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The Space Between Languages 
and the Emotion That Eludes Translation
 
George  J. Ge
Jun 2025





1. Introduction


风住尘香花已尽
The wind has stilled; the scent of dust lingers. The blossoms are gone.
Le vent s’est calmé, le parfum de poussière flotte encore. Les fleurs ne sont plus.
風が止み、塵の香りに、花の気配だけが残る。

I once tried to translate this line for someone I cared about.
He didn’t speak Chinese, but I wanted him to understand—not just the meaning, but the silence behind the words.
That kind of silence. The kind that hangs in the air when something beautiful has ended.

So I tried.
In English: too precise.
In French: too perfumed.
In Japanese: too blurred at the edges.

Each version touched the surface but missed the ache—
like water tracing the rim of a porcelain cup long since broken.

He smiled and said, “That’s beautiful.”
I smiled too, but something in me curled back into silence.
Was it the fault of language—or the fault of longing?

自是人生长恨水长东
Of course—life mourns its own fading light, as the river mourns, forever eastward.

I once tried to explain this, too.
I didn’t know how else to say: This is how I feel when you leave.

But how do you translate a sigh without letting it evaporate?
How do you carry the weight of a river in a language built not of ink strokes, but of bricks and punctuation?

I tried again.
English: too grounded.
Japanese: too hesitant.
French: so elegant, so exacting—
yet even le chagrin cannot carry the water goes eastward yet never stop.

So I offered a translation:

“As the river flows forever eastward, life too, mourns its fading light.”

He smiled.
I nodded.
But a part of me remained with the original—its rhythm, its ache, its silence.

And then one evening, I stood by the Garonne in Bordeaux.
Moonlight spilled across the river, soft and silver, as if it too were remembering something.
A phrase from my childhood came to mind, one I had copied again and again in calligraphy class:

浮光跃金，静影沉璧

I wanted to say it aloud. To share it. But I hesitated.
How does one translate such a line, so compact yet luminous, without breaking it?

Or maybe—

Translation is always an attempt to preserve a moment of intimacy that was never meant to be moved.

It’s not just the words that get lost.
It’s the spaces between them.

I have lived in Chinese, dreamed in Japanese, and healed in French.

Chinese writes with suggestion.
English, with structure.
Japanese, with atmosphere.
French, with grace.

But I live somewhere in between—
between thought and language, memory and explanation, East and West.
Between what I feel, and what I can say.





2.1  Rhythm and Structure: When Languages Breathe at Different Tempos

There are sentences that arrive not in words, but in breath.
浮光跃金，静影沉璧  was one of them. 

A sentence does not mean to be spoken, but to shimmer briefly on the surface of memory, like sunlight dancing on water.

I tried to translate it once.

In English:
Floating light leaps like gold; still shadows sink like jade.

In French:
La lumière flottante saute sur l’or, l’ombre silencieuse s’enfonce dans le jade.

In Japanese:
浮遊する光は金の上を飛び、沈む影は玉の奥に眠る。

Each version tried to catch the ripple, but none could echo the stillness that came after.

Chinese, as I have come to realise, does not write with grammar. It writes with rhythm.
It breathes in strokes.


A phrase like  秋水共长天一色  holds no subject, no verb, no predicate—yet it paints the world. It doesn't describe what is happening. It is what is happening.

Where Chinese suggests, English explains.
Where Chinese compresses, English expands.

To write 一苇渡江  in English, I need a subject, a verb, a clause, and probably a footnote.

“A man once crossed a vast river on a single reed.”

Or perhaps:
“One reed, one crossing—a fragile defiance.”

But none of it captures the tension of the original. The brevity. The resolve. The silence between the characters.

English is built on structure. It insists on order, logic, causality.
French is similar, but carries its logic with perfume. Every sentence is a corridor with gilded mirrors and a touch of ceremony.
Japanese, on the other hand, erases the path entirely. It floats. It alludes. It lingers.

But only Chinese can create a full painting with four characters, like a seal on silk.


一字千钧 — one word, a thousand weights.

And that’s the tension I live in.
As someone understand a bit of all—Chinese, English, Japanese, and now learning French—I find myself translating not just between languages, but between pulses.

Some languages walk.
Some languages fly.
Some simply disappeared, leaving only the echo.


2.2  - Continued

In Chinese, brevity is not a limitation—it’s a technique. A philosophical stance.
The less you say, the more the reader must feel.
The beauty lies not in exposition, but in compression.

石破天惊
A stone shatters the sky.
Une pierre qui fend le ciel.
空を割る一つの石。

But it’s not just a meteor strike.
It is suddenness, disruption, revelation. It’s not the action—it’s the shockwave after.

风雨如晦
The wind and rain turn the day to dusk.
Le vent et la pluie obscurcissent le jour.
風と雨が昼をも暗くする。

English needs subjects. French needs agreement. Japanese needs particles.
Chinese needs none of these—and still speaks.

To explain 芳草无情  in English, I must break the illusion:

“The spring grass shows no mercy, growing as if nothing happened.”

But it’s too literal. Too... pragmatic.
The original doesn't say what happened.
It simply sighs and leaves the rest to you.

Each language carries a worldview—not just in what it says, but in how it permits you to say it.

Chinese privileges 意合 — the unity of meaning over structure.
Its grammar breathes by omission.
You are expected to infer, to wander, to feel the weight of silence as part of the sentence.
There is no need for subject, verb, or tense—only rhythm, tone, and image.
In Chinese, a line is not a vessel of logic, but a window of resonance.

English, in contrast, is rigorously 形合 — form determines sense.
Syntax is everything.
You cannot say "Missed." You must say I missed you—even longing requires an architecture.
English insists on directionality, causality, accountability.
Its rhythm is stepwise, its clarity precise—but often at the cost of breath.

French dances between logic and lyricism.
Also 形合, yet scented with elegance.
The grammar is baroque—curved, conjugated, adorned.
To speak in French is to compose.
Yet even its tenderness is framed by grammatical decorum.
Emotion is permitted, but never uncombed.

Japanese exists in ellipsis.
It implies. It hesitates. It wraps its subjects in fog.
Particles replace grammar; emotions dissolve into suggestion.
Its phonetic system, rich in softness, sometimes lacks the vertical gravity of Chinese characters.
あかい can mean thick, hot, dense, deep. But only the kanji tells you which—and the voice carries none of it.

In the end, it is not just the tempo that differs—
It is the ontological contract between language and thought.

Some languages require declaration.
Others permit intuition.
Some demand you explain yourself.
Others let you vanish.

I am lucky to understand Chinese by birth, English by life, Japanese by affection, French by aspiration—
I find myself not fluent in four languages but suspended between four modes of perception.

And perhaps that is what rhythm truly is—not sound, but expectation.
And what poetry seeks is not clarity, but permission:
to feel without explaining,
to breathe without building,
to vanish—without losing the shape of meaning.




2.3 A Last Echo in Four Tongues

Before we move on, allow me to offer one final line. A line that has haunted me since adolescence.

It is from Li Yu—the fallen king of Southern Tang.
Once an emperor, later a prisoner. A man who once ruled cities, and later sat under moonlight composing verses for a country he no longer owned.

The poem is called 虞美人·春花秋月何时了 — often known as his “death song.”
It was written during his captivity under the Song dynasty. He had lost his kingdom, his court, his family.
And yet, what he mourned most deeply — was memory.


春花秋月何时了？往事知多少。

Chinese (Original)
如此开篇，仅十字，便已满地风霜。没有主语，没有时间，没有情绪标明，却一字一句，字字锥心。


English (Translation Attempt)

When will the spring flowers and autumn moon ever end?
How much of the past still lingers in memory?

This version conveys the question. But not the grief.
It explains—but doesn’t ache.
The Chinese begins with 春花秋月—images, not thoughts.
It doesn’t tell you how to feel. It lets you fall.


French

Quand finiront fleurs de printemps et lune d’automne ? /
Combien de souvenirs le passé retient-il encore ?

French lends it elegance. The flow is soft, ceremonial.
But the sorrow becomes refined, almost distant.
The velvet gloves, again.


Japanese

春の花も、秋の月も、いつまで続くのだろう。
過ぎ去った日々には、どれほどの思い出があるのか。

This version is gentle—wistful, even.
But the original has weight. Here, the lines hover
In Japanese, the regret becomes internal. A private sigh.
In Chinese, it was the cry of a man who once ruled—and now waits for death.


Each version walks in a different rhythm.
Each loses something in the crossing.
Some become too clear.
Some, too soft.
Only the original leaves silence in its wake.

And maybe that’s what language is:
A bridge between emotion and structure, built always too late.
Somewhere between what we mean, and what we manage to say—
there is a kingdom that no longer exists.
And a sentence that still waits to be understood.





3.1– The Mistranslation of Love: When “I Love You” Crosses Languages

Some words are so overused they become hollow.
Others are so rarely spoken they echo for years.

“I love you” is both.
Said too much, and not enough.
And always too differently.

In Chinese, we rarely say it.
To love is not to proclaim, but to remain.
It is not said—it is done, folded into gestures:

“吃了吗？”
“早点睡。”
“我买了你喜欢吃的。”

Even when we try, we often detour:

“我想你。”

Three characters, never fully explained.
Does it mean I miss you? Or that I still remember you? Or simply: I’m still here?

“我在。”
No subject of affection. Just presence.

In this language, affection is embedded—not expressed.
Love is implied through restraint, not confession.
To say it directly risks vulgarity, or worse—emotional nakedness.


English, on the other hand, is assertive.
It names what it feels, and declares what it wants.

“I love you.”
“I miss you.”
“I want you.”

The subject is always present, the verb active.
It claims, it centres, it acts.
Even longing is grammatical:

“I miss you.”
—not “You are missed.”

But this clarity comes at a cost.
Once you say it, there is no room left for 猜—the guessing game that sustains intimacy in Chinese.
The ambiguity disappears.
And with it, some of the poetry.


Japanese is different still.
It rarely allows the word “love” to appear at all.
Instead, it lingers on the absence of the other:

会いたい – I want to see you.
寂しい – It’s lonely.

Love here is not stated. It is suffered.
You are not the subject, nor the object—you are the missing space.

Even when one says “好きだよ” or “愛してる”, it often feels too direct, almost foreign.
So people hesitate. They write it in songs. They say it once, in the rain, with their back turned.

Love in Japanese is felt between the syllables,
just as silence is part of a haiku.


And then, there is French—
the language of lovers, of declarations, of sighs behind closed doors.

Je t’aime.
Tu me manques.
J’ai envie de toi.

Here, the words are shaped like gifts.
Emotion wears silk gloves.
Even missing you is reversed:

Tu me manques – You are missing from me.

It isn’t “I miss you.”
It’s you, who left a hollow in me.

The structure is inverted.
Just like longing itself.

So which language tells love best?

Chinese whispers it.
English asserts it.
Japanese avoids it.
French seduces it.

And I—
find myself stranded between syntax and sentiment.
Between a language that hides feeling, and one that cannot stop naming it.



3.2 Love in Symbol, Across Tongues
Each language builds love out of different materials.
Some use water.
Some use birds.
Some use bodies.
But all of them attempt the same impossible thing:
To hold a feeling still, long enough to say it.

Let’s begin with 春江花月夜 , Zhang Ruoxu’s seventh-century masterpiece.
A single poem.
But it contains an entire river of Chinese romantic cosmology.

春江潮水连海平，海上明月共潮生。
The spring river flows level with the sea; the moon rises over the tide.

It begins not with the speaker, nor the beloved—
but with nature.
Always, in Chinese classical poetry, emotion is projected into landscape.
It is not I love you—but the moonlight is also thinking of you.
The lover is absent. The emotion—de-centred, displaced onto scenery.

Later lines make this clearer:
江畔何人初见月？江月何年初照人？
Who first saw the moon by the riverbank? In what year did the river moon first shine on man?

Love here is a question—not a declaration.
Time dissolves. Identity vanishes.
What remains is a shared loneliness between man and moon.
The ultimate intimacy in Chinese poetry:
to be forgotten together, beneath the same sky.


Now, to Japanese:

かささぎの 渡せる橋に おく霜の 白きを見れば 夜ぞふけにける

From the 古今和歌集 attributed to Emperor Tenji.
Often translated:

Upon the bridge the magpies made / lies white frost— / and I see the night is deep.

Here, love is inference.
There is no mention of affection, or even of a person.
Only frost.
Only night.
Only a bridge—formed, in legend, by magpies flying wing-to-wing so lovers could meet once a year.

Japanese love poetry often functions by allusion and seasonal metaphor:
birds, frost, mist, moonlight.
The more oblique, the more profound.
Like a painting half-finished, meant to be completed in the reader’s heart.
The poem doesn’t say I miss you.
But you feel it, between the feathers of the magpies.


Now, in stark contrast: E.E. Cummings, writing in 20th-century English:

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in / my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere / i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done / by only me is your doing, my darling)

No birds.
No frost.
No rivers or moons.
Just the self—and the beloved—folded into one another.

English, especially modern poetry, tends toward personal subjectivity.
Emotion is claimed, not hidden.
Where Chinese dissolves the speaker into landscape, and Japanese submerges feeling in symbol,
English compresses emotion into the self.
It names love directly. It speaks it aloud.
Even the poem’s lack of punctuation is a kind of vulnerability—raw, breathless, intimate.

And in French, L’Inconnue by Paul Éluard

Elle est debout sur mes paupières
Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens,
Elle a la forme de mes mains,
Elle a la couleur de mes yeux.

She stands upon my eyelids,
Her hair tangled in mine,
She is shaped like my hands,
She is the colour of my eyes.

This is surrealism in love.
She is not someone else—she is the speaker.
The beloved becomes identity, the metaphor dissolves boundaries.
Love here is obsessive, intimate, dissolved into the self.

French allows this lyrical abstraction without losing its sensuality.
There’s no need to say “I love you.”
You say: “She stands upon my eyelids.”
That is enough.

So what do these poems reveal?


Language  
       Presence
           Expression
           Symbol System
       Temporal Mood

Chinese
       Absent
          Environmental
       Natural / Cosmic
       Eternal / Cyclical

Japanese
       Oblique
           Atmospheric
       Seasonal / Mythic
       Nocturnal / Suspended

English
       Assertive
           Declarative    
       Bodily / Immediate
       Present / Personal

French
       Dissolved
           Lyrical / Erotic
       Metaphoric / Introspective
       Dreamlike / Fluid


And this, perhaps, is the tragedy of translation.
Not just the loss of words—
but the loss of what each language allows love to mean.

When I translate 春江花月夜, I lose the river’s stillness.
When I explain the magpies, the frost melts.
When I bring E.E. Cummings into Chinese, his voice becomes too loud, too bare, too sincere.
All these poems are about love—
but they love differently.
They ask different questions.
And they leave different silences.





4. Untranslatable: The Feelings That Slip Between Tongues

Some feelings are too precise to name, and too fragile to explain.
They live in the folds between languages—
not lost, but untranslatable.

They are not “difficult to translate.”
They refuse translation.
Because translation demands equivalence—
but these emotions exist only in asymmetry. In silence. In pause.

Take the Chinese word: 幽微
Not quite “subtle.”
Not “delicate.”
Not “faint.”

It describes something dim yet beautiful—like a fading light seen through gauze,
or a thought not fully formed,
or the presence of someone who once loved you, still lingering in the shape of a room.

“她的微笑中有一种幽微的哀愁。”

No English word can hold this.
“Bittersweet”? Too saccharine.
“Melancholic”? Too heavy.
“Poignant”? Too neat.

幽微 is what remains after a poem ends.
It is meaning.
It is also resonance.

Then there is 怅然 .
A kind of empty sadness—not from tragedy, but from beauty incomplete.

Like standing in a beautiful train station with nowhere to go.
Or watching cherry blossoms fall and realising spring is already ending.
It is a bit of grief.
It is a bit of regret.
It is the sadness of passing things.

Try translating 怅然若失.
You get:
“A vague sense of loss.”
Which is about as poetic as reading a product label.

But in Chinese, it’s a sigh hidden in four characters—
a whole season of emotion held in the gap between lines.

Japanese has its own ghosts.
Take 物の哀れ —
the deep, aching beauty of impermanence.
The awareness that things are lovely because they will end.
The cherry blossoms. The summer cicadas. The face you once knew by heart.

It is not nostalgia.
It is not sorrow.
It is a kind of emotional tenderness that comes with watching time pass.

And what language outside Japanese would describe love as something that fades as it blooms?

Also 切ない（せつない）.
Often rendered as painful, heart-wrenching, bittersweet—but none of these fit.

切ないis the ache of wanting something so much it quietly hurts.
It’s not dramatic.
It’s not loud.
It’s the quiet sting of knowing someone won’t text back, even as you still keep your phone near.
It is love’s hesitation.
A tremor in the chest, not a tear on the cheek.


Now to French:

Apart from Tu me manques
Avoir le cafard – “To have the cockroach.”
Which sounds absurd in English—
but in French, it means to feel low, downcast, emotionally overcast.

It’s not sadness with a reason.
It’s not sorrow you can name.
It’s waking up on a Sunday and feeling that life is… less.
A silent fog around the spirit.
A softness that refuses remedy.

There’s no English equivalent.

“Feeling blue”? Too cheerful.
“In a funk”? Too American.
“Depressed”? Too medical.

Le cafard  just is.
A passing mood that doesn’t want to be fixed—only acknowledged.

All these are not just words.
They are emotional geometries.
Ways in which cultures teach us to feel.

Some languages make you say it.
Others let you feel around it.
And some—like Chinese, Japanese, and French—trust you to read what is not said.

As I moves among them, I have learned:
There are things I can only say in one language.
There are emotions I only feel in Chinese.
Memories that only French can make elegant.
And longings that only Japanese can hold without breaking.

And perhaps this is the real untranslatable:
Not the words—
but the self that exists differently in each language.





Final Chapter – Translation as an Act of Love
I used to believe translation was about accuracy.
That if I studied enough, looked long enough, loved hard enough—
I could carry every word across the river intact.
That the moonlight would still shimmer.
That the silence would still ache.

But now I know:
Translation is not about perfection.
It’s about care.

It is the act of holding something so fragile it might dissolve in your hands,
and still choosing to carry it.
Knowing it will change.
Knowing it will lose something.
And still believing it’s worth it.


Each language carries a version of myself.

In Chinese, I am quiet, interior, full of shadows and calligraphy.
I think in absence. I ache in scenery. I never say "I love you"—but I dream it into the moon.

In English, I am articulate, observant, a little guarded.
I make sense of my pain. I explain myself before I’m understood.
I say “I’m fine” when I’m not, but the syntax is correct.

In Japanese, I walk softly. I disappear in indirectness.
I speak in mist. I long without expecting.
I hold heartbreak like it’s a porcelain bowl that still has warmth.

In French, I slow down. I write in silk.
I allow melancholy to become aesthetic.
Even sadness wears perfume.


And yet—none of them say everything.

So I write.
Between the lines. Between the tongues.
I translate not to explain myself, but to remember I still feel.

Because translation, in the end, is not about fidelity.
It is about intimacy.

To translate is to trust someone enough to show them the shape of your feelings—
even when the words are wrong.

To translate is to say:

“This is not what I said.
But this is what I meant.”

And maybe that’s what love is, too.



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