The Word

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 14: The Word

It came on the fourth day. The witness had returned — the testimony not yet complete, the prosecution having requested additional examination on a specific aspect of the witness's experience, an aspect the prosecution argued was relevant to the pattern of systematic attack that formed the basis of the charges. Judge Okonjo had permitted the additional examination. The witness had returned to the witness box. The headphones, the microphone, the water glass. The blue head wrap. The small body in the chair.

Devaux asked the witness to describe her life after the attack. The prosecution's interest was not in the attack itself — the attack had been described, had been cross-examined, had been entered into the record. The prosecution's interest was in the aftermath, in the years that followed, in the particular form of survival that the witness had experienced. The interest was strategic — the prosecution was building a case for the gravity of the crimes, gravity being the legal concept that measured the seriousness of the offense, the measurement relevant to sentencing, to the determination of how many years the accused would serve if convicted, the gravity a number that corresponded to years, the years the penalty, the penalty the court's response to the crime.

The witness described her life after the attack. She described the IDP camp — the three years in the camp, the plastic sheet, the maize flour, the registration number. She described leaving the camp — the return to the village, the village rebuilt, partially, the concrete church still standing, the other buildings rebuilt with new thatch and new mud brick, the rebuilding a form of defiance, of insistence, the village refusing to cease to exist, the existence a choice, the choice made collectively, the community deciding to return, to rebuild, to inhabit the place where the violence had occurred.

She described living in the rebuilt village. She described the daily life — the farming, the washing, the cooking, the market, the school, the church. She described the dailiness with the specificity of a person who attended to the daily because the daily was the evidence of survival, the proof that life continued despite the violence, the continuation the achievement, the achievement unmarked, uncelebrated, the achievement simply the fact of another day in which the village existed and the people in it existed and the existence was enough.

Then she described the grief.

She spoke the word. The word was in Lingala. The word was a single word — four syllables, tonal, the tones rising and falling in the particular pattern of Lingala tonality, the tones carrying the word's music, the music part of the meaning, the meaning not separable from the music, the two fused in the way that meaning and sound were fused in all tonal languages, the sound not decoration but structure.

Amara heard the word. The word entered her headphones with the directness of the direct translation, no relay, no buffer, the Lingala arriving in her ears unprocessed, the word raw, original, the word in the language it belonged to. And Amara's mind did what her mind always did — it reached for the English equivalent. It searched the mental lexicon. It looked for the word.

There was no word.

The English language did not contain an equivalent for the word the witness had spoken. The word described a specific form of grief — not grief in general, not the broad and universal experience of loss, but a particular grief, a grief with boundaries and conditions and geography. The word described the grief of a mother who had lost a child to violence and who continued to live in the place where the violence had occurred. The word was not "grief." It was not "mourning." It was not "bereavement." It was not "sorrow." It was not any of the English words that Amara's mental lexicon contained for the experience of loss, because the English words for loss were general, were abstract, were applicable to any loss in any place under any circumstances, and the Lingala word was specific — specific to mothers, specific to violence, specific to remaining.

The word contained the geography of loss. The word said: I lost my child here, in this place, and I am still here, in this place, and the here-ness is part of the grief, the continuing to live in the place where the child was killed a component of the grief that does not exist in the grief of a person who has left, who has moved away, who has put distance between herself and the place where the violence occurred. The word said: the place is the wound, and I live in the wound, and the living-in-the-wound is a specific kind of suffering that requires its own word because the suffering of the woman who stays is different from the suffering of the woman who leaves, and the difference is not a matter of degree but of kind, the two sufferings different species of the same genus, and this word names the species of the woman who stays.

Amara paused. The pause was brief — one second, perhaps two — the pause the space in which her mind searched for the word and did not find it and recognized the not-finding and began the process of constructing an alternative, the alternative the workaround, the linguistic detour that the interpreter took when the direct route did not exist, the detour longer but necessary, the detour the only path from the witness's Lingala to the court's English.

She spoke into her microphone. She said: "The witness uses a term in Lingala for which there is no direct English equivalent. The term describes the specific grief of a mother who remains in the place where her child was killed by violence."

The definition was twenty-nine words. The word in Lingala was four syllables. Twenty-nine words to carry what four syllables contained. The disproportion was the measure of the untranslatable — the distance between the word and its description, the distance that the definition tried to close but could not close, because the definition was not the word, the definition was about the word, and the aboutness was the distance, the aboutness the gap that separated the description from the thing described.

Judge Okonjo nodded. He received the definition. He accepted the definition. The acceptance was the court's protocol for untranslatable terms — the interpreter provided a definition, the court accepted the definition, the definition entered the record, the record containing not the word but the definition, the definition the closest the English language could come to the word, the closest the bridge could span.

But the closest was not the thing. The definition described the word's semantic content — the mother, the child, the violence, the remaining, the place. The definition did not carry the word's music, the four syllables, the tonal pattern, the particular sound of the word in the mouth of the woman who spoke it. The definition did not carry the word's history — the history of a language community that had needed this word, that had created this word because the experience the word described was common enough to require naming, the naming a linguistic event, a moment in the language's history when the community said: this experience exists, this experience is specific, this experience is different from other experiences of loss, this experience requires its own word. The definition did not carry the word's community — the community of women who used this word, who recognized this word, who heard this word and understood not just its meaning but its applicability, the word applicable to them, the word describing their experience, the word their experience's name.

The definition carried the content. The word carried the world.

Amara sat in the booth with the word inside her. The word had entered through her headphones, had traveled through her auditory nerve to her brain, had been processed by the neural mechanisms that processed Lingala, the mechanisms trained, developed, the mechanisms that she had built in Kinshasa and in twelve years of translating Congolese testimony. The word was inside her. The word was in the Lingala room of her seven-language house. The word was there, and the English room did not have a corresponding word, and the absence of the corresponding word was a hole in the floor of the English room, a gap, a place where the English language ended and the emptiness began.

She had encountered untranslatable words before. Every interpreter encountered them. Every language contained words that other languages did not contain — the Portuguese "saudade," the German "Schadenfreude," the Japanese "mono no aware," the Danish "hygge," the Finnish "sisu." These words were famous untranslatables, collected in books and discussed in articles, the untranslatability a form of celebrity, the words famous precisely because they resisted translation, the resistance a proof of the word's uniqueness, the uniqueness a proof of the culture's uniqueness, the culture having produced a word that no other culture had produced because no other culture had needed it.

But the witness's word was not famous. The witness's word was not in any book of untranslatables. The witness's word was local, specific, known only to the speakers of the particular Lingala dialect spoken in the witness's region, the word perhaps known more broadly in Congolese Lingala but not known to the world, not collected, not celebrated, the word existing in the mouths of women who used it and nowhere else, the word's existence a fact of linguistic community rather than a fact of linguistic tourism.

The word was: the grief of remaining.

Amara turned the word over in her mind. She thought about each component — the mother, the child, the violence, the remaining, the place. She thought about how each component was necessary, how removing any component would change the word into a different word, how the specificity was the word's essence, the essence requiring all five components, the way a chemical compound required all its elements, the removal of any element producing a different compound with different properties.

She thought about the word's closest English relative, which was "grief." But grief was too broad. Grief was the ocean, and the witness's word was a specific bay, a specific inlet, a specific body of water that was connected to the ocean but that had its own shores and its own depth and its own particular quality of water, the quality determined by the rivers that fed it and the land that surrounded it and the life that lived in it. To translate the word as "grief" would be to translate the bay as "the ocean" — technically correct, categorically accurate, and utterly insufficient.

She thought about the word's relationship to the witness. The witness had used the word to describe her own experience — the experience of losing her husband in the massacre and returning to live in the village where he was killed. The word was her word. The word described her life. The word was the name of the thing she lived in, the way "rain" was the name of the weather and "Tuesday" was the name of the day. The word was not literary, was not metaphorical, was not an expression chosen for its beauty or its power. The word was practical, descriptive, the word a tool for naming a condition that the language recognized as a nameable condition, the naming the language's acknowledgment that the condition existed and that the condition was specific enough to deserve its own name.

The witness continued speaking. She spoke about the grief — about living with the word she had named, about inhabiting the word the way she inhabited the village, the word and the village the same space, the space of remaining, the space of staying in the place where the violence occurred and where the loved one died and where the life continued, the life continuing not in spite of the grief but inside the grief, the grief the environment, the grief the air, the grief the water, the grief the soil from which the cassava grew and the river in which the clothes were washed and the church where the prayers were said.

Amara translated. She translated the description of the grief — the living-in-the-grief, the daily negotiation with the grief, the morning walk to the river that was also a walk to the place where the husband was killed because the village was small and every place in the village was also the place where the violence occurred, the geography of the village now double, every location existing in two registers, the register of the present (the river where I wash) and the register of the past (the village where they died), and the two registers simultaneous, the woman living in both at the same time.

She translated this double geography, and the translation was long, was multiple sentences, was a paragraph of English where the witness had spoken a few sentences of Lingala, the English expanding what the Lingala compressed, the expansion necessary because the Lingala could assume — could assume that the listener understood the word, understood the double geography, understood the specific kind of grief, the assumption a property of shared language, of shared culture, of the linguistic community that the witness and the Lingala belonged to and that Amara, as a learned speaker rather than a native speaker, belonged to partially, incompletely, the incompleteness the interpreter's particular form of the word's untranslatability.

The testimony moved on. The prosecution asked other questions. The witness answered. The translation continued. But the word stayed. The word stayed in Amara's mind the way the three sentences from the church had stayed, the way the five-minute pause had stayed, the way all the testimony stayed — in the sponge, in the space between the ears and the mouth, in the space where the seven languages lived and where the gaps between the seven languages were visible, the gaps the spaces where the untranslatable existed, the spaces where language ended and something else began.

After the session, Amara sat in the booth. She sat with the word. She thought about the word in the context of her own life — her own grief, her own remaining, her own geography of loss. She thought about Accra, about the house on Cantonments Road, about Mama Dede in Kpando, about the mango trees and the Volta Region in August. She thought about The Hague, about Scheveningen, about the flat, about the beach, about the North Sea. She thought about the places where she lived and the places where she had lived and the places where loss had occurred — the loss of her grandmother, who had died in Kpando six years ago, the loss of her father, who had died in Accra nine years ago, the losses ordinary, the losses the common losses that every life accumulated.

Her losses were not the witness's losses. Her losses were not the specific grief the word described — she had not lost a child to violence, she had not remained in the place where the child was killed, she had not inhabited the double geography of the present and the past. Her losses were different, were smaller, were the losses of age and distance and the particular attrition of a life lived far from home. But the word — the Lingala word for the grief of remaining — resonated in her because the word described a structure she recognized, a structure of staying, of remaining, of continuing to inhabit a space that was marked by loss, the space not a village in eastern Congo but a profession in The Hague, the profession marked by the loss that translation imposed, the loss of the original, the loss of the untranslatable, the loss that was the bridge's toll.

She did not equate her experience with the witness's. The equation would have been obscene — the interpreter's professional loss and the witness's personal loss were not comparable, were not commensurable, were as different as the word "pain" in English was different from the word "pain" in Lingala, the same word in different languages meaning different things, the meaning determined by the body that experienced it and the language that named it and the history that shaped both the body and the language.

But the structure. The structure of remaining. The structure of staying in the place where the loss occurred and continuing to work and continuing to live and continuing to carry the loss while carrying the work. This structure she recognized. This structure was hers.

She left the booth. She walked the corridor. She stopped at the window at the end of the corridor — a window that looked out over the ICC's grounds, the manicured lawns, the parking areas, the fence that separated the court from the city. She looked through the window and she thought about the word, and she thought that the word was the novel's word, the word that contained the entire problem of her work, the problem of translating the untranslatable, the problem of carrying what language could not carry, the problem of remaining.

She thought: I have a word for this in Lingala. I do not have a word for this in English. The not-having is my work. The not-having is the space where I work. The not-having is the booth, the glass, the microphone, the headphones. The not-having is the bridge. The bridge exists because the word does not exist. If the English contained the Lingala word, the bridge would not be needed. The bridge is needed because the languages are different, and the difference is the space, and the space is the translation, and the translation is my work.

She stood at the window. The afternoon light was fading. The Dutch spring was arriving in its incremental way. The lawns were green — the green of April, the green of new growth, the green of the season's beginning.

She turned from the window. She walked to the exit. She left the building. She went home. She sat in her flat. She did not turn on the lights. She sat in the dark and the dark was the space between the languages, the space where the untranslatable lived, the space where the word existed in Lingala and did not exist in English, the space that was the translator's domain, the translator's territory, the translator's home.

The word. Four syllables. Twenty-nine words of definition. The disproportion the measure of the gap. The gap the space of the work. The work the carrying. The carrying the silence.

The grief of remaining. The translator remained. The translator carried the grief. The translator was silent.