Lost In Translation

Prepping this month's ‘Thought for the Day’ blog, I came across Genesis 4: 7, which all commentators agree is difficult to translate and interpret. In my blog, I studiously avoided it! 

But it reminded me of a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book gifted to me several years ago – ‘Lost in Translation,’ by Ella Francis Sanders. The author has collected single words that other languages would translate with a phrase or sentence. Here are a few of my favourites: 

Mangata (Swedish) – the road-like reflection of the moon in the water.

Glaswen (Welsh) – literally, 'a blue smile,' a smile that's sarcastic or mocking. 

Komorebi (Japanese) - the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees. 

Kummerspeck (German) - literally grief-bacon, the excess weight we can gain from emotional overeating! Hilarious! 

And my absolute favourite:

Hiraeth (Welsh again) - homesickness for somewhere you can't return to; nostalgia and grief for the lost places of your past or places that never were. 

How wonderful to have a word for a feeling that, for me, is often conjured up by the other worlds of stories; Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or Lewis’s Narnia. Looping back to this month's ‘Thought for the Day,’ I wonder, do all such yearnings hark back to humanity’s long-lost Garden of Eden?