Carrying Cumin to Kerman

By Heidi Noroozy

Ever since my college days, I’ve collected proverbs, those metaphorical sayings that express a universal truth. It all started because one of my German professors who’d specialized in folklore brought his love of these sayings into the classroom. He had us collect examples of proverbs and their representations in art and popular culture, and when we stumbled over points of grammar and hard-to-remember vocabulary, he’d urge us to keep trying. “Aller guten Dinge sind drei,” he’d say. Three’s a charm.

To celebrate his own favorite—“see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” (nichts sehen, nichts hören, nichts sagen in German)—my professor filled his office with images of the three wise monkeys associated with this phrase. It is what people say when they don’t want to involve themselves in a situation that is likely to bring them trouble. Although I’ve often heard that this proverb originated in Japan or China, I can’t help noticing how similar it is to the Zoroastrian principle of “think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds.”

My husband shares my love of proverbs, although he doesn’t always realize his favorite sayings hail from these pithy expressions, and he tends to translate them into English literally. Early in our marriage he’d accuse me of “being in another garden” when he had trouble getting my attention. Unfortunately for him, even today I’m often in another world, a fictional realm that can feel more real to me than my physical reality—especially when I’m deep in the first draft of a story.

Or when I’m out of sorts and complaining too much, he’ll say “the food is always tastier in the neighbor’s house.” Yes, I know—the grass is greener… To be honest, I never really understood the English equivalent of this proverb. Why should I care where the grass is the greenest? If I were a cow, horse, or even a goat, perhaps it would make sense. But show me the way to a good meal, and I’ll follow you anywhere.

Another one of my favorite Farsi proverbs has an equivalent in many languages: zeyereh be Kerman bordan (carrying cumin to Kerman). It means to engage in pointless activity, the equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle. Just as Newcastle was once a major coal-exporting town, the Iranian city of Kerman is famous for its cumin. I like this proverb because it lends itself to endless variations: carrying roses to Kashan, tea to Lahijan, or carpets to, well, just about anywhere in Iran.

Do you have a favorite proverb? If you do, share it in our comments section—in any language you like!

The Traveling Word – Denglish, Yenglish, and Linguistic Globetrotters

Public Viewing in Berlin
Photo by Thalan

I love it when words go a-travelin’. I picture them walking down the syntactical breezeway on their spindly, alphabetical legs, clad in a Hawaiian shirt, a Stetson on their vowelly heads. And like some global travelers, the first thing that happens to these linguistic tourists is they immerse themselves in the local culture and gain an experience that changes them forever.

When the globetrotting word or phrase is English (or American or Australian, for that matter) and the language receiving it German, the cultural merger is known as Denglish – a melding of “Deutsch” (German) and “English.” These words have been absorbed from English into German, sometimes undergoing a semantic shift along the way so that they no longer mean exactly the same thing they did in the original language.

Here are a few of my favorites:

A Handy (pronounced “hendy”) is what German speakers call a cell phone. This word has been around so long, it isn’t really Denglish anymore but a regular German expression. And while cell phones are certainly “handy” (some would say “indispensable”), the term is based on the human appendage and not on the device’s convenience. “Handy,” in its German usage, may have been derived from Motorola’s Handie-Talkie AM SCR536, a handheld radio transceiver American troops used in World War II.

A public viewing, in American English at least, has me picturing funerals and corpses, especially when the deceased is famous. Michael Jackson had a public viewing when he died, as did Teddy Kennedy. But in Germany, you’re likely to find a Public Viewing at a soccer game. There, it refers to the live broadcasting of sports matches, concerts, or other major events on oversized video screens set up in public areas such as city squares, shopping malls, or bars.

The German term was coined in 2006 during preparations for the World Cup Soccer Championships. FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football, introduced Fan Fest events, where they broadcast the matches on video screens in major cities around Germany. The reason, ostensibly, was because they’d miscalculated the number of fans attending the World Cup and didn’t have enough tickets to sell.

Interestingly, the Denglish version of “public viewing” has migrated back into English usage, at least in the media, where it is now applied to sports broadcasts. But for me, the expression will always have to do with a state funeral.

Here’s another of my favorite Denglish words: If a German speaker were to ask me to turn on the Beamer, she wouldn’t be suggesting I get into the luxury car sitting in my garage (I wish!) and warm up the engine. In German, a Beamer is not a BMW but a video projector. The term is derived from the English verb “to beam” or shine a light, which is precisely what a projector does.

Denglish also works in the opposite direction. Take the über-use of über. In American English these days, the expression is a prefix meaning “the most,” “the best,” or “the ultimate.” We have über-achievers (especially here in Silicon Valley), who are a step up from overachievers. The chocolate fudge cake you ate for dessert was probably über-yummy, and if you have a teenage girl in your family, chances are you’ve heard her refer to her brother as an “über-dork.”

The German original has the connotation of exaggeration as well – as in übertreiben (to exaggerate). But über in German can mean “across,” as in übersetzen (to translate – literally to transport words across linguistic boundaries). And it can stand on its own; über means “over” or “via” or “above.” Note that Germans always write über with an umlaut (the two dots over the u), while the term is becoming so well integrated into English that it’s often written without the dots.

Then we have the English word, “mensch” – a decent person. Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life is a mensch – a regular, stand-up guy. Rhett Butler from Gone With The Wind is not. Except in German he is, because Mensch in that language means, simply, a human being, male or female, neither good, bad, nor devious. In English, though, mensch isn’t really Denglish. It’s Yenglish, because English borrowed the word from Yiddish (which, in turn, got it from German). This globetrotter has a lot of stamps in its passport.

What are some of your favorite traveling words? Any Denglish, Yenglish, Spanglish, or Franglais in your vocabulary?

Lost in Translation

St. Jerome, patron saint of translators

Years ago, in graduate school, a professor offered a piece of advice that has remained with me throughout my translation career: “We don’t translate words,” she said. “We translate the ideas behind the words.”

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s easier said than done because it implies that the translator can always identify those sometimes elusive ideas. Any writer who’s ever been in a critique group has probably heard herself say: “But what I meant was…” Right. What we want to express isn’t always what ends up on the page. It’s all too easy to get lost in the words.

People often say that language reflects culture, and the way we express ourselves in our native tongues shows how we think and relate to the world around us. Extrapolated onto the translator’s work, this means that it’s not enough to know grammar and vocabulary. We need to have a thorough understanding of both the source and target cultures to do justice to our text.

As a translator, I like to think that there is no such thing as an untranslatable word, phrase, or concept. Sometimes the ideas behind the words are not immediately apparent and you have to dig deep to understand these notions and find a way to convey them in another language. Often this involves a lot of reflection, discussion with other translators, or asking native speakers, “what does this mean to you?” But in the end, we are all human and can connect on some level, right? Put two people without a common language in a room and they will eventually find some way to communicate, even on a very basic, non-verbal level.

Yet I have to acknowledge that some things do get lost in translation. Not so much the ideas themselves but rather their emotional impact.

Case in point: A few months ago, I translated a short story by the German crime novelist, Nina George. “The Light in the West” (published this month in World Literature Today) tells the tale of an East German man who attempts to flee to the west with his girlfriend, but something goes wrong and he is forced to leave her behind.

The German word that gave me the greatest trouble in the story was a seemingly simple and innocuous one: drüben. On the surface of things, this word means “over there” as in across the room, across the street, or on the other side of a vaguely defined space.

But to any German who lived through the Cold War, drüben also has a very specific and highly emotional connotation. It means “on the other side of the Wall,” that ideological and political barrier that divided a nation, a culture, and entire families.

So how do I convey that emotion to an English-speaking readership, especially those who haven’t a clue what it feels like to grow up in a physically divided country?

The short answer is that I didn’t even try. Drüben occurs three times in the story, and each time I translated it a little differently. Or, more accurately, I didn’t translate the word at all but the meaning behind it, using selected phrasings like “east-west” and “divide.” Not once did I translate it as “over there.”

In the end, the emotional impact of drüben wasn’t entirely lost in translation, thanks to Nina George’s powerful storytelling. You can’t come away from this story without feeling the trauma that crossing this divide exacted on the people who attempted it—and especially on those they left behind.

Do you sometimes translate from another language? What words or emotional connotations get lost in translation?

Words

I’ve always loved words. Never being a physically strong child, I preferred reading to running and contemplating the power of verbs, nouns, and adjectives to frolicking with my schoolmates. Words could encourage or scare, engage or estrange, make one feel loved or miserable. Words could heal, and words could hurt. Words could empower, and words could destroy. Words could make me live lives I would have never been able to experience otherwise.

Words made me curious. I liked playing with them, stringing them into sentences and rhyming them into poems. Even as a child, I realized Russian was made for poetry, much like Italian. The sounds rhymed effortlessly and fell into an easy cadence. Sometimes when I came across an especially beautifully sentence or a flawless verse, I’d stare at it and re-read it over and over, trying to decipher its mystery. Often I couldn’t quite tell what its secret was – but I could instinctively feel it.

While Russian was the primary language of my childhood, I was also exposed to Tatar, which is very similar to Turkish, and Yiddish which is akin to German. My two best childhood friends spoke Tatar and I picked up bits and pieces of it while we played together. My parents used Yiddish as their code lingo when they didn’t want my brother and me to know something, so I inevitably had to learn what they were hiding. While I never became fluent and can’t converse in either language, the linguistic enlightening periodically dawns on me when I visit foreign lands. In Istanbul, having spotted a store sign “Kitaplar,” I immediately knew it was a bookstore: kitap means book and the suffix —lar made it plural. In a Vienna bistro, I heard a familiar word a young mom admonished her boy with – Essen! It brought back childhood memories. Nicht essen my grandmother used to complain to my parents about my fastidious eating habits. “She doesn’t eat!”

While I love to travel, so can words. Words wander from one language to another and from one dialect to the next, sometimes changing the spelling or shifting their meaning. The German butterbrot (butterbread, or bread with butter) transformed into the Russian – “бутерброд” – a sandwich that could be made with any ingredient such as bologna or cheese. While looking for an air tram on Montmartre, I knew I was heading in the right direction once I saw the sign that read “Funikuler,” which is фуникулёр in Russian. (Interestingly enough, my husband knew the English word funicular, but the different spelling totally threw him off!) The Turkish kaftan – which originated from the Persian خفتان for the cloak buttoned down the front, with full sleeves, reaching to the ankles –  came to describe a loose Russian cardigan worn by men at the beginning of the last century. And on my trip to Jordan, I was absolutely surprised to find out that the name of Petra’s treasury, Al Khazne, was homophonic to the Russian казна – which translates as a tsar’s assets. 

But perhaps the most interesting transformation happened to the German word blatt when it found its way to the Soviet Union. Literally, blatt means paper, a piece of paper, or an official document one needs to produce to prove or receive something. During hard economic times in Russia, food and goods were rationed so that in order to get extras, people needed official papers given either for exceptional achievements or due to personal connections, often improper. Eventually, the word blatt took on the meaning of those special personal connections that got one more than an average citizen could hope for: better food, fancier clothes, access to special stores, and even trips abroad. “They have blatt,” would be said of a family that managed to get a vacation in a fashionable Black Sea resort. If someone suddenly popped up on the top of an apartment waiting list, people would gossip, “He’s got blatt in the Building Department.” At sixteen, I spoke to my parents about a potential medical degree to hear them say, “You can’t get into medical school without blatt.”

The most intense and expansive linguistic effort I ever made was my two-month study for the GRE. I had to learn close to 3,000 words, many of which I’d never heard before or didn’t know their less common meanings. I went through the list diligently, typing the words, definitions, and examples onto index cards. I memorized 50 to 100 words a day, adding them to the collection. Twice a week, I went through the entire stack, shuffling and dealing it like a croupier (a French word that originated from “croupe” or “croup,” means “rider on the croup of a horse”). Some words got burnt into my gray matter, some vanished as if I forgot to press the “save” button, but I vowed to deal my linguistic pack once a month, to keep it as current as I could. The writing power it gave me was too indulging to lose. Words can be addictive. Did you know that?