“translation
/tranz-LAY-shuhn/
noun
1.“the art of failure,” -John Ciardi
2. The vietnamese words thuong and yeu are often translated to “love.” But the reader would never know that where thuong is generous, yeu is selfish and unbending. Yeu owns the object of its affection with as much ferocity as thuong sits with its arms open in unadulterated devotion. No matter how fluent the translator, this world within a word can never be elegantly packaged into three english letters. Yeu is not thuong is not love.
Origin: Before these words akin to love passed through my lips, they passed through my mothers’, and my grandmothers’ before that. When she was sixteen, in a world thirty years and five thousand miles and another language apart from mine, she blackened her teeth dark as dirt. She could not wrap her mouth around the words in my language that would let me see why, so this was her crude translation: it was how things were done.
I could not understand these things any more than my grandmother could understand why I left for the academy. To her, I was transplanting myself into a place whose name she could not pronounce. My elementary Vietnamese was hopeless against the thrill of meeting people who knew things I didn’t know existed. She gave me a letter when I left, and when I typed it into google translate, it read “I hope you grow into a beautiful apple-pear flower”
My grandmother, my mother told me, went down on her knees when pirates threatened to steal her secondborn son on her flight across the South China Sea. She hid her wedding jewelry in a sack of potatoes. When the government named her husband a fugitive, she carved a life in the rainforest for her children.
Now, all her hurricane history is condensed into the skinned apple-pear she would press to my palm every Sunday. My grandmother and I spoke the language of cut-up fruit. Was it enough?
Synonyms: Until my roommate K. walked into the kitchen with a jar of yuzu honey tea, I did not know how to translate between our parallel worlds; she had spent her days weaving between the Swiss Alps on a pair of skis, and I had confined mine to ten square Kansan miles. We spent the first week of school tiptoeing around niceties before we finally found ourselves alone in the kitchen. I could not help glancing over my physics textbook to peer at the golden liquid pouring from her kettle. K. met my gaze and pointed to an empty mug in silent question. The next day, she showed up at my door with a steaming cup of tea, and the next, and the next, until we found ourselves lying side by side on my carpet shaking with laughter every night after curfew.
My every word is a translation. It is a futile attempt to wrangle the dirty hopes inside myself and stuff them into something as brittle as English. To speak is to toss an imperfect translation into the void and hope someone sees through the muck and into your soul.
2. Translation is work. It is the price you pay for companionship. To love and be loved is to forever be misunderstood, to be sentenced to eternally striving to bridge the gap between worlds. My grandmother was worth the work. So was K. The work of translation- the fact that you are willing to do the work, to gently peel the layers back, a never-ending mystery, a gift that you get to unwrap over and over again- isn’t work. Not to me.
3. Sometimes translation seems impossible to conquer, but sometimes all it takes is a yuzu honey tea cup and a plate of apple-pears”
Ava Truong is a high school junior at Phillips Exeter Academy. She is the recipient of the National Scholastic Silver Medal in Short Stories, and Honorable Mention in Poetry, and and Honorable Mention from the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest for Prose.
