A few months ago, I was hospitalized in a country that is not my own, where I spoke not a single word of the native language. No one in the hospital spoke English, nor should they have—we weren’t in an English-speaking country—but this put us at an impasse. I couldn’t explain what was happening to my body and they couldn’t explain what we might do about it. 

I had a fever, something I discovered by putting my hand on my forehead and converting the number the nurse showed me on the thermometer from Celsius into Fahrenheit. The nurse interpreted my fever as Covid and I interpreted my fever as signs of a developing infection—but neither of us had the words to express that. I only figured out the nurse believed I had Covid because she sealed me in an isolation room. 

From my hospital gurney, I reached for my cellphone, opened Google Translate, then started typing. When I clicked go, I watched my English words transform into characters of a language I did not know. Characters I could not even phonetically read, let alone pronounce. I stared at the screen and wondered whether the app understood what I wanted to say. I had no way of knowing. 

That’s the trouble with language. We can only speak with the words we understand. 

While Google Translate may be able to tell you several items on a restaurant menu—as long as the writer of said menu has written those items in a straightforward manner absent of both puns and slang—the app cannot reliably translate pain. It cannot reliably assure you that the person on the hospital gurney is making a joke. It cannot determine whether they’re actually angry. It cannot express the complicated duality of sarcasm. The hinge of humor and fury. Those nuances aren’t always spelled out. They aren’t always obvious. They aren’t easily translatable.  

This is the difference between literal and literary translation. Literal translation is converting Celsius into Fahrenheit. The number in question relates to the temperature of the body. The unit of measure is the only variable. Literary translation is the ability to express how someone is feeling. To take the sentence: It feels like I’m being punched in English and to make the person who does not speak English understand the physical sensation of punching. The description of a feeling that is untethered from what is literally happening in the body. 

Literary translation is the ability to express how someone is feeling. To take the sentence: It feels like I’m being punched in English and to make the person who does not speak English understand the physical sensation of punching

In my isolation room, everyone wore masks—me in my gurney and the nurses checking my IVs and the doctors putting their hands on my body and the kind woman who kept bringing trays of food that I wasn’t allowed to eat—so in the absence of a shared language, we didn’t even have each other’s faces to read. We had only words that meant nothing to each other—that were just sounds, maybe harsher or stranger or stronger than the other was used to—and the robotic translation on my phone screen that may or may not have been accurate, and all of our eyes, hidden underneath plastic Covid visors, trying desperately to communicate with each other.

What I’m trying to say is: When I say we’re going to translate, what I mean is that we’re going to tell jokes that are funny. We’re going to take an aphorism in one language and make a reader in English understand it. When Google Translate told me that the nurse said: It’s dark under the lamp, what she really meant was: The answer is hiding in plain sight. 

We’re going to accomplish this by putting pressure on each and every one of our word choices. The choices we make in English and the choices that were made by the original author in the original language. When those choices were made. Where we are now. Whether the distance or difference between those timelines matter. We’re going to ask ourselves questions that might feel arbitrary or poetic, but that are the key to the difference between feeling something and feeling nothing:

Is the color blue ever just the color blue? Or is there always something deeper in that choice. Is the color blue as much about the sound of the word blue as it is about the shade being described—deep blue or dark blue or pale blue or bright blue—as it is about alliteration—blue blinding blankness—or about the images that the word blue conjures: the sky, the water, a hospital blanket, a surgical mask. 

When Google Translate told me that the nurse said: It’s dark under the lamp, what she really meant was: The answer is hiding in plain sight. 

The gift of translation is bringing someone’s voice into another context. It is the act and art of creation. Of building a new text out of an existing text. Of teaching someone to understand another from a different corner of the world. In a different time. In a different universe. Of collapsing the distance between the person on the gurney and the person in the scrubs. The reader of this passage and the writer hunched over her laptop. 

———

Jenessa Abrams is a writer, literary translator, and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. Her fiction, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, Tin House, Electric Literature, Guernica, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the New York Public Library, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation. She has taught writing at Columbia University, Catapult, Rutgers University, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center.

Jenessa's classes for us in Summer 2023 include The Art of Literary Translation: For Beginners and Writing Through Illness.

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