Words we cannot translate

(are literally some of the best damn words ever)

I don’t know about you, but not only am I fairly language-obsessed, but I am especially a fan of beautiful words that have no real English translation. I recently read a beautiful paragraph about the Japanese word setsunai in Catapult:

Setsunai carries an implication of something once bright, now faded. It is the painful twinge at the edge of a memory of someone you have loved—say, the memory of a Saturday spent together running errands, or a brilliant peel of a smile tossed at you over the lunch table—all the while knowing that person is no longer with you. It is the sting of time passing. It is the joy afloat in the knowledge that everything is temporary. Perhaps, then, the cutting implicit in setsunai is the way the passage of time eventually draws a thin line of blood, of pain, across even the roundest, fullest happiness.

But, look, I took two semesters of Japanese and now could maybe communicate with a toddler given the skills I retained, so I’m by no means an expert on the incredible expansiveness of words like this and so many others in the language. But reducing the word to “bittersweet” seems awful. However, “…the way the passage of time eventually draws a thin line of blood, of pain, across even the roundest, fullest happiness” is a hell of a sentence. Let’s start there today. Where, at this moment of your life, do you have a line of pain or grief running through a round and full happiness? Is that a memory of someone now gone? A regret? A temporarily difficult situation? Whatever it is, let’s write.