Back in 2018, I wrote about a fun, interesting new word being introduced to English from Japanese. It featured in lots of articles about words English didn’t have but needed; it made lots of lists about words from other languages that are impossible to say in English. There was just one tiny little problem: none of the Japanese people I asked about it actually knew it. So, I wrote:
"There's a special place in linguistic hell for anyone who claims that word X from language Y is so totally unique that it can’t be translated into English!"
My opinion hasn’t changed much1. I still think that claiming any given word is untranslatable is poor form, especially for anyone with any sort of linguistic training or background. Actually, let’s be fair: it’s poor form for anyone who speaks more than one language regardless of education or training. Because, the thing is, everything is translatable. Everything.
You might not be able to do it in a simple one-to-one word, you may not even be able to do it in a pithy phrase, but you can do it. That’s how languages work. And if I sound cranky about it, it’s because I am.
Welcome to Revision, a subsection of Learned where I go back through the archives to figure out if there’s a book hiding anywhere in what I have previously written.
When we write these articles, we’re usually just suggesting that there are ideas which have coalesced into single words in other languages that have remained phrases or even paragraphs in English. The implication is that because these concepts have been distilled into a single noun or verb, it’s an idea that must be central to a culture and therefore, possibly, worthy of emulation.
And that might be true if it were not for the fact that people make up new words all the damn time. In lots of different cultures and languages. And because very few of us writers speak every language that might give us a new word, we can’t always easily ascertain if that’s truly a commonly used word or if it’s just something someone made up that one time on Instagram.
Anyway, the post I’m quoting is, as I said, from 2018, during the very first volume of Learned. The word I wrote about is “tsundoku,” means buying books and stacking them up to read later. It is a real word, it comes to us from the mid-1800s, but, as I point out in the original essay, it’s not exactly a commonly used word today.
All that said, we can write this whole thing off as me being a cranky old man and being more than a little irritated at people writing better than me on my turf. However.
I returned to the topic again in January of 2021, for an essay about the Japanese practice of “techo kaigi.” In it, I talked about a new Japanese-to-English phrase making the rounds in which people set aside some time (kaigi) to set-up their planners (techo) for the upcoming year. Which sounded fantastic and really interesting and the Japanese people I asked about it had no idea what the hell I was talking about.
But the other thing I talked about in “Techo Kaigi” is that this practice of looking to other languages for concepts that don’t exist in English as pithy one-word expressions seems to have collided with the self-help aisle of the bookshop to create a lot of articles about traditional art of whatever from whatever ancient culture. And that’s a problem.
In the same essay, I talked about a different Japanese-to-English buzzword, kakeibo2, which proponents touted as a revolutionary way to manage a household budget from Japan! And, well, guess what happened when I asked Japanese people about it?
I mean, imagine you don't speak English and you live in a non-English speaking country. Now your friend comes up to you, breathless and trembling, just bursting to tell you about this ancient and traditional American philosophy called "spring cleaning." Every year, you take a week in the spring to totally clean your house, top to bottom, and discard all the things you no longer need and to organize the items you want to keep. The act of cleaning your dwelling as deeply and thoroughly as possible recalls the early European settlers to the continent and how they would make their homes as spotless as possible as thanks for having survived a harsh winter...
Seriously, it's like that. I find it more than a little frustrating. On the other hand, when I ask Japanese people about the whole thing, they tend to find it amusing, if not bemusing. So, maybe it’s just me.
After all, there are fantastic idioms from other languages that we can appreciate and maybe even adopt into English, there are thousands. Sometimes even when it's not actually a common phrase in its home language, it can still be a fun English phrase. I'm thinking of the Polish idiom, "not my circus, not my monkeys" which I understand to be more popular in English than it actually is in Polish. And of course there are unique cultural points inherent in every language and every culture past and present, but those should be celebrated and explained with regard to their history and context, not presented as the next new life hack.
But can it be a book?
Which brings me to the point: here in Revision, we’re asking the question - can this be a book? So, in this case...I'm not sure?
The core concepts expressed in these two essays are:
There is no such thing as an untranslatable word
A lot of the words bandied about as untranslatable words are often not well-known or commonly used words in their cultures of origin
Taking rather mundane vocabulary from another language and writing it up as another culture’s philosophy is tantamount to othering at best and racist at worst
I feel like the first two could be good topics for a book, maybe. The third could be but doesn’t really feel like one that I ought to be writing. But, also, all three are pretty negative, almost prescriptive, and that’s not a place I like to present from.
I suppose I could try for the high road and do a deep comparison of things like wabi-sabi and look for similar cultural and lexical items from other places, but that sounds like a lot of work.
And I guess that means lots of really nice people are going to the special hell set aside for linguists, journalists, and writers of all stripes, including me, most likely.
At the moment, the one that really gets under my collar is ikigai, which a thousand life-hacker blogs will tell you is a Japanese philisophical exercise where you find the thing you are meant to do in life by looking at the intersection of what you're good at, what you can do to make money, and what you care about. And when you ask Japanese people, they tell you that, yeah, it's a thing and they think they did a worksheet on it back in junior high, maybe?