So In Other Words...

I really want to take up French again (learnt for four years -ten years ago) but maybe I should just give up and try something else. I love how languages and dialects have phrases and words that are almost untranslatable but describe things perfectly.

Makes you wonder about subtitles in movies huh?

These are among the words discussed by Christopher Moore in his fascinating book In Other Words:

Russian - razbliuto

The confusing bundle of emotions felt by Russian males for their ex-girlfriends

Czech - litost

This is an untranslatable emotion that only a Czech person would suffer from, defined by Milan Kundera as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery." Devices for coping with extreme stress, suffering, and change are often special and unique to cultures and born out of the meeting of despair with a keen sense of survival.

Portuguese - saudade

A kind of intense nostalgia that only Portuguese people are supposed to understand. In Katherine Vaz's definition, which she uses to explain the title of her novel Saudade, it is "yearning so intense for those who are missing, or for vanished times or places, that absence is the most profound presence in one's life. A state of being, rather than merely a sentiment." In his 1912 book on Portugal, A.F.G. Bell writes: "The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning toward the past or toward the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

To read Simon Winchester's foreword to In Other Words, click here.


ps #115 Promising to Learn a New Language - From Stuff White People Like

Pin It