Everything Is Translation. Such is the main metaphor, the focus theme of Book Arsenal-2025. The conversation between curators Marci Shore and Oksana Forostyna started with it in the summer of 2024. This conversation lasted throughout the fall, and its outcome was recorded at the end of that year which can now be called “the last year before Trump”. That is, before the great geopolitical shifts that are changing the international order established after World War II.
Even in the times of interregnum, as Polish-British philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called them, and we live in such times when one order has been destroyed and the other has not yet been established, the ability to convey one’s experience and opinion is a key task, but it does not make it any easier.
Can a language exhaustively describe reality, and what do the numerous untranslatables tell us—words that exist in one language but are absent in another? Are then slightly different realities meant, from language to language, from society to society? And what if the experiences of these societies differ radically? Can language reliably convey the experience of one to another? How to build in general a dialog between people and between nations? What to hope for? The answer is in the curators’ conversation, but to find it, you need to read the conversation to the end.
Another topic of this conversation is the problem of hierarchy and power. The use of language and social status can be a tool for oppressing an interlocutor, demonstrating who is in command. Such a risk is always present where a native speaker of a certain language, simultaneously being in a position of power, speaks with a foreign-speaking interlocutor. We have recently witnessed this happening. Marci Shore reveals how she avoids such a situation by deliberately equalizing the language hierarchy between interlocutors.
Or the question of structuring language and thinking associated with it through interaction with other language patterns is raised. Working with translation is at the same time working with one’s own language, changing it through this contact, as a stone is polished under the influence of winds and waters. Oksana Forostyna reflects on how the discipline of thinking changes as a result of openness to the other. No less interesting remains the question of what thinking and its manifestations in language look like in a closed and isolated society.
There are many other topics, hints and short sketches in this essay-dialog. Here, as if a thread, you can pull an endless tangle of reasonings and existential questions, unfolding it in your own way. Far otherwise as the theme is formulated by the curators themselves. This is because everything is translation.
Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta
Oksana Forostyna — Marci Shore
Dec.14, 2024
Oksana: The title of the focus theme we are discussing implicitly rejects the possibility of perfect understanding or total transparency in any message, dismissing it as a utopian ideal. This applies not only to communication across different languages but also within a single language, as language can alter itself at any moment. George Steiner, in After Babel, argues that language is “the most salient model of Heraclitean flux.” To shift our conversation to something more tangible, I propose we begin by exploring the opposite of this utopia—cases of untranslatability. You mentioned earlier the concept of свої (or swoi in Polish, as in sami swoi) in several Slavic languages, which is not translatable into English, as well as the Russian words произвол and продажность. You also wrote about such cases in Czech in your book The Taste of Ashes. I think we both agree that these examples go beyond mere epistemological exercises. Just as you feel the absence of свої in the U.S. context, I feel the lack of the English words “integrity” or “grace” in Ukrainian. The Ukrainian word for “integrity,” for instance, doesn’t carry the same reference to integritas—the sense of wholeness or the cohesion between declarations and deeds. Your understanding of English shifted when you “absorbed the very different Slavic syntax” of Czech, and my understanding of ethical issues in Ukrainian society was transformed by the simple English word “integrity.”
In that sense “untranslatable” does not mean an “incomprehensible” concept—correct me if I’m wrong!— but rather a concept that doesn’t have an equivalent mirror in the other language, one that isn’t reflected in the fabric of our language. Untranslatability, then, compels us to unravel this fabric of language and make space for foreign concepts through lengthy, detailed explanations. I must admit, I see any instance of untranslatability as an inspiring and productive opportunity to expand our understanding of others and enrich a language by challenging its limits.
I’ve also noticed how painful this challenge can be for some people, with the very suggestion that something is untranslatable often being seen as an insult to a particular language.
Marci: I don’t find the idea of untranslatability pejorative or insulting, either to a language that possesses a given word or to one grasping for an adequate translation. I love languages, even those I struggle with and speak poorly. I take a lot of pleasure in both the possibilities and the impossibilities of translation. There’s something enticing about the polyphony, the allusions to concealed and half-concealed worlds.
Moreover, as a native English speaker—and English is my only native language, I’m not natively bilingual, and I feel handicapped in all of the languages I’ve learned as an adult—I fear the leveling and flattening effect of English as it becomes a kind of hegemonic Esperanto.
There is something totalitarian about perfect transparency; and in this sense, we should take some comfort in the fact that language both enables border-crossing and resists transparency. I think of untranslatability not as opacity, but rather as a potential key to a secret door, a key to another way of thinking, to thoughts I haven’t yet had. Words like свої, продажность, произвол, обнажение, перемога have opened ideas to me I would not have otherwise come upon. Our mutual Polish friend from Pogranicze, Krzysztof Czyżewski, has spoken about the phrase “пiсля перемоги” as introducing a new concept that should become a universal one. It was Krzysztof who drew my attention to the fact that перемога is etymologically different from victory in English or zwycięstwo in Polish or победа in Russian. Пере-мога literally means a going beyond what one is able to do. And this is the essence of our hope.
I think of language a bit the way Sartre thought about consciousness: he resisted both Husserl’s idea of a transparent reines Ich–a “pure I”—and Freud’s idea of a more or less opaque unconscious–das Unbewusste–in favor of the translucence of consciousness. This is also true of language: it is neither transparent nor opaque, but rather translucent. Understanding comes in that space between transparency and opacity, it comes into being amid translucence. This is an active space, the space of striving, where we don’t possess a thing but we can see it flickering on the horizon, and we need to extend ourselves to move toward it. I love that.
Oksana: You mentioned pleasure in both the possibilities and the impossibilities of translation, and I can’t help to take up at this point: on some basic level, there is a pleasure in finding the right words for translation, especially in cases of “impossibility.” I suppose that’s the kind of pleasure most of us experience when focusing deeply on a particular intellectual task. However, I believe that beyond the satisfaction of total focus, there is another kind of pleasure. Among his many metaphors for translation, George Steiner emphasized the idea that we “break” a code—deliberately stressing the word break. He also elaborates on the invasive, violent nature of translation—drawing on Saint Jerome’s image of “meaning brought home captive by the translator” and meditating on “sadness after success, the Augustinian tristia which follows on the cognate acts of erotic and of intellectual possession.” The translator “invades, extracts, and brings home.” And while all that may sound a bit dramatic at times, I must admit to a sort of hunting instinct I discovered in myself when translating.
However, what I found more intriguing (and ambitious), is how “productive” this hunting is for our own languages. Again, Steiner refers to Borhardt’s “creative transformation”: “The translator could propose, indeed enact an alternative development for his own language and culture.” I must say I have high hopes for this in the case of the Ukrainian language. While you’ve mentioned the “flattening and simplifying effect of English,” I’ve observed a positive impact from the influx of translated texts (mostly from English), the growing interest in international media, and the broader forces of globalization (or, more specifically, Westernization) on the Ukrainian language. Our panel discussions have become more focused and meaningful, and our tolerance for the empty words is lessening. I believe that every time we translate an opinion from a U.S. newspaper, a book, or a British TV show into Ukrainian, we slightly change our way of thinking. I know it sounds Enlightenment-ly in a bad way, but I find this disciplining effect of English a positive change.
Marci: Now that you bring up Steiner’s idea of “breaking the code,” I find myself suspecting that my own pleasure in translation is not so dissimilar to the voyeuristic thrill I get from working in the archives and reading letters from times past that were never meant for me to see.
Czech was the first Slavic language I learned, and the first language in general that I ever learned well enough to really live in and think in–as you know, the magical moment when you’re learning a foreign language is precisely when you stop translating and let the world exist in that other language. It felt miraculous to me when one day I woke up and stopped translating, and was able to let the world be in Czech. When I was nineteen, in my second year of university, I began reading Václav Havel intensely; I was reading Paul Wilson’s exceptional translations. One day, out of curiosity, I looked in the library at Stanford for one of Havel’s plays in the original Czech. This was pre-internet, I had no idea what Czech even looked like. And I have a vivid recollection of that first encounter with the sight of the language: holding Havel’s Vyrozumění—translated into English as Memorandum—in my hands and experiencing absolute opacity: no meaning coming through at all. And then I began to learn the language–my first teacher was Eva Kalivodová, Erica Jong’s Czech translator. (Eva’s translation of Fear of Flying, which appeared in Czech in 1994 as Strach vzlétnout, was an important moment in Czech feminism.) The drama that followed—the drama of something absolutely opaque gradually revealing itself—was intellectually seductive in a way nothing else had ever been for me.
My frustration with the hegemony of English is also connected to my gratitude for that experience: I came to Eastern Europe at the last moment when any kind of real immersion in another language was possible for a native English speaker. It was just before everyone learned English. What pushed my Czech into something close to fluency was my friendship with my Slovak roommate in Prague. Ingrid was a medical student at Charles University who had come to Prague from Slovakia; she was bilingual in Czech and Slovak. We rented rooms from an elderly couple living in a tiny apartment in a pre-fabricated socialist high-rise the Czechs call a panelák. And we became very close; we spent an enormous amount of time talking about school and ambitions and men and feminism and insecurities and what we would do with our lives. Ingrid was in her early twenties in 1989; she’d studied Russian and German at school in Slovakia; she spoke German well, but she didn’t speak any English, and so was forced to deal with my bad Czech. Today, it’s difficult to imagine that a smart, well-educated medical student living in an urban area wouldn’t know English and want to practice it. But of course, my frustration with the hegemony of English is a selfish one: my privileged position as a native speaker of a hegemonic language impoverishes the other languages I’ve worked so hard to learn. . .
And you’re absolutely right about how translation–an encounter with a foreign language–enriches a language. This is also why I worry about hegemony: I want the linguistic influence and the penetration of new words to be multidirectional. English needs that as well, in order not to become stale, in order to keep the relationship among words fresh. But the multidirectionality of influence plays a role, too, in cultivating an anti-hierarchical spirit Belarusian feminists have described as “horizontal solidarity.”
Oksana: I love the story of your Czech years in your book The Taste of Ashes! Your observations while learning Czech really resonated with me—things like the passive voice as the default mode of expression, the pejorative connotation of “ambition,” and the difference between the English “impossible” and the Czech není možné. All of that struck a chord.
At the same time, your frustration with the hegemony of English feels both familiar and strange. I can relate to the claustrophobia of being confined in the totality of one language, as that was the reality for most people in the Soviet times. For most people, learning foreign languages had no practical value, and Russian was the language tasked with explaining everything in the world—one explanation, in one and only possible way. It just occurred to me that the Soviet Russification project was a bizarre, dystopian version of the return to pre-confusion innocence, with Russian as a primordial language spoken before Babel. I suppose that fits within the context of Communist eschatology.
From this perspective, English seemed more like an escape route from that dystopia. Timing was key, of course, as our escape led us into the internet times quite swiftly. Our transition was also our confusion, as we opened up not just to English but to an overwhelming array of languages of other kinds: new color palettes, new smells, new tastes, and even new gestures.
When I thought about your friendship with your roommate Ingrid, I had to admit that, lately, my most important and engaging conversations with my friends were in English. I don’t mean professional communications here, but rather late-night talks and long letters. For some of my friends, English is their native language, while with others, we both use it as a bridge language. I don’t know about them, but I just realized I’m a better friend in English, and that may be because I invest more effort.
Marci: I think I understand what you mean, and in my own case, I can tease out at least two reasons for those feelings. The first is that there’s something about a second language—about translating our own selves—that can feel not only constricting, but also liberating, offering openings for self-reinvention and for making possible thoughts we might not have had in our native language. In this sense the experience of a non-native language is reminiscent of the avant-garde’s inversion of the traditional hierarchy between content and form: avant-garde writers and artists insisted on the primacy of form, on the power of form to shape and even create content. The new words and linguistic structures generate new thoughts, or at the very least, create a space for them.
And then there’s the idea you mentioned of a “bridge language.” English is, of course, the dominant bridge language in Europe today. In the much more limited context of my own relationship with Ukraine, though, the bridge language has been Polish. It’s been my language with Jurko Prochasko and Ola Hnatiuk and Halyna Kruk, for instance, and often with Yuri Andrukhovych and Serhiy Zhadan and Mykola Riabchuk as well–that is, with friends and colleagues more or less my own generation and older. But I’ve also noticed that even among a younger generation of Ukrainian students who already know English well, it’s sometimes more comfortable to speak Polish, especially if the conversation is not strictly academic. I suspect this is partly because it takes the edge off an inequality–the structural advantage I have in being not only the professor but also the native speaker. There’s something about Polish that often feels to me less hierarchical, and somehow warmer, in this context. It both belongs and does not belong to both of us equally, and that oddly makes it sometimes feel more personal. And, of course, it’s a language I love—one I have come to love, even though it’s not my own.
As an aside: my fourteen-year-old son, Kalev, is learning Latin now at his high school in Toronto. I’m quite jealous and wish I had learned Latin in school; it would have helped me a lot with Slavic languages later on. The first time I heard what a declension was, I was twenty-one-years-old and in Prague. I asked someone how to say “post office” in Czech, and heard in response that it all depended on what role “post office” was playing in the sentence, because the word took on seven different forms. And I honestly thought it was a joke. It seemed absurd to me: how could the same noun change seven times? Kalev is natively bilingual in English and German, and did two years of German-language school in Vienna, so when he started Latin, he already had some vague notion of what a declension meant. He has, though, been frustrated with the idea of learning a “dead language.” He approached his teachers with the suggestion that they replace Latin with Esperanto. ☺️
Oksana, I want to raise one more question related to language. This is Halyna Kruk, in Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk’s translation:
my love language is a wreck,
avoid this thicket, it’s mine upon mine, a tangle of tripwires,
you never know what a word really means,
which memory you can touch, which will detonate.
Halyna writes of how “my love language has broken teeth,” “my love language is a wreck”—and this touches on a point that many Ukrainian poets and writers have expressed: the feeling of language’s inadequacy in conditions of extremity, in a Grenzsituation, to use Karl Jaspers’ word. How can language ever be adequate to express certain extremes of despair and suffering? This is also a problem of translation: how do you translate the internal into the external, emotions into words? Language is a form of boundary-crossing even before a second language comes into play.
That’s the first level: can we ever truly express the self, translate the self into words, even if we are just speaking to our own selves? And then the second level: can we translate those words into another language to reach others? Can we understand our own selves through language–and if so, is there a chance to understand others as well, accepting an additional degree of separation when even the self is not transparent to the self?
Oksana: Your questions definitely ring a bell.
Recently, I realized that none of the languages I know well enough to write an essay in feels like my native language. Russian is my first language, but I cannot call it “native” since I don’t have an emotional connection to it—Russian was imposed on part of my family, as it was on many other families in Ukraine. I learned proper Ukrainian relatively late and struggled with the accent for some time. I think in Ukrainian now, and I know it well enough to work as an editor, but I realize I never had an intuitive grasp of it as a true native speaker would. Then there is English, which is not even close to a native language for me, yet sometimes I feel more comfortable writing and speaking in English than in Ukrainian, especially when I need to keep my emotions in check. (Besides, my child is accidentally bilingual, and English is one of the languages we speak at home. For my daughter, English is literally a mame lushen, as it’s the language that controls my attention.) Then there is Polish: I feel a deep emotional connection with it, unlike Russian, as it is the language of the lost side of my family. It’s also the only language I associate with the church—I don’t know the prayers and words of mass in any other language. For me, Polish carries such a sense of guilt, to the point where I’ve never mastered it well enough to write anything more complex than an email, and I’m often shy to speak it. Given all this, I’ve come to accept that there is no language in which I can fully express myself in any possible situation. In a way, it makes me an agnostic when it comes to the transparency of the self.
When it comes to expressing extremes of despair and suffering, I suspect many of these experiences have never been fully articulated by those who lived through them. The more extreme and horrifying an experience is, the less likely it is to be captured in a first-person narrative. Of course, there are plenty of survivors’ memoirs, whether it’s those recounting the horrors of the 20th century or the ongoing war, fresh from the printing press. But I keep thinking there is something of a survivor bias we should take into account. I must admit I’m a bit hesitant to make any definitive statements on the matter—it’s too easy to say something thoughtless or inconsiderate. We all know the examples of both incredible stamina and intellectual bravery necessary to describe the abysses of evil, be it the Gulags, Nazi camps, or wars. At the same time, these authors mostly had the intellectual background that allowed them to turn the unspeakable into texts—in other words, to translate. And again, I wonder how much human suffering is left silent for eternity. For me, this means we can only suggest that we know something about the suffering one can survive, but nothing about the kind that proves lethal.
Marci: I fear an enormous amount of human suffering is left silent for eternity. And given this, we should all the more so appreciate what language can do, however, imperfectly, and appreciate those who attempt to translate moments at the very border of human experience into words. I’m thinking about Tadeusz Borowski’s Proszę Państwa do gazu, Heda Margolius-Kovály’s Na vlastní kůži, Henri Alleg’s La Question, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Nasza klasa, Stanislav Aseyev’s Светлый Путь—books I’ve read with my students in seminars to help them make an imaginative leap into experiences that are close to being unimaginable. We will never understand anyone else’s experience perfectly, all the more so in situations of extremity. That said, the act of translating–of translating our own experiences into language, and of translating someone else’s experiences from one language into another–is a leap of faith that some kind of understanding is possible. And I cling to that.
The text was edited by Kate Tsurkan