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.