what won’t cross

Kafka, 1915. Ungeziefer. Middle High German: an animal unfit for sacrifice. Not “insect.” Not “vermin.” Not “cockroach.” A thing defined by what it’s too unclean for, not by what it is. Kafka told his publisher not to illustrate it. Every translator since has drawn it anyway — picked a species, given it legs, pinned it to the page. The word’s power is refusal. The translations all comply.

Pushkin, via Nabokov, 1964. The Onegin stanza: fourteen lines, a specific rhyme scheme, the sonic engine of the whole novel. Nabokov destroyed the music to save the meaning. Literal prose chopped into lines. Edmund Wilson said it sounded like a computer translation. Nabokov said that’s what fidelity costs. They stopped being friends over it. The friendship was the second translation loss, and nobody tried to render that one either.

Russian, 19th century. Birzhevoi zayats — “stock exchange hare.” A pun: zayats means bad luck (a hare crossing your path) and also an unlicensed broker. A character says “a stock exchange hare I know ran across my path.” Both meanings fire simultaneously. The translator’s footnote, helpless: “If only unofficial brokers were called ‘black cats’!” They weren’t. The pun died in the crossing and the footnote is its headstone.

Ibn Khalawayh, 11th century. Four hundred Arabic words for lion. Each one a compressed etymology — why this particular quality of lion needed its own name. David Larsen translates them: The Strutter. The Colossus. The Bane. Good names. English names. But an Arabic name for lion is a small essay about what a lion does to a language that has to live near one. An English name for lion is a label on a cage.

Wang Wei, 8th century. 空山不見人 — five characters. “Empty mountain not see person.” No tense. No article. No specified subject. Is this happening now or did it happen? One person absent or many? Is the speaker alone or describing someone else’s absence? The Chinese doesn’t say, because the Chinese doesn’t ask. The English translator must answer every question the poem refused to raise. Translation as forced testimony.

Every language into English. The word “you.” French has tu and vous — distance and closeness built into the pronoun. Japanese has seven or more, each one a map of relative status. German switches between du and Sie and the switch itself is an event, a threshold crossed. English: “you.” One word. The translator arriving in English loses the relationship encoded in address. The translator leaving English has to invent it. Every “you” is a guess at intimacy.