untranslatables

Sitting on a crowded train up from London to Glasgow, I hear the babble of other speakers, often inaudible and incomprehensive, speaking multiple languages. And despite its indication of the proximity of strangers - from which our bodies now automatically shrink away - I realise how much I have missed this, how much of the past year has been speaking into silence. Through catching snatches of conversation not meant for me, but spoken freely and within earshot, I think about how these threads are thrown out to welcome me. How, tentatively, those in my carriage have become my neighbours. ‘Teach Me a Word You’re Afraid to Forget’ explores the forum of a more permanent neighbourhood - Govanhill - and our neighbours’ experiences of difference and belonging, shared and expressed through language.

The concept of untranslatable words has always held a sort of whimsical intrigue for people. Take, for instance, dèrive, a French word which means ‘drift’ if literally translated into English. However, it also has a specific conceptual definition requiring a more nuanced, longer translation to be understood in English: an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…… how pleasant! We often think that these untranslatable words tell us something culturally particular about the people/s that speak this language, encapsulating something essentially and idiosyncratically ‘other’ from our own, and this is often true only with respect to their etymology (the dérive was conceived as a philosophical revolutionary tool by French Situationist Guy Debord). On the contrary. If we study their definitions, these words can actually bring about connection through a strange familiarising mechanism.

Untranslatable words package an experience or a concept, and learning their definitions is extremely satisfying because you’re already familiar with that concept. Although the word might be foreign, the experience is something known. When I hear speakers for the ‘Teach Me a Word...’ define something they want to nourish the memory of, I realise that this word that they hold so close is also dear to me. Exploring untranslatable words is actually rooted in shared experiences, and this is powerful because familiarity predicates friendship, family. Not only does it create moments of recognition across cultures, but it also facilitates intergenerational and temporal bonds. Learning extinct words from our elder kin has the power to tell us about their lifetime in all its similarities and differences to ours. I notice this in the Yorkshire word thoil (to be able to justify the expense of something) which one speaker chose, explaining that: I chose this word because it's a word that I only really have heard said by older generations so e.g. my grandpa says it. Not so much by younger folk. So, I think it's kind of dying out a little bit. But, I think it's quite a handy word. I think it's quite nice and succinct. Similarly, reading untranslatable words in Shakespearean English for example, and learning their definitions, is a way to reach people across time through old texts - finding translations for these words our language no longer uses, but we can often still relate to. Through this practice we are invited to recognise ourselves in others, others who are speaking this word we've never heard before, for something that we’ve already experienced intimately.There’s a strange familiarity to hearing a stranger giving testimony to your life.

As our neighbours in ‘Teach Me a Word...’ teach us their words and we listen, we are brought together into a shared third space - the space of remembering and acknowledging the experience we each know so well. We locate ourselves together, overlapping. This spatial definition plays out in Word Turner II. In this and the ‘Teach Me A Word…’ website, Młyńczak maps the intimate language of our neighbourhood, its emotional geography, plotting points of meeting and recognition through conversation, and making these invisible encounters visible. To engage with the work is to feel that you are passing your neighbour in the street and, this time, recognising them. Hearing someone define their untranslatable word taps into the idiosyncrasies and intersectional similarities of living - sharing in a multifaceted way. One speaker donated the word Ehsaas (Urdu) to the website: a common word to describe an emotion or a feeling. Or, the state of knowing an emotion or feeling. It more closely translates in English to the word percipience so, an intimate and sensitive understanding or insight into an experience or emotion. It’s not a verb. You don’t 'to ehsaas'. Ehsaas is a possession of emotional knowledge. While listening, I wonder about the speaker and what qualities I share with them that construct this experience as relatable to me. I think about how an experience can be common to two people with different languages who both identify as female, or as queer, for example, asserting these identities as equally strong as that created by language. It becomes evident that even in our differences there are similarities - what is foreign can also be called home. Why is it that only when we brush up against the strange and unfamiliar in our own language, we overcome this, calling it learning, adventure, seeking new horizons. Why does this not translate? We encounter strangenesses every day, whether in our mother tongue or others, and there are some concepts and realities that my identity will never permit me not to be a stranger with - so I welcome whichever ones that I can, and in doing so challenge my parameters of family/familiar and alien shift ever so slightly.

Recording, sharing and hearing ‘Teach Me a Word..’s ‘untranslatables’ creates a warm feeling of friendship and kinship that is engendered by more than simply learning from others. Listening to them spoken and defined aloud teaches us about communal living. ‘Teach me a Word you’re Afraid to Forget’ does the precious work of building the concept of a neighbourhood, and celebrating the legacy of multicultural communities. As the train pulls into Glasgow I move into other circles, leaving my temporary carriage community behind for the next one on the station, the street, the park. I ruminate on the idea that this is something to treasure and nurture as we start to rebuild our integrated lives post lockdown, start to share spaces once more, and as we meet our neighbours again, for the first time.