Tag: magic

The Magic of Untranslatable Words

I’ve always believed that written or spoken words, with their ability to communicate our thoughts, wishes, discoveries, joys, and sorrows — sometimes across time and space — carry with them a bit of magic. On the printed page, whispered into a waiting ear, or shouted from the rooftops, language forms the bedrock upon which society and culture are built. 

I’m particularly captivated by words from other languages that cannot be easily translated into English. These often convey ideas and situations we’re all familiar with, but for some reason, when it came to creating English words to describe them, they never quite made the cut. 

For example, ya’arburnee, an Arabic word, expresses the hope that you will die before someone you love because you wouldn’t be able to bear living without them. Literally, it means “may you bury me.” The Japanese have boketto, which describes the act of staring blankly into the distance. From Yiddish there is luftmensch, which refers to someone who is not successful in life or business due to his or her unrealistic ideas and goals. The French have voisinages, a word that refers to the relationships among or between neighbors. And in Brazilian Portuguese, there’s cafuné, a word that describes the motion one makes when running their fingers through a lover’s hair. (Leave it to the Brazilians to require a word just for this.)

Perhaps one of my favorite, and I think one of the most beautiful “untranslatable” words, is saudade, a Portuguese term that conveys a longing for a person, place or time you recollect fondly but know you will very likely never be able to experience again. Derived from the Latin solitate, or “solitude,” saudade acknowledges, mourns, even celebrates the discarded bits of ourselves that lie scattered across the landscape of our lives. 

Saudade also implies a feeling of gratefulness, the glow we feel in our hearts when we remember how lucky we are to have had particular experiences and people in our lives. Like an empty chair at the family dinner table that reminds us of the person who once filled it, the empty spaces within us take on the silhouettes of those who left them behind.

Saudade is different than nostalgia or reminiscences, which are often about remembering with a sort of affection occurrences and relationships no longer relevant in our lives. Even if it’s rooted in the past, saudade lives in the present.

Portuguese art, literature and traditional fado music, which literally means “fate” or “destiny,” are all heavily informed by the concept of saudade. The Portuguese, along with the people living in Portugal’s former colonies, such as Cape Verde and Brazil, have built an entire culture around their unapologetic, deep and passionate feelings about just about everything, from romantic love to sports teams. They approach life with the notion that all emotions, happy or sad, are worth experiencing because collectively they are what make us human. 

Since my daughter moved into her own condo, I’ve come to know saudade well. Madelaine’s absence from our house has often been difficult, as her absence is often a presence all its own. I sometimes find myself thinking about the days before she started kindergarten, when I was a stay-at-home mom. Back then, we were together all the time, sometimes 24 hours a day for weeks on end when my husband was traveling for work. We ate all our meals together. I helped her get dressed every morning. We shopped together and went for walks around the neighborhood. In the wintertime, we snuggled on the couch under a blanket while we watched her favorite show, “Arthur,” on TV. Some days I longed to get away, to have another adult to talk to. There were times when I lost my patience and did things I now regret. 

I grieve the loss of the baby that Madelaine was, and the loss of myself as a young mother. But these memories also bring with them a powerful and bittersweet happiness. I’m grateful I was able to spend so much time with her when she was young, and I believe the time we spent together helped her become the intelligent, thoughtful, successful young woman she is today. The sadness my memories bring helps me better appreciate the time she and I spend together now. Because I know someday I’ll look back at these moments with longing, too.

ENP

Summertime Magic

I still remember the satisfying feeling brought on by cleaning all the papers out of my desk and tossing them directly into the trash on the last day of school — no need to so much as glance at any of them. The day’s rising heat brought with it the promise of beach days, long, lazy afternoons punctuated by grape Popsicles, and running leaps through the backyard sprinkler. 

Summer meant visits from the neighborhood ice cream truck, rainbow-colored snow cones, and clusters of sweaty kids clutching damp dollar bills. My sister and I raced around the neighborhood on our bikes (no helmets! no shoes!), completely disregarded all advice regarding sunscreen, and stayed up well past our bedtime every night waiting for the sun to finally go down. Everything we did seemed to have an aura of magic to it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that magic and how I might try to recapture some of it.

When I was growing up, my friends and I were fully present during our summer vacations, no matter what we were doing. We weren’t thinking about all the chores we were supposed to do or that school was starting soon. Whether we were playing kickball with the neighborhood kids, making Italian ice runs to the corner store, or just hanging out on the porch trying to keep cool, that time was ours. We weren’t going to let anyone or anything take it away from us.

It’s rare these days to have any amount of time that’s truly our own. We’re accessible 24/7 on our phones. Our attention is constantly being drawn in ten directions at once by television monitors, emails, the daily news cycle. We’re always worried about the state of our country, the possibility of war, corrupt, evil politicians, the bills we have to pay, the kind of world we’ll leave behind for our kids.

All of those things are pressing, but they’re not going away, at least not anytime soon.

Summer is fleeting. It’s time we took all took a step back and carved out some time to enjoy the smell of freshly cut grass, the way the air smells when a sudden rainstorm hits the hot pavement. We can count the fireflies as they hover and flash on summer nights, and wake up early to hear the songs of morning birds.

We can dig holes in the sand and eat ice cream cones, read novels, stare at the sky, turn the music up loud in the car. We can do whatever we want if we let ourselves, even if it’s just for an hour or a lunch break or between phone calls. It doesn’t even need to cost anything.

The magic is still out there. Go and find it.

ENP

Everyday Magic

Back in the early summer, I went for a hike at the state forest near my house. I’ve been there many times, during every season, and I know the woodland pretty well. Along my regular route, there’s a side trail that leads to a ledge overlooking a pond. I don’t always visit the ledge, but this day I did. The first thing I noticed was a pile of what looked like white balloon skins. After looking more closely, I discovered a few more piles, all of them beside shallow holes dug into the sandy soil. Then it dawned on me: turtles! I had come across a nursery where mother turtles had laid their eggs in the spring. The baby turtles had recently hatched, leaving their egg casings behind.

It was amazing to me that I’d been to that exact spot so many times and had never noticed how alive it was.

Magic is everywhere if you’re open to seeing it. Sometimes it’s in the way the sun reflects off my birdbath, creating a dancing globe of light on the tree behind it. It’s in the miniature green bees that visit my garden, the pollinating insects almost too small for me to see without my glasses. There’s magic in a toddler’s smile, and in the look of delight on their face when you smile back.

A couple of weeks before I discovered the turtle hatchery, I was with a friend at the same state forest by the same pond, but in a different spot. My friend pointed to an oak limb stretching out over the water. “Look at that bird,” he said. “It’s huge.” An adult barred owl was perched on the branch, its eyes trained on the pond. As we stood and watched, the owl swooped down and grabbed something just below the surface with its talons and flew up into the canopy, never making a sound.

Just yesterday, I was on the porch at Mount Holyoke’s Summit House, a 19th century hotel in Hadley, Massachusetts, that is today a museum and visitors center. Looking down at a flower bed below where I was standing, I spotted a tiny iridescent green bird bouncing from blossom to blossom. The hummingbird made several trips to the flowers, stopping occasionally to rest on top of a nearby fence. Several people walked right past the little jewel, most of them much closer to the bird than I was, but they were all too preoccupied to notice him. On the hummer’s final trip between the flowerbed and the fence, he flew up to the spot where I was standing and landed briefly on the railing beside me. It was as if he knew I’d been watching him.

If you’re quiet and pay close attention to your surroundings, there’s almost no limit to the magical things you can find. I used to think I needed to travel the world to find inspiring, wonderful things to help mitigate life’s hardships and disappointments, and help me come up with ideas for my writing, but that’s not the case at all. Everything I need is wherever I happen to be.

ENP