The Greeks Had a Word For It Read online

  Hiraeth

  (Welsh)

  Intense happiness at a love that was, and sadness that it is gone

  Saudade

  (Portuguese)

  The sense of wistful melancholy experienced when reflecting on lost love

  PEOPLE DO FALL in love in English, but the language sometimes lacks the means to express the delicate ways in which the experience can affect us. Love and sadness can be inextricably intertwined; there may be a dreamy but intense happiness at the love that was, and regret that it is gone, all touched with an uneasy sense that maybe it was never really as perfect as it now seems. If English had a word for that finely judged balance of emotions when a lover is wronged or a love is lost, there might be fewer bad love songs on the radio. The Welsh, however – the earliest occupants of Britain, as they might occasionally remind you – have just such a word.

  Hiraeth (HEER-eth) is a broader, more all-consuming love. It refers usually to the native Welshman’s love of Wales, its valleys, its craggy coastline, its language, its poetry and its history. But this is much more than simply homesickness. When a Welsh baritone like Bryn Terfel sings about the welcome they’ll keep in the valleys when you come home again to Wales, he also promises that he’ll banish your hiraeth with a few kisses. Coming home, he’s saying, will assuage the longing that you feel.

  It’s an empty promise. This is an ache that can never be truly relieved. Because hiraeth is also a longing for unattainable past times – for your own childhood or for the historic, much-mythologized past of Wales, the days before the Saxons, or the time of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in the thirteenth century, or of Owain Glyndŵr in the fifteenth. For many, it could be a longing for the days of Wales as an independent nation.

  But what has this to do with second-rate songs on the radio? Well, hiraeth can be felt for people, too. Mae hiraeth arna amdanot ti would translate as ‘I feel hiraeth for you.’ You might translate it as simply, ‘I miss you,’ but you would be cutting away all the emotion – handing over a cheap bunch of flowers bought in a supermarket rather than a bouquet, still jewelled with dew, that you picked yourself. The Welsh version means ‘I long for you deep in my soul; I long for the way we were, for the things we did together, the places we went, the dreams that we shared – and that we may share no more.’ You could write that in a poem. The English version, ‘Wish you were here,’ you’d put on a postcard.

  Welsh isn’t the only language to boast such an evocative word. The Portuguese saudade (soh-DAHD) has been memorably translated as ‘the love that’s left behind’, and it has the same connotations of wistfulness and melancholy nostalgia, whether focused on a place or a person. Back in the seventeenth century, the aristocratic soldier-poet Francisco Manuel de Melo caught its knife-edge sense of mingled pleasure and pain with his definition: ‘A pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy’ – a phrase that could apply just as well to hiraeth.

  Any Welshman will tell you that the difference between the Welsh language and the English language boils down to the fact that Wales is a romantic land of bards, poets and seers, while English is spoken by accountants in suits. But an Englishman might point defensively to the poetry of A. E. Housman and his ‘Land of Lost Content’ – ‘The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.’3 So an Englishman can feel hiraeth, even if he doesn’t have a word for it.

  Mamihlapinatapei

  (Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego)

  Describes the delicious uncertainty of the early days of what may or may not become a love affair

  FEW THINGS, PARTICULARLY emotions, are black and white.

  Today, you may rather like someone who yesterday interested you only slightly. Tomorrow or the day after, you may enjoy their company even more, and sometime after that, you may fall in love. And in between each of those stages are a million shades of emotion, affection and desire that poets have struggled for centuries to define.

  It’s not an area that English words are very good at capturing. The more complex our feelings, the more likely we are to have to create phrases, even sentences, to reflect them adequately – which is what poets and writers do for a living. But how wonderful to have one word that describes a single, nervous, shared moment at the beginning of that long and delicate process of falling in love – and how tragic that the language that provided it is now almost certainly extinct.

  Yaghan, once spoken on the remote archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, is believed to have been one of very few languages in the world without external influences or connections with any other language on earth. It grew and developed on its own. It was spoken only by a few islanders at the very tip of South America, so far from anywhere that the islands knew only very occasional visitors, and over the last century or so it has been vanishing almost without trace – a language, a history and a culture lost as if they had never existed. The last known native speaker is now in her late eighties. Little is understood about the structure, grammar or vocabulary of Yaghan, beyond the existence of a rudimentary dictionary published in the late nineteenth century.

  But one word survives: mamihlapinatapei (MAH-michk-la-pin-a-TA-pay, where the chk is pronounced at the back of the throat, like the Scottish loch). It refers to an unspoken understanding between two people, both of whom want to start something but who are each reluctant to make the first move. It’s very like the Japanese koi no yokan, then, except that this is essentially a feeling which two people share from the very start. It’s not certain whether it relates specifically to the beginning of an affair, but its relevance to those early moments where each one wonders how committed or willing the other might be is clear. It’s a word that oozes uncertainty and potential.

  Many translations suggest that mamihlapinatapei includes a wordless exchange of glances, but even that seems to be too specific for this ghostly word, which seeks to pin down a moment that vanishes like mist. It’s not even certain whether it is a noun or a verb.

  And the point about mamihlapinatapei is that it may not relate to the beginning of an affair, or of anything at all. Both the people involved are uncertain about what will happen next – it’s perfectly possible that nothing will and that the moment the word describes will remain one of the wistful might-have-beens that gather around the fringes of our memories.

  Generally, we seek to pin words down to a particular meaning, the more specific the better. Vagueness in language is often seen as a lack of accuracy, and you would expect a legal document or a set of building instructions to be clear, concise and unambiguous. But what about when the situation you are seeking to describe is vague and uncertain? Mamihlapinatapei captures the delicacy of a subtle and nuanced moment in a way that in English would demand a sentence or a few lines of a poem.

  STICKS AND STONES …

  Attaccabottoni

  (Italian)

  A bore whose only topic of conversation is him- or herself

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE’S poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the tale of a guest hurrying to a wedding who unwisely catches the eye of a mysterious bearded stranger and as a result sits through 143 verses of his story and misses the ceremony. It’s an experience you may have had – usually without the benefit of hearing at first hand one of the great classics of English literature – when you’ve been buttonholed by charity collectors, religious enthusiasts or political canvassers.

  If only you had known the Italian word attaccabottoni (at-ACK-a-bot-OH-ni). Once you can name a danger, it’s easier to face it down, and you could have stared the stranger fearlessly in the eye, dismissively murmured, ‘Attaccabottoni’, and walked on by. It means a buttonholer, and it refers to the type of bore who manoeuvres you into a corner and proceeds to tell you the long, tedious and apparently endless story of their life, their failed relationship, their children’s success with the violin, or the massive problems they’ve solved single-handedly at work … The one thing it will always be about is them, and how cruelly and unfairly they have been treated.

  It might be foolish to w
aste too much sympathy on Coleridge, however. His friend, the essayist Charles Lamb, used to tell a story about him which amounts to a perfect description of an attaccabottoni. Coleridge had a habit of holding on to the coat button of the person he was talking to, to impress him with the urgency of what he was saying. Then, eyes closed and making languid gestures with his other hand, he would launch into his story, without a pause for breath. Lamb claimed to have put up with this assault on his time and patience for several minutes on one occasion before he took drastic action.

  A true attaccabottoni finds nothing remotely interesting but himself.

  ‘I saw that it was no use to break away so … with my penknife I quietly severed the button from my coat and decamped. Five hours later and passing the same garden on my way home, I heard Coleridge’s voice and, looking in, there he was with closed eyes, the button in his fingers, and his right hand gently waving, just as when I left him.’4

  The tale sounds pretty unlikely, but it’s the sort of anecdote that ought to be true, if only because it reflects the feelings of so many of us when we are in a hurry to be somewhere but can’t bring ourselves to be rude enough to walk away. The only difference is that Coleridge was a dear friend of Lamb’s, and this story is told with a good-humoured affection that few of us feel for the earnest doorstep preachers who occasionally keep us from our dinner.

  It’s easy to tell if you have just been the victim of a common or garden bore or of a dedicated and skilled attaccabottoni. Conversations should be a matter of give and take; if, as you limp away wearily from your encounter, you have a nagging feeling that you have learned a lot about the other person but said very little about yourself, then you can be sure that you have suffered at the hands of a master. A true attaccabottoni finds nothing remotely interesting but himself. Or herself – the noun can be masculine or feminine in Italian.

  It might be possible to feel a degree of sympathy for an attaccabottoni – anyone who has to clap you in irons to make you stay and listen is unlikely to have a lot of friends. But you should harden your heart – your attacker is exploiting your own decency and good manners and turning them into weapons against you. It would be easy enough to tell them to shut up and walk away, if only you were ruder than you are. If by using the word attaccabottoni – which they won’t understand anyway – you can make yourself feel better about hurrying past, then you will have saved valuable minutes of your life and done no harm.

  Davka

  (Hebrew)

  A gruff, one-word response to someone in authority

  THERE IS ALWAYS room in a language for one more word, which, with its surly defiance, its refusal to engage, its sheer unreason, enables teenagers to drive adults to impotent distraction. One like the English word ‘Whatever’, which says, ‘Yes, I’ve heard you, but I’m not interested, I’m not going to pay any attention, and I’m going to keep doing exactly what it was that you said I shouldn’t.’

  A word, perhaps, like the Hebrew davka (DAV-ka). It is a word with a long history, its roots reaching back into the ancient Middle Eastern language of Aramaic. It is used in the Jewish Talmud and in rabbinical commentaries on it to mean ‘precisely’ or ‘in this way and no other’. Matzah, for instance, the unleavened bread traditionally eaten during the Passover holiday, is made davka from wheat, barley, spelt, rye and oats. No other grains will do.

  Today, davka retains that meaning, but it has also gathered a sense of deliberation and contrariness, so that it often has a sarcastic overtone. English sometimes pulls the same trick with the word ‘precisely’ – ‘Do you know how many biscuits he’d left me in the tin? Precisely one.’ The implication is that you might have hoped for more than that, but one was all you got, and that’s pretty much just as you’d expect.

  Davka can have much the same ‘Just like him’ edge to it – ‘I asked for a red shirt, so, davka, he bought me a blue one’ – but it often has a wider implication that the world as a whole is being cruel to you. Fate is not on your side – ‘I was in a hurry, so, davka, the bus was late.’ A child who is said to be ‘doing davka’ is being contrary and difficult, in the way that children can be.

  So the word has a variety of meanings, which English might try to pick up in several different ways. But the one that might be most useful – the one that Israelis speaking English say they miss most – is when it is used as a gruff, one-word response to someone in authority. In English, if you ask your surly teenage son where he is going, you might get the answer, ‘Out.’ Or if you ask your daughter what she has in her bag, ‘Stuff.’

  So in Hebrew, you might ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’ and get the answer, ‘Davka’ – because I choose, because I want to do it this way rather than any other. Just because. It’s about expressing determination, independence and a degree of contempt, all in one word.

  And don’t we all have a little bit of teenager in us every now and then?

  Ilunga

  (Tshiluba, Democratic Republic of Congo)

  A willingness to let an offence go twice but never a third time

  ILUNGA (IL-UNG-AH) HAD its fifteen minutes of fame back in 2004, when the BBC reported that it had been chosen as the world’s most untranslatable word in ‘a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists’. Oddly, the article then went on to translate it with some confidence as ‘a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time’ – which seems to suggest that it’s actually quite straightforward to translate, if a little lengthy.

  The idea of a word being the hardest to translate is a bit strange anyway – certainly until you’ve defined which language you’re translating into. A word that’s hard to translate into English may have a perfect equivalent in Korean or Welsh.

  A gradual, even unwilling diminution of sympathy.

  Ilunga comes from the Bantu Tshiluba language, spoken by some six million people in the southern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other commentators weighed in to the BBC immediately with their own suggestions, including several who put forward the American saying ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ as an equivalent.

  For anyone who knows nothing about the rules of baseball, that sentence would itself be pretty hard to translate, and that fact seems to highlight one of the most intractable difficulties of translation. It’s all very well to replace one word with another – a carretilla in Spain, or a schubkarre in Germany, would probably look very much like a wheelbarrow in England – but it’s the unspoken assumptions and cultural implications that go with a word that can make it almost impossible to replicate in a different language.

  ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ has a threatening ring to it – an implication that justice is implacable and inevitable. The rules of baseball, after all, are very clear and brook no argument on the subject, which is the reason for carrying the phrase into the administration of the criminal law: there will be no argument and no plea in mitigation. It might even sound rather smug.

  That’s certainly not the case with the meaning of ilunga, which describes a gradual, even unwilling diminution of sympathy. The emphasis is on the mercy that is shown at first, rather than on the condemnation that will eventually follow – precisely the opposite of ‘Three strikes and you’re out.’

  It may be unrealistic to think that we are such a patient and forgiving people that we need a word which suggests that our first instinct in response to any injury would be forgiveness, and that our preference is always to show mercy until the offender has demonstrated once and for all that he is just going to take advantage of our gentleness. But it’s a very nice idea.

  Schlimazl & Shlemiel

  (Yiddish)

  Someone prone to accidental mishaps & someone clumsy who creates their own mishaps

  WE ALL HAVE moments when it seems as if the world is ganging up against us – moments when we’ve spent an hour getting ourselves ready for an important occasion, with a new suit and freshly polished shoes, only for a ca
r to drive past through a puddle and cover us with mud. Moments when we’ve written a particularly fine letter on our computer and are just about to print it out when there’s a power cut. Moments when we sit down on a broken chair that collapses beneath us, or lean against a door that’s just been painted.

  We all go through those Charlie Chaplin experiences that would seem very funny if only they were happening to someone else but are near-disasters when they happen to us. For most of us they don’t really happen all that often – it just feels as if they do. But suppose they happened to you all the time – what would you be then, apart from suicidal?

  For some people, petty disasters do seem to be a way of life. And if you’re one of them, you’re a schlimazl (shli-MAZL). It’s an old Yiddish word that means someone who is chronically unlucky, someone to whom bad things happen all the time. These mishaps are probably nobody’s fault, and they’re not tragedies, not disasters that are going to ruin a person’s life, but they are the ridiculous little accidents that can drive you to distraction. Why me, you say.

  However, it could be worse. Suppose it was all your own fault? Rather than have a random car drive past and soak you, you might have tripped over into the puddle all by yourself, stumbling over the shoelace you hadn’t tied properly. Instead of a power cut, you might have lost your beautifully crafted letter because you’d turned off the computer by accident. Maybe the chair was fine, but you were just too heavy for it. And how much more annoying would it have been if you’d painted the door yourself?