In Translation

Or, the subject of all my favorite books this year

In a previous Substack essay on the beauty trap, I talked briefly about how many of my favorite books are directly or indirectly about language. In 2023 alone, I have read and enjoyed Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri, Cultish by Amanda Montell, The Power of Language by Viorica Marian, and The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar (I also read Thinking Inside The Box by Adrienne Raphel, a charming nonfiction book about the history of the crossword puzzle). And of course, my favorite book of all time, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, follows a young woman in search of purpose and understanding through her love of words.

My mother has called me “wordgirl” for years now. I learned to talk at ten months, learned to read at age three, was most notably chastised in childhood for writing on surfaces that were not paper (walls, the upholstery of my mother’s mammoth Lincoln Navigator, etc.) I started journaling in earnest at the age of eighteen and have kept up the habit ever since. I am a self-diagnosed hypergraph, physically and psychologically incapable of going a day without writing something down. My favorite time of year growing up was back to school season—to this day, I could spend hours roaming the aisles of stationery stores, comparing the nib sizes of gel pens and closely examining the weight and particular shade of notebook paper. I have just as great an affinity for the tools of the trade as I do for the trade itself. It is no surprise, of course, that my love language is words of affirmation.

Many treatises on translation explore how to translate is to lose something, necessarily. It is impossible to sustain a perfect one-for-one exchange when translating a long-form work into another language. Some analyses even call it an act of violence, a type of grief. Reading Lahiri and Marian made me ache desperately for another language with which to express myself, even as I read that translation and interpretation are subjective. Gaining another language means twice as much vocabulary to probe my thoughts, but no greater guarantee that those thoughts will be understood by the wider world.

In high school, I advanced as high as the AP Spanish Literature class during my junior year. There were only a handful of us, maybe a half dozen after the first week. We read excerpts of poetry and fiction from as early medieval times up to the turn of the century. I remember being on FaceTime with my best friend for hours, laughing hysterically as we struggled through the ancient-seeming Spanish together and then silently answering the essay questions that accompanied them. I felt so confident during exams, but my heart never stopped racing when I raised my hand to participate in class. I always feared an un-rolled r, an emphasis on an incorrect syllable, a nervous stutter that might render an entire sentence unintelligible to our teacher, a small bookish woman from Spain. Her entire job was to nurture our fledgling skills, and yet I was terrified of sounding anything less than native. My senior year offered no more rigorous Spanish study, so I took the only other class I hadn’t yet taken, which was nowhere near as challenging or immersive. I felt my skills wither, and by the time I got to college, when I met students on campus who tried to speak it with me, I was already too shy. I haven’t taken a Spanish class since, and every time I dig around for words that used to flow effortlessly to me, I feel great shame.

Just as travelers often remark that they wish they could move to the spot in which they are currently vacationing, I feel an intense desire to master a language every time I hear it in the wild. My father speaks fluent French. We have traveled abroad together many times, and while many of the people we encounter speak French if they don’t speak English, occasionally other language barriers arise. In Lisbon, I dreamt of Portuguese; in Vienna, I dreamt of German. Every time I see people signing to each other in public, I feel a flash of determination to teach myself ASL. In writing this, I wonder if I am not a true lover of words but rather a linguistic dilettante.

In Lahiri’s book, the chapter that moved me most intensely was her meditation on the myth of Narcissus and Echo. I had previously only been familiar with the basic pop cultural explanation of the story. For example, I did not realize that, to use Lahiri’s words, “Echo, who starts out as a talented storyteller, is converted, thanks to Juno’s curse, into a translator.” Echo is stripped of her great language capabilities and doomed only to repeat fragments of what has been said to her. In turn, as she attempts to court Narcissus, it is only when she repeats back his own rejection that he becomes drawn to her. Then, “Echo, in her shame, wastes away, her body vanishing, to the point where she is nothing but a heap of bones and a voice.” The plot point that most people know about Narcissus is that he falls in love with his own reflection in the water, but more urgently, he falls in love with the echo of his own language, especially as it is elusive and out of reach.

“When Echo advances physically, however, Narcissus again ‘flees’ […] and in retreating, refuses her touch, going so far as to say that he would rather die then embrace her. Why is an echo—as we have already established, an act of love, of listening and of restoring—so threatening? Why does that sound, which is in fact our own sound, recast by means of another, undermine and even threaten to annihilate our sense of who we are?”

It was this passage that affected me so deeply. It has been stated often that love is essentially an act of intense attention. We live in an age of unprecedented attention-seeking, where millions of people raise their hands every day online and beg to be seen (all of this, then, is me, raising my hand). And yet when that attention is turned onto us, we so often recoil. The precise, illuminating heat of true and undivided attention is so rarely received how we imagine it will be. How often have you had a conversation with someone who recalled a personal detail of yours, and then remarked that it was strange they remembered? To record and to repeat back—to demonstrate true understanding and active listening—is so often framed as an intrusion. An economy functions when its basic currency is made valuable through scarcity. Thus, in an attention economy, it is only when attention is repeatedly denied that it is valuable. Perhaps Narcissus and Echo can explain why you bristle at the acquaintance who remembers your birthday.

Learning another language does not ensure that I will be understood the way I aspire to be, nor does writing more music or fiction or Substack essays. Just as translating from one’s native tongue to a foreign one is an act of loss and elision, so too is translating from one’s thoughts to spoken or written words. I know, even as I write this, that the self is ultimately untranslatable. And yet I keep trying, staring into the reflecting pool and trying not to run.