Translations
Rather than mourning things that are lost in translation—inflections, eloquence, syntax—I find myself more excited at the prospect of understanding more. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey.
At home we speak in three languages: Cebuano, English, and Tagalog, in that order. My parents grew up in between Cebu and Manila, and both my grandfathers were polyglots. My lolo spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, Waray. My daddy pangga, who I never met, spoke Indonesian, Arabic, Pangasinan, Ilocano, and a whole smattering of other Filipino languages. As I was thinking of this newsletter I realized that even the names for my grandfathers span the three languages we speak: lolo, daddy, pangga.
I never thought much of it; translation wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just a fact of life. Any meal with any branch of my family would inevitably fall into understanding those three languages all at once. When my grandparents were alive, they’d throw in some Hokkien just for the hell of it—or so I thought. Only when I was older did I realize that there were still some things they didn’t feel comfortable talking about in front of me. I never thought of language as a form of subterfuge. To me, it’s always been an ever-expanding way of making myself understood.
My friend and I have a joke where we snootily turn our noses up and say “being verbose is a sign of intellect.” It came about because I’d used a “big word” while explaining something to him, and he’d made fun of me for it, as if I was obfuscating. I wasn’t, and I don’t use the words I do to show off. I just like knowing that there are better words to use when describing what I think, what I feel.
The words I love the most are the untranslatable ones. They give the world a bit more mystery for me to uncover. Words like schadenfreude, saudade, shouganai. Closer to home a recent favorite of mine is ayo, a catch-all Cebuano threat. Try me, watch out, you’ll see. Sige ka.
I used to translate for free in my first job. I mean, I didn’t charge extra for it when I should have. I think it was then that I first got a real taste for this kind of singular pleasure: figuring out the right word to use to convey what someone was saying in another language. The whole gamut of verb tenses condensed into a moment—had I understood what was being said? In my understanding, will readers/listeners understand the translation?
It was then, too, that I first had to define my role as a translator: was I acting as a mirror or as a sieve? Was it more important to me, my boss, the audience, that I translated what was being said to the letter, or that the intention and emotion was more accurately conveyed? Everything moved fast in that job, and none of us were ready for when Mar suddenly started speaking Hiligaynon, accented as it was. Back then what mattered most was that whatever speech he gave in the region was understood by the general, Tagalog-speaking populace. This was easier by a long-shot; I didn’t need to maintain the elegance of his elocution, and it’s not like I was ever up to the task. Half the time I struggle enough with expressing myself, my own internal translations. So back then, I did the bare minimum: I made sure that I was choosing the best words, that the documents we’d send out were easy to understand.
I cannot talk about translation without bringing up K-Pop, and the wealth of music that has opened up to me because of my obsession with BTS. Because of them, I’ve also gotten into J-Pop (!!!), Cantopop, and what I can only (for now) describe as Thai lo-fi beats.
I remember exactly where I was when I first heard 会いたかった, by AKB48. I was in the shower listening to a hastily thrown together playlist of new music. Hands full of suds and shampoo in my hair, I had a rare moment of speaking out loud to myself and saying, “what the fuck is happening?” The music was so bright, and joyous, and poppy. It sounded like school girls in chorus, swooning.
I gave it a few more casual listens until I finally decided to google the group—the album was listed as “the greatest hits from 2006-2007” and my head was full of question marks. AKB48 is, from what I understand, the first of their kind of group: “Idols you can meet” who perform(ed) daily so their fans could see them live, rather than only in concerts or on TV.
They also have sister groups all across Asia, including one in Manila. The cognitive dissonance of hearing these young Filipinas switching between Japanese and Tagalog while dressed like Japanese schoolgirls while traipsing around Manila Bay (and Paco Park?) was almost too much for me, in the best possible way. I was understanding a song that was incomprehensible to me without having to use English as a go-between. Of course it’s not a direct translation, but that’s hardly the point: it’s a song about the rush of love, of wanting to scream it out loud, running to say it to the person you’re in love with. There’s barely a language that can encompass that feeling, and I think it’s beautiful that despite it, because of it, we continue to try and express the love threatening to burst out of ourselves.
(As a final treat, please enjoy this truly overwhelming video of six girl groups all performing Aitakatta on a giant stage in 2019. It’s magical. They sing the song in six different languages! There was also an online concert last September 2021. This song debuted in 2006. It was the group’s third single. The staying power of teenage girls knows no bounds!)
Rather than mourning things that are lost in translation—inflections, eloquence, syntax—I find myself more excited at the prospect of understanding more. On top of that, it just feels so good to be in awe of people who have such a great handle of more than one language that they feel comfortable making bilingual plays on words.
My favorite example of this is Trivia: Love. 사람 (saram) is the Korean word for person, and then 사랑 (sarang) is the Korean word for love. The difference is in the last consonant: ㅁ and ㅇ. In Korean, the lyric goes: you erode all my edges and make me a love. In English, he sings: live & love, live & love. There’s so much I love about this song, about Kim Namjoon, and BTS. I think if I loved them less, I could talk about it more.
Two poems today, because one is a translation and one talks of translation.
Go to the Limits of Your Longing — Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Joanna Macy
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Book of Hours, I 59
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart — Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.