海

[quotidians]

Whenever I read poetry or philosophy in translation I can't stop myself from agonizing over some real or imagined nuance that might've been lost. Not to discredit translators in any way--they're typically quite successful in conveying the overall meaning & feeling of a piece--but sometimes the nuance is in the structure of the language itself, and that's the most difficult part to replicate.

There's this Kobayashi Issa haiku that's been making the rounds online. The English translation reads

Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time—

Which is still quite beautiful and succeeds in conveying longing for a late mother, but the point of the poem is really in the structure of the characters themselves. In the original Japanese, it reads

亡き母や 海見る度、見る度に

The kanji for "mother" is 母, and "ocean" is 海 (as they are in Mandarin, my native tongue). Along with the radical 氵, which represents water, 母 also appears within the character 海 as a radical. English also has plenty of portmanteaus, but there's no equivalent in this specific case, so there's always going to be that little piece missing from the translation.

Another language thing that's only tangentially related: there's a commune in France called Condom, which comes from the Gaulish Condatómagos, apparently meaning "field of the confluence." It was then recorded in Latin as Condomus, before the modern-day name. According to its Wikipedia page, Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie of Siouxsie and the Banshees fame lived there for a couple of years. They've got a Condom Cathedral, and there used to be a Roman Catholic Diocese of Condom up until 1801 (though no bishop of Condom has ever been elected Pope). The actual word for a condom is préservatif in French, but incidentally this little municipality is located by the river Baïse, which is very close to the verb baiser, meaning "to fuck".

Comments

[comix64]

there're a lot of tongues, and they all taste with the same buds, regardless of their cells.

also, i'm surprised that's your native tongue! it didnt clock to me at all, despite a skimming of a lot of posts when i first found your blog, that you're anywhere near there. i thought you were from, like, london or something. something about a shared surrounding. all the world's the same place.

[quotidians]

I was actually born in Beijing, but I only had 2 years of primary schooling there and immigrated to Canada when I was quite young. Then I took Chinese language classes on the weekends up until the pandemic and never resumed. Since then, my ability to read Mandarin isn't what it used to be, unfortunately, but I still speak like a native because it's the only language my parents know so I get constant practice. Sometimes I worry that when I start living alone, my spoken Mandarin will get rusty and then I'll have difficulty communicating with them. I guess that'll be my motivation to call home often.

I've actually never been to London. Last year I was invited to an awards ceremony there for getting a commendation on something I'd written for an essay contest (though I personally thought it wasn't any good). Didn't bother going because I figured it wasn't worth the flight money. You're right: all the world's the same place. It's remarkable how something that originated in the fear of thermonuclear annihilation (ARPANET) evolved to facilitate human connection beyond any physical distance.