagram feed in one word and most of the time, i fail miserably.
Speaking of misery, not very long ago, i used to be heavily into poetry. Of late, i’ve moved to prose. This change reflects in the way i perceive cinema too. Earlier, i focused on the colours and the sounds of the film. I seem more engrossed by the dialogues and their delivery now. Not that i don’t read poems anymore, just that essay — derived from French for attempt; every essay is basically an attempt at writing an essay!—draws me closer. The more you read them, the more you become convinced that you don’t know anything worthwhile. I often notice how writers pour themselves out in to their essays. Seldom have i come across books where this level of zest has been maintained throughout by the writers.
Things get worse when translation is involved.
More often than not, translation kills the spirit of words — be it in an essay or a book. I recently read the English translations of Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Madhushala and Naseer Turabi’s Woh Humsafar Tha and it’s sad how inadequate English can be in catching the pulse of a foreign language. Last month, i watched the Tamil film Visaranai (2015) and the English subtitles did the exact opposite of justice. So many brilliant Tamil jokes got killed in the mayhem. I’m sure this perceived deficiency could be a matter of quality check. That said, it must also be true for any other composite language, not only English. It’s not necessary that one language should be able to stare into the soul of another. During moments like these, words become more powerful than God as well as less effective than a sneeze.
To give you an example, my late maternal aunt (mallamma) named Radha (nicknamed Radho) had a standard reply to a standard question.
Others: “Yencha ulla Radho?”
Mallamma: “Ulle anchi!”
Here, the question is the ubiquitous “How are you?” and the answer is something that possibly can’t be translated. Those two words in Tulu can be broken down for their separate meanings — ulle means alive, anchi means somewhere — but the essence of sarcasm is lost. What my aunt tried to indicate there was the unremarkable status of her life. Almost similar to the existence of a non-living creature whose movement depends on the will of a living creature. To put it in Internet lingo, stationary af.
Come to think of it, isn’t it nice to see how English has its limitations? I hope it continues to face such humbling obstacles before eventually annihilating all the vernacular languages.
