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
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.