Lost in Mistranslation

Out beyond ideas

Of wrongdoing

And rightdoing,

There is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

– Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks

A few months ago, a friend told me she would never forgive the West for what they did to Rumi. It was the first I’d heard of it, and I was haunted by the wording she used until I looked it up. I found an entire debate about the legitimacy of translated Rumi poetry, how his mysticism and Islamic references were removed time and time again through history; how his words were twisted and misconstrued and watered down for a western audience too fearful of a higher power. In the end, Rumi had become associated with sensuality, love, and inherent goodness. No God, no Quran, no religion. Think, the most popular poet in the world completely removed from the identity he devoted himself to. Translated so liberally that the better term would be imagined.

If Rumi wasn’t safe, are any of us? Could any poem, any song, and any written verse ever be accurately translated from one language to another?

I didn’t put much thought into the act of translation until I started learning Japanese. I tried to convert a sentence in Kana into a sentence in English and found that half of its beauty was destroyed to make room for proper grammar. It was a jarring moment for me; my own inexperience with the language and the sinking awareness that ‘this was more difficult than it looked’. I likened it to cutting a finger off without bleeding. And this made me painfully aware of one thing: cutting a finger off without bleeding is impossible, and so too is translation without flattening the folds of its native language.

It’s not like I hate translated poetry, though. Quite the opposite. However much we wish to; the truth is that most of us will never be able to read all the literature we want to read in its original language. It’s a great dream to aspire to… but unrealistic. Edward Hirsch once said, “Strictly speaking, total translation is impossible, since languages differ and each language carries its own complex of linguistic resources, historical and social values. This is especially true of poetry, the maximal of languages.” Recently, I’ve been in the habit of reading bilingual translations where the original language is on one side of the page, and the translation is on the other. It’s fascinating to see the variations in word choice and what ideas the translator was trying to preserve. Translators who make the effort to understand and convey the intentions of the original writer by understanding cultural contexts and who bring their own poetic styles of articulation to their work are unsung heroes of literary translation.

In 2019, someone approached me regarding a fanfiction I’d made once that went semi-viral. She wanted to translate it into Vietnamese and while I mulled over the proposal, I wondered why. Why would she want to spend so much time translating a 62,00+ word story that I hadn’t even finished yet? I told her to wait until I was able to completely redo the novel because, my god, was it a mess of sentence fragments and run-ons and general incoherency—yet as it stands, it may never be. It was a lost opportunity for me, for us both, but it gave me space to think.

The reality is that most of us will never need our words formally translated. If we should make it big as writers and celebrities, maybe then the things we say might be translated into different languages for fans, readers, and what have you. This might be posthumously or while we’re still alive. (Must sound pretentious coming from me when I just told a story of how I was approached for a translation project.) But until that time comes, we’re responsible for our own translations and ensuring the things we say can be communicated clearly.

I find that to be the most difficult part of living within words—finding the right ones at the right time for the right person in the right context. You could scour the Earth and not find one person without regrets; someone who should’ve spoken up or should’ve held their tongue. Words that were used as violence. Words that died in the echoes of silence. Sometimes the words we want to say the most are the ones we never do. I call this the futility of speech and how we get lost in mistranslation.

Think about it. When we meet new people, we fall into the same, familiar habits. “Hi, my name is this. I live around this area, yes, it’s nice. I like this music, it’s alright.” Like a routine, we go on to tell stories from our childhood, revelations from when we tried to soul-search, and pepper in cautious little test statements about our insecurities to see how we’ll be received. We’ve said it all before to someone no longer in our lives, who now carry those tidbits of information in their back pocket and there’s nothing we can do to get it back. Now we’re faced with someone new, and our tongues unfurl to speak the same core sentences and we pretend it isn’t a breach of integrity to do it all over again. But we want people to understand us, so we use the words that come easiest because they worked once so they’ll work again, surely—even if what we really want to say is nothing at all.

We intentionally mistranslate ourselves sometimes. There are things I say that I don’t mean, and vice-versa. At any given point in time, there are people who have in their heads the half-baked middle-school version of me. I’ve changed so much since then, both outwardly and inwardly, but I can’t take back their opinion of me and the things I’ve said. What does my first girlfriend remember of me? What was the last thing I told her that remains preserved in her head? On that note, what do I remember of her? I close my eyes and can’t remember her face, but I remember how she used to text and the funny little idioms she liked to overuse.

Just the other day, I was reconnecting with a friend from high school, and I jokingly mentioned that I had just left a situationship with a white man. She was silent for a long time before admitting that she never expected me to be with a man, much less a white one since I had been so adamant about it once before. It was a great surprise to her.

“Things change,” I’d told her after getting over the paralyzing shock of only being remembered as a moody 15-year-old with a limited worldview, when I really meant, “You don’t know me at all.”

You, nor I, none of us can carry over everything in a translation, and we can’t guarantee that all people maintain the perception of us that we want.

I think the entire world is made up of and built on translation. Every act of communication is translation, verbal or written. It reaches far beyond knowing the meaning of a string of words in another language. Beyond the boundaries of a language’s written conventions. Poetry is the translation of silence into words. What is speech if not the translation of thoughts and emotions into words? What is a gesture? What is anything? Translation is intrinsic to every aspect of how we communicate.

But how do we translate the untranslatable? Of course, by that I mean feelings. Between the echoes of words, families and friends and lovers create their own encoded languages every day. Alain de Botton said, “Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others” and Sujata Bhatt said, “I’ve been meaning not to mean anything for once […] when this man kisses me I want to learn another language.” and Céline Sciamma said, “A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else” and A.S. Byatt said, “We two remake our world by naming it together, knowing what words mean for us.”

Every so often, it hits me that we create our own languages amongst ourselves, ascribing meaning to every pocket of space we come across. It lives and breathes and holds weight. Its translations and meanings are personal—a story between me, you, and the ghosts left in our wake.

My father says, “Do you need a ride?” and I hear, “I want you to get home safe.”

I know why that girl wanted to translate my little fanfiction story into Vietnamese now, even if we haven’t spoken since. I mean, why did I write the story in the first place if not out of love? So why would she translate the story, if not also out of love? The answer was so simple all along, right there in front of our eyes.

My first crush introduced me to the cumbia music from his childhood one evening while we played video games with his friends. Frantically, as the band sang, he typed the translations as best he could out into the chat. It was a song he always listened to when cleaning the house with his family in Argentina, he explained in between hasty typing, a tradition. We’ve since parted ways, but what he did that night stuck with me. He wanted us to understand it as he did. I didn’t that night, but I understand now.

Love is many things. Love is telling you one thing when you really mean another. Love is the special language you make with your spouse. Love is not knowing what is being said but knowing what is being felt. Love is vacuuming before New Year to song lyrics you still don’t understand.

To translate is to love.

Beyond kufr and Islam

There is a desert plain,

In the middle space

Our passions reign.

When the Gnostic arrives there

He’ll prostrate himself,

Not kufr not Islam nor is there

Any space in that domain.

– Rumi as translated by @persianpoetics on Twitter

The same poem as the one at the beginning.