Last week, I said this in a workshop, out loud, in English, and then I liked it enough to put it in an article:
If the prediction gets built out of instances, and your instances are stored as a feeling you cannot open, then the only move I have found is getting them onto a page where you can read them back in your own handwriting.
A dozen words in, I heard it go flat; the slow emotional leak, where you start loosing your readers or listeners… What I meant was in Polish, and it was shorter, and it had a picture in it.
Thirty years in English and my brain still reaches for the “images” in Polish first. Then it translates, and the translation is always worse.
Here are few examples:
Rzucać grochem o ścianę.
To throw peas against a wall. Small hard things, one after another, at something flat. Each one makes a tiny noise and comes straight back at you. Nothing breaks, nothing moves, and you can keep doing it for forty-five minutes with a shared screen up. I have sat in that meeting. So have you.
Co ma piernik do wiatraka?
What does gingerbread have to do with a windmill? You say it when someone swerves somewhere wildly unrelated. English has the same move, the price of tea in China, and it works fine. But tea and China are just far away. Gingerbread and a windmill are both sitting right there in the same village, close enough to smell, and still have nothing to do with each other. That’s the better joke.
Myśleć o niebieskich migdałach.
To think about blue almonds. English calls it daydreaming, which sounds like something you should stop doing. Blue almonds sounds like a place I would very much like to go, possibly with a notebook.
Robić z igły widły.
To make a pitchfork out of a needle. A mountain out of a molehill at least keeps you in the same family of object. A needle becomes a farm implement. The escalation is the whole point, and yes, I have done it before 7am.
Bułka z masłem.
A roll with butter. It means easy. English offers piece of cake, a dessert, something handed to you on your birthday by people who are watching you eat it. Ours is breakfast. The easy thing is the one you do every single morning, standing up, thinking about something else.
Every one of those is a picture. That’s the trick of them. You don’t have to follow the sentence, you just have to see the thing. Peas hitting a wall. A needle turning into a pitchfork. Then I stand in front of a room and say instances stored as a feeling you cannot open, and everyone nods, and nobody sees anything.
So what does gingerbread have to do with a windmill.
Here’s the seventh one, and it has no picture in it at all.
Co powiedzą ludzie.
What will people say. That’s the translation, and it’s useless. In English it sounds like mild social anxiety, something a good therapist could clear up in six sessions. In Polish it’s a weight.
Sunday dinner table. My mother gasping at my hair, which had gone pink entirely by accident (well, at least that was my story and I’m sticking to it!). My aunt leaning in to ask what exactly was wrong with me, because my mother had just told her about the D in math. Neither of them was angry. They were worried about what this would look like.
I put that one down at the airport, or I thought I did.
At twenty-one, a few months into a country where I had fifty dollars and a paper dictionary, I handed a Polish boyfriend a poem I had just written. He read it and said, this is really stupid, why do you waste your time on poetry. I threw the page in a garbage can on my way out the door. Then I didn’t write anything for twenty years.
That’s the cost. Not the embarrassment, which passed in a week. Twenty years. Co powiedzą ludzie doesn’t stop you from living. It leaves the life running perfectly well and quietly takes the joy out of it, and you don’t notice, because everything still works.
I am fifty and I publish under my own name now, and I still feel it move when I hit send on something with my mother’s language in it. I hit send anyway. That is the entire skill. There is no version where the weight goes away.
Your turn. Write down a phrase you think in that doesn’t survive translation. Another language, your grandmother’s, your industry’s, one your family made up when you were eleven. Put the literal version underneath it. Then write what it cost you to carry it, and be specific about the number of years.
Reply and send me yours. I want the literal translation, and the stupider it sounds in English, the better.
Write it first. Live it second.
With love and courage from the in-between,
Magdalena
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