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.