Language has a stormy phenomenology. We ascribe arbitrary purpose and sense of "authenticity" to every language. Germanic languages are meant for philosophy and reason, while Bengali is the sweet tongue of poetry. I grew up believing that Russian is the purest language of maths and physics because every textbook was penned by a Russian author. Obviously, I had their English translations so it didn't really matter to my teenage brain. Spanish songs dominated the charts, and Greek holds sole domain over enduring epics. We constrain the ideal version of these facets of human communication to particular groups of languages and thus consider any attempt at translating from them a fundamentally diluted one. Radical translations like Emily Wilson's The Odyssey that breathe new life into the original through technical mastery and vivid reinterpretations are viciously attacked by manosphere reactionaries every four months on Twitter. More liberal translations such as Deborah Smith's translation of Han Kang's vegetarian are also reviled by "experts". The translators (mainly women) are unfairly made to bear the brunt of frustrations with translation, which circumvents the fundamental truth that the "perfect translation" does not exist. Han enthusiastically approved the transformative nature of Smith's work, yet the collaboration was subsumed by the vitriol targeted towards Smith. We seem to want for a perfect confluence of these languages, an ask that forgoes all the geopolitical and cultural baggage of language. Translated works reside in this strange liminal space where they are expected to amplify and even replace the original, while never modifying it. The language of "original" and "target" itself implies an indignity for the translation, a zenith of truth that can never reached. The hegemony of the original can never be broken by the translated text since it fundamentally came later.

The formal parts of language are crucial for beauty. Alliteration, assonance, rhymes are based on finding unique patterns of phonemes, allophones and morphemes. Good poets can follow these rules and great ones can break them. No two languages share prosodies so poetic forms and devices cannot be brought over without fundamental modification. Subtle nuances can slip through the cracks when translating German novels. Take Kafka’s "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), where the German word "ungeziefer" is often translated as "vermin" or "insect." Yet, "ungeziefer" carries a broader connotation of ’uncleanliness’ or ’pest,’ altering the reader’s perception of Gregor’s transformation. Nebulous nuances and pesky particulars can slip through the cracks of languages as closely related as German and English. How can we expect translators to have the finesse to bring the semantics over without sacrificing the aesthetics? Most languages in the world do not have a first-person honorific like "hum" in Urdu/Hindi. Thus, it is nigh-on impossible to delineate the difference between Mir Taqi Mir saying "humko" (formal first-person) in a ghazal about God revealing himself to man, and saying "mujhko" (informal first-person) in another about his drunken stupor filled with self-loathing. The former opens the door for discussions of deification and seeing the divine in images of ourselves, but any translation will be lacking in that ambiguity by constraining it to a blanket first-person pronoun, making it an inextricably awful read in anything that isn't Urdu/Hindi.

I watched "Soy Cuba" the other day. This passage in the first few minutes stuck out to me.

Soy cuba. Una vez aquí desembarcó Colón, él, escribió en su diario: "Es la tierra más hermosa...que ojos humanos vieron." Gracias, Señor Colón. Cuando usted me vio por primera vez... yo cantaba y reía. yo saludé las velas agitando mis palmeras. Creí que me traían felicidad. Soy Cuba. Mi azúcar se lo llevaban los barcos. Mis lágrimas me las dejaban. Extraña cosa es el azúcar, Señor Colón. Tanto llanto en ellas...y sin embargo es dulce.

I was using English subtitles but using broken Spanish to pick up on the weight behind azúcar. The word itself comes from the Muslims in Spain giving the Arabic word al-sukker. Many etymologists postulate that this was derived from the Sanskit शर्करा (śarkarā), which in turn came from the Proto-Indo-Aryan śárkaraH. However, sugarcane cultivation was ripe in South Asia well before the advent of Indo-Aryan people, so it is equally plausible that the Sanskrit term comes from a Proto-South Dravidian word like cet-Vkk. My paternal grandparents say shakkar to refer to sugar in Hindi. My maternal grandparents that grew up just 150 miles away say cheeni instead. China procured raw jaggery from South Asia and sold it back as processed sugar, so it stands to reason that powdery white sweetener came to be know as the common Indic word for China, cheeni. Regardless of the origin, indentured laborers from India were sent to the Carribean to work on sugar plantations for this very sugar. This was part of the Sugar Revolution, a socioeconomic push in the 17th - 20th centuries where production in the Carribean and other parts of Latin America shifted from diverse agriculture on independent plots to sugar monoculture on huge plantations using slave labor. These are the same material conditions that led to the formation of the Sindicato Nacional Obrero de la Industria Azucarera in Cuba, a trade union syndicate that was the backbone of the general strike that enabled the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

azúcar, açúcar, చక్కెర (tʃakːera), शक़्क़र, ಸಕ್ಕರೆ (sakːare), сахар (saxar), سُكَّر (sukːar). Cognates borne by settlers trading across ancient lands, colonization and linguistic suppression, witholding uniquely bloodied stories of a seemingly benign sweetener. The word in one language can never adequately capture the history from another even if it has ties to it, especially the English "sugar", the form that strips the word of all history and marks the final commercial product. How can we ever expect a translator to work around this? Why should we?

The Manifesto Antropófago was a call by Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade for the "cannibalization" of European art and culture as a means of post-colonial reclamation and creation of strong national identity centered around indigenous people and traditions. Is it not antithetical to translate works from this movement into the languages it seeks to subsume? The original 1928 essay venerated the Tupi people, so should it not have been written in Tupi rather than the Portuguese that is only spoken in Brazil as a result of colonization? These complex tapestries of emotions passed down through generations, linguistic phenomena rooted in contradictory histories and desires to reach a certain population make up the influences of any written work. A true translation that exists in a vacuum is unrealizable. It will always be colored by the histories of both the source and target language but never capturing either in a meaningful way. I'm reminded of the ending of Killers of the Flower Moon, where Scorsese admits his culpability in telling the story of the Osage that was not his to tell, but he is the one with the power to tell it because of the privilege afforded to him by the very horrors he documented. Translating from endangered languages or disenfranchised people's languages should feel inadequate and haunting in this regard.

Transcendent art does transcend time, culture and most language. The emotion resides in the ether rather than the words themselves. The works of Gabriel García Márquez are poignant for every complex family and every person that questions the erosion of reality in the face of nationalism. How can we convey magical feelings through language without relying on it? Can the language be a vehicle for feeling without the bedrock of understanding? It is foolish to aim for scientific accuracy in translation studies. The "true" context of the art cannot be recovered. The translation itself shouldn't be the goal, but rather the conversation between languages, where we can try and understand what is inevitably being lost rather than trying to plug those holes in the most technically sound ways. We should use the strengths of the target language in conversation with the intense emotion of the source text to birth an homage to the stories lost between the words. The best translators in the world understand this nuance in a much deeper manner than we will ever realize as monolingual readers. Their works take on a new life, a dialectic between the original language and the new. Ghalib's ghazals should whisper different memories in the mind of native Urdu reader and the English reader. While problematic translations exist, we should critically analyze the material conditions behind that judgement rather than blindly vilifying the non-compliance to the source.

I recently saw an exhibition about the Joffrey Ballet company at the Wrightwood gallery in Chicago. One of the most striking installations was a video of the performance of Astarte, a psychedelic ballet which breaks the bourgeoisie beliefs around ballet. It is the dance between a goddess in mystical regalia and a mortal man in plain tightey-whiteys. He initiates an alluring graceful dance that showcases a shifting exchange of power where all his movements - sublime, yet understated - are in the services of the goddess that exudes primordial beauty, every twirl and revolution marked by eons of memory. There is a power struggle but the mortal man gives himself over in rightful servitude to the one that has untold power and stories to tell, and spends the rest of his life making sure the divine can shine her light on the world. That is the perfect translation for me, where the target language exists in servitude of the original, restraining from its own flourishes in gracile support for the dizzying splendors of the source language. It is not a helpless bystander nor a main act, but rather the willing stage hand in the grand performance. We can say "true" translation is an impossible task, but that's no reason to stop altogether. We should celebrate the transformative works that bring beauty across languages while recognizing the futility in chasing "correctness".

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best. – Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Works Cited

Gullander-Drolet, Claire. “The Translation Politics of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian; or, The Task of the Reader of the Work in (English) Translation.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 138.3 (2023): 652–665. Web.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~fsouth/from_ccat/Proto-DravidianAgriculture.pdf
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2025-04/postcolonial-translations-and-the-reception-of-indian-literature-in-the-west-deo/