Untranslatable, page 1
UNTRANSLATABLE
By Alma Alexander
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 Alma Alexander
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Alma Alexander’s life so far has prepared her very well for her chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist and short story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific Northwest of the USA (where she lives with her husband and two cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. You can find out more about Alma on her website (www.AlmaAlexander.org), her Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AuthorAlmaAlexander/) or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander). You can also support her on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/AlmaAlexander)
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Praise for UNTRANSLATABLE
Aware: Leaving Via Callia
What a sad, sweet story. Beautifully written and deeply felt. Lovely!
– Patrice Sarath, author of The Sisters Mederos
Kintsugi: Something That Would Shine
Kintsugi—or kintsukuroi, which is how I learned it—has been a passion of mine for years, for decades. The very opposite of invisible mending, it makes a bright blazing feature out of damage, out of repair. In this story, Alma Alexander takes that spirited response one step further yet; in alien hands, it becomes something more valuable yet. As ever, the best in science fiction speaks to what is most human in us now, and we are richer for it.
– Chaz Brenchley, award-winning author of Bitter Waters
Trouvaille: Bucket List
An inventive (and nasty!) update on a classic story theme. It’ll make you very nervous around empty buckets.
—James Alan Gardner (author of
All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault)
Mamihlapinatapei: Equinox
I’ve never been to a summer home, but this is so well drawn I feel like I have walked in this one. A wistfully beautiful story of golden summer and the unknown colder, greyer, other life, and the might-have-been magic promise of the equinox—that feels like one of my own memories.
– Ryn Lilley, author of the Underground series
Inshallah: Night Train
"Night Train" offers us that rare sense of bittersweet hope for the future, one we may never understand but that believes in us. The universe is indeed perverse and all the more wondrous for it.
– Sandra M. Odell, author of Godfall & Other Stories
Won: She Wore Yellow
“She Wore Yellow” is a look at all the half-glimpsed, half-remembered things that kick around the edges of our minds and torment us because we know they will all fit together if we can just remember the one missing piece, the elusive detail that we want to believe is real. A tantalizing story set on the knife-edge between memory and illusion.
– Leigh Grossman, author of The Green Lion
and The Lost Daughters, creator of Sense of Wonder
I love Alma Alexander’s writing. I’ve spent hours talking about language with her on those infrequent occasions when we were on the same side of the continent, and reading one of her stories is like having one of those wonderful conversations about language, a beautiful and intense conversation that you walk away from realizing that you’ve learned something you didn’t know about yourself.
– Leigh Grossman, author of The Green Lion
and The Lost Daughters, creator of Sense of Wonder
UNTRANSLATABLE
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
SOMETHING IS BEGUN
Iktsuarpok: Black Wings over Kjellmar
(Inuit)—the frustration of waiting for someone to turn up, the anticipation of constantly going outside to see if someone is coming
Ikigai: Dreamshare
(Japanese)—a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to live
Trouvaille: Bucket List
(French) a valuable discovery or a lucky find—something lovely discovered by chance
Mamihlapinatapei: Equinox
(Yagan—indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego)—”The wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.”
IN THIS MOMENT
Mokita: To Remember Riobarre
(New Guinean)—the truth everyone knows but nobody says. I think it’s similar to the English phrase “there’s an elephant in the room.”
Komorebi: Color
(Japanese)—the quality of dappled sunlight shining through trees—the interplay between the light and the leaves
Mångata: Go Through
(Swedish)—the word for the glimmering, roadlike reflection that the moon creates on water
Aware: Leaving Via Callia
(Japanese)—the bittersweetness of a brief and fading moment of transcendent beauty
Inshallah: Night Train
(Arabic)—[in-shal-la] While it can be translated literally as “if Allah wills,” the meaning of this phrase differs depending on the speaker’s tone of voice. It can be a genuine sentiment, such as when talking to an old friend and parting with “We’ll meet again, inshallah,” or it can be used as a way to tacitly imply you actually aren’t planning to do something. An example would be if someone proposes a meeting at 4 p.m., and you know you won’t be able to make it on time. You can say, “I’ll see you at 4, inshallah,” meaning that you’ll only make it on time if Allah wills it to happen.
THE GIFTS OF THE PAST
Won: She Wore Yellow
(Korean) the reluctance on a person’s part to let go of an illusion
Kintsugi: Something That Would Shine
(Japanese): golden repair) is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer resin dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum (the “golden repair”). As a philosophy it speaks to breakage and repair becoming part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Ya’aburnee: The Flying Dutchman
(Arabic)—Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.
Duende: The Painting
(Spanish)—While originally used to describe a mythical, sprite-like entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one’s surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to “the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.”
Saudade: The Bones of Our Ancestors, The Blood of Our Flowers
(Portuguese)—One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.”
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
FOREWORD
Ethereal. Enchanted. Often magically powerful; frequently, hopelessly inadequate. Capable of building castles of clouds, turning lead into gold, making you hear a color or see the sound of the whispering wind in the silver shivers of aspen leaves. Capable of painting pictures without the touch of a brush or any paint at all, capable of building worlds without wood or water or stone, capable of making dreams solid enough to be touched and caressed, or of nightmares real enough to steal your breath away.
Language.
Words.
Meanings.
Language is such a heady incense for me, fragrant and glowing and vivid and bright. When I write, I tend to use words that people are sometimes forced to look up. I speak of the susurrus of wind tossed leaves; I know what perichor means; I can use—properly and accurately—words like actinic, and etiolated, and flense.
I was very young when I first fell in love with the word, and your first love lasts forever.
And this love, for me, only deepened as I grew older, as I read more widely and more deeply, and as I began to write my own words, shape my own stories.
There were side roads that branched off the main thoroughfare of the language that I was using to do so, other languages, languages that spoke of other cultures, of delightfully strange and unfamiliar concepts and ideas, for which sometimes the primary language I thought and wrote in had no simple equivalent.
I had entered the Untranslatable Lands…and nothing would ever look quite the same again.
It becomes, at some point, impossible to see or experience something and not wonder how it might appear to someone who is not you, how a strange and different pair of eyes might interpret something that is utterly familiar to you or just how lost in translation a concept that seems simple to somebody else can become when you try to understand it from your own perspective.
There are words in other languages which require whole sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, of explanation in English. And the attempts at translation transcend the language-to-language direct parallel lines. There are times when it is necessary to adjust one’s entire understanding of the world to fully understand a concept which can at once be simple to one mind and unutterably complex to another.
That is one axis on which this collection rests—the attempt to take an Untranslatable Word and to attempt to give a glimpse into its bigger meaning through a story.
The story is not *about the word*. It is about that untranslatable concept behind the word. It’s all about the quiet stab of comprehension—the Oh! I see it now! moment in which understanding breaks into a reader’s mind like the light of dawn cracking the edges of shadowed and unfamiliar landscapes and illuminating something that is almost, almost, almost within their grasp.
It is a literal journey, into language landscapes of Japan, of Sweden, of the frozen wastes of the far north where the Eskimos roam, of France, of Portugal, of Tierra del Fuego. A glimpse into the worldview and the mindset of cultures different enough from our own to produce a single word that encompasses a world of concepts.
The other and somewhat unexpected axis turned out to be that of time—because these amazing, astonishing, delightful, enchanted words seemed to fall naturally into categories which indicated a quickening anticipation (a beginning), a startling awareness of the moment in which one finds oneself drawing breath (the middle) or a quiet looking back on things that were but no longer are, often sorrowful and regretful, sometimes melancholy, sometimes just coupled with a pang of a sense of something that’s passed away (the end).
And so the stories in this collection found their place in space and time and language.
Translating the Untranslatable.
Alma Alexander
SOMETHING IS BEGUN
Iktsuarpok:
Black Wings over Kjellmar
NOTES ON THE WING-BORN OF KJELLMAR
MOBILE AMBASSADOR GELLMAN GRON ABALAS
There had been some curiosity, before I came here, as to the appearance of the Kjell. They are humanoid, but they are plumed from the top of their head all the way down their solid neck which broadens into wide muscled shoulders and onto their backs, spilling over the shoulder and running down a feathered line diagonally across their pectoral muscles until they peter out mid-abdomen. Male and female alike wear colorful kilts, leaving this upper part of the body bare. Some Kjell, of the higher social order, have a spectacular crest—it remains unclear whether it is the crest, randomly obtained by genetic lottery, that provides the entry into the upper social echelons, or if it is that the members of that particular class are a separate subspecies who are born with the identifying crest in place.
The feathers range in color from dowdy browns to brilliant burnt oranges and reds, and one family line which boasts plumage which is so deeply red that it begins to fold into purple and even traces of blue on some edges. (Illustrative images enclosed as attachments to this report.)
But these plumed and feathered creatures had no wings underneath the back feathers, not even vestigial ones hidden under cover of plumage. It was an obvious question, and we asked; there was a great reluctance to discuss the question, and we had allowed the matter to drop for the time being, until I could perhaps find a better opportunity to inquire about it.
I arrived on Kjellmar in the spring of what they identify as their year 11432 (reference: the period which they call a year is roughly 1.75 times as long as the standard year as measured by the original Terran base unit). Our initial encounters with the Kjell were borne out by my extended stay here—they are a closed and mistrustful people and they dislike, even resent, strangers who intrude into their world. For almost five months after my arrival I had almost literally gotten no further than receiving terse acknowledgments from the servants assigned to my compound; I had studied their language before I arrived and I could make myself competently understood when I spoke it but nobody would answer me in the same language, responding to any overtures of my own in whatever they could muster of my own language—or, if they could not come up with the vocabulary or enough of an intent, with silence.
It was a lonely time, and I had begun to seriously question my presence or my usefulness on this world before I quite accidentally stumbled into a deeper layer of their society, one which they’d clearly had no interest in sharing with an outsider such as myself.
A winged one was born in my compound, to one of my own servants, and whether or not it was a fortunate thing to have happened, I was present in the house when the child was born, I observed the circumstances surrounding its birth, and I had questions which I insisted that I find the answers to. The time for silence was at an end.
They had not expected me to emerge from my quarters that late at night, and it was perhaps that which had made them err—they had been too intent on getting the newborn out from under my potential observation as quickly as they could, and they had sacrificed, in their urge for haste, a more adequate concealment. Thus it was that I quite clearly saw the infant they carried, and I quite clearly observed the shape of tiny wings on its back.
They were intent on their task and they did not immediately notice my presence as they hastened towards the spiral stair which led to the flat roof of the compound. One of them, the one bringing up the rear, turned at the last moment and saw me—and followed the others into the doorway which led into the stairwell, speaking quietly and urgently to those already inside. I had already decided to follow them, and the warning, if such, had arrived too late—I emerged onto the rooftop in their wake, and I was in time to see something that none of our inquiries had brought to light. A winged Kjell awaited on the roof, under the stars. I was in time to see the newborn child hurriedly handed over to the winged visitor, who carefully placed it in a pouch securely strapped across its abdomen and launched skyward, spreading immense wings which blotted out the view of the bright stars for a moment before the creature rose high enough to diminish, and then vanish out of sight.
I was aware that I may have crossed a line and stepped into some taboo—but they had accepted my presence there as Ambassador from the Coalition, and in the time that I was on Kjellmar they had learned enough of me to know that I could not permit this to pass without an explanation.
It was one of the compound staff, a high-ranking crested Kjell leading the small knot of Kjell who had made their way to the roof with the child, who made a short sharp gesture to the others, and then lifted his big round eyes with their large golden irises to me.
“I will need to find out more,” I said, in formal Kjell.
“Yes, Ambassador,” the Kjell said, in his own language, communicating with me at last. “I will see to it in the morning.”
