In Defence of Untranslatability by Deepa Bhasthi

In this essay, Deepa Bhasthi defends untranslatability – the intentional choice to not-translate text – as a necessary practice. As examples, she draws on Kannada words that feel too complex or hyperlocal to be translated into a single English word, as well as significant books she read during her time as our inaugural International Translator in Residence. Written by Jamil Jan Kochai, Waguih Ghali, and SJ Kim, these texts deliberately do not translate/transliterate certain words into English, and Bhasthi unpacks the aesthetic and political impacts of these choices.

Read Deepa Bhasthi's memoir-manifesto piece of life writing, titled 'Language is a Fuse Waiting to Be Lit', in print in Wasafiri 125.

‘There will always be words in Kannada that I will never encounter in my life, and for the many I do, I will never learn the meanings of.’  

This line arrived in my mind, as such thoughts do, out of the blue the other day. It left me both amused – thinking there will never be a shortage of words I will want to translate into English – and dispirited, as I’ll never journey the entirety of my language ... ever.  

These are ultimately pointless ruminations — for languages, born into or acquired later in life, cannot be bound within the parameters of an average human lifespan. Their mysteries are beyond the most dedicated of us, their worlds within our grasp but outside full possession. Language(s) make(s) us, even when we wrestle with its parts to try to bend, mould, or control it.  

I have spent the duration of my term as Wasafiri’s first International Translator in Residence, and the few years prior that, as an occasional translator from Kannada, thinking up the many ways in which to translate a word, phrase, or cultural nuance from my language into English. I have ended up with many thoughts on language and transcreation, from the politics of each word choice, to the accent I like to keep it in, to throwing out italics and why, and so on. The more I think about the translatability of a word, the more I find myself leaning towards the untranslatability of some – many – words. 

This is not an argument about what is lost in translation, a narrow-minded concept that couldn’t be discarded soon enough. For when no two languages in the world are same-same, how could every word in one language have an equivalent in the other? Instead of fixating on what is supposedly lost, we would, as writers and readers, do better by focusing on what is gained by the act of translation when two languages are in conversation with each other.  

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What I talk about when I talk about untranslatability is not its obvious impossibilities, but its very necessity: to intentionally not-translate something, rather than deeming the word/phrase as being impossible to convey in the target language.

I have a two-sided approach to thinking about untranslatability. One is keeping an ongoing list of Kannada words that contain so much complexity that the only way they could be understood by non-Kannadigas is by writing a long sentence (if that) defining their meaning in English. This is usually because they have hyperlocal context, unique to not just a particular Kannada (there are many Kannadas, just like there are many Englishes), but also because they are sometimes native to only one town or district.  

I’ll never journey the entirety of my language ... ever

First is ಗೋಧೂಳಿ/goDhuLi, which describes a very particular kind of light and time of the evening. In villages, when cattle are being driven home during the dry months, the dust that their hooves rake up from an unpaved road mingles with the gold of the setting sun that is burnished dull by the day. ಗೋಧೂಳಿ delineates this exact light and hour. It is my favourite word and my favourite sepia image from a world familiar to me as a child. 

Second is ಅಲಾತಚಕ್ರ/alathachakra, a word I learned two days ago while suffering through a particularly difficult translation exercise I had given myself. The image this comes from isn’t as romantic as the last one. It is set in a village again, probably a more rural one; both word and image were more common about half a century ago. Before artificial light took over the darkness of rural spaces, people who needed to commute between homes would use ದೊಂದಿ/dondhi, a coconut or palm frond lit on one end. The person carrying it would have to gently swing it back and forth to ensure the fire did not go out. The optical illusion of a semicircle – the remains of light in front when the dondhi has swung back – is called alathachakra. 

There are dozens of such extraordinary words on my list, words that could constitute entire paragraphs in English. One could, of course, keep the word in and remove the enchanted imagery of their meanings altogether, and introduce, say, dusk for ಗೋಧೂಳಿ and illusion for ಅಲಾತಚಕ್ರ. But the notion that some aspects of a culture will be wholly unavailable for comprehension in another culture is, to me, the reason why we read literature in the first place. We read because we are curious. We read because we want to learn about different kinds of people — only to realise we are not all that different in the first place. We read to be part of the larger world, and we read to access and practice something as ancient as storytelling, something that is beyond our selves. This is why we read, or should read, literature in translation.  

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My second approach to the merits of untranslatability is through books that don’t consciously translate or transliterate non-English words. These books are not necessarily in translation. In fact, they are nearly always written in English by a writer who is a non-native speaker. These authors still have other languages in them, either by birth or heritage. When they leave in words from those languages, it is always to make some sort of a statement, a political reclamation of their heritage and culture. An assertion. With their closed fists swinging upward, they say: take that, look it up, figure it out.  

Language(s) make(s) us, even when we wrestle with its parts to try to bend, mould, or control it

Whether the books I read during this residency were coincidental choices or whether they walked themselves over to me, I cannot say. But in many of them, I began finding untranslated words that further shaped my preexisting thoughts on untranslatability. Several of these ideas had developed during the months I spent touring with Heart Lamp, the short story collection that won me the International Booker Prize in 2025. I had somehow become the first Indian translator and first translator of colour to win the prize, and this put me in a position (in my head, at least) where I felt I needed to be able to articulate my translation practice, explaining why I was making the word choices I was making. I had never felt a similar compulsion to explain myself before when it came to my own writing. 

As I began to talk about translation and its inevitabilities and impossibilities, I started becoming particularly attuned to words or sentences from other languages that had been deliberately left unexplained. It was fascinating to observe what they were doing and why they were there on the page. 

Among my favourite reads was SJ Kim’s This Part is Silent: A Life Between Cultures, a 2025 memoir about growing up in the American South as a child of South Korean immigrants, then navigating academia in London as an adult. The first few pages are generously dotted with Korean letters that I was happy to skip past quickly. But then, the word 정, transliterated as jeong/jung, began to mess with my head. Unlike the dedication or a line of poetry in Korean in the book, this word kept cropping up until I began to recognise its shape as distinct from the other Korean letters in the book. I resisted staying on it for any longer than a millisecond, hoping that the context would help me guess the meaning. Occasionally, that worked — until the word began to push back on the meaning I was trying to assign it, running across the page and outside of it while I remained in hot pursuit. Then it was my turn, to push back against resisting the comprehension of 정. We wrestled a bit, the word and I, until I accepted the discomfort of not being able to read it. 정 conveys an indescribable emotion, I learned later. It signifies a deep connection within a relationship and is gained or lost in relation to another person. It is a lot of different things at different times in different situations. If transliterated each time, it just wouldn’t have had the same effect on the page as it did when keeping the Korean letter. This act retained the word’s complexities and nuance. 

... to try to erase or invisibilise the role of the translator in making a work of literature is not just an insult, but an injury to the source language

I also think of Waguih Ghali’s only published novel, Beer in a Snooker Club (2010). The book follows the story of Ram and Font, two Copts from well-heeled Egyptian families, as they live through their student years in London, then later as young men returned home. The novel is a deeply insightful and unapologetic critique of colonialism and the native elites who benefitted from it — ‘one of the best novels about Egypt ever written,’ according to the author Ahdaf Soueif in the newest edition’s blurb. When Ram talks to his mother or is at a party with rich friends and relatives, many of the dialogues are in French. This is perhaps to show their exclusion from the rest of Egyptian society, depicting them as sophisticates. Soon, one begins to expect Ghali’s characters to speak nothing but French. It is as if, by exchanging words in Arabic-rendered-in-English, they would become common and lower in class, and not remain as ‘cultured people’ firmly in their bubble.  

My third example is probably the book that I stayed with the longest, staring down at its pages, hoping to get under the skin of the words and listen to one last story. Jamil Jan Kochai’s 99 Nights in Logar (2019) is an adventure to find the village dog Budabash, who has run away after biting the tip of twelve-year old Marwand’s finger. The little boy has come home to Logar, Afghanistan from America, where he and his parents live. The journey that follows explores memory, family secrets, landscapes, loyalties, and identity, for Marwand as well as his cousins. Towards the novel’s end, one of the characters consents to telling the story of Watak, a family member who died a tragic death and is an important part of the narrative. This is laid out in a subsequent chapter written entirely untranslated and untransliterated in Pashto. Explaining the choice, Kochai said in an interview for Dawn: 'I wanted to upset this notion that, in order for this story to have value, it needed to be made consumable for an English readership. Here, the English reader is asked to work in order to understand the Pashto narrative. For these few pages, Pashto becomes essential and English is made secondary.' 

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I am sometimes asked if there are books that are just untranslatable for whatever reason. The writer in me emerges fists up, ready to argue that there is nothing, strictly speaking, that is wholly untranslatable. But the translator in me is slower to respond, her practice a little aged now; she grants that while anything can be translated, there is a political need to not translate some things. The few books mentioned above exemplify how that intentional choice can have different effects on the reader.  

Ultimately, to translate is to make choices on many, many different levels: from what to translate, whom to translate, and why, to how to translate cultural nuances, language quirks, idioms, and proverbs, and it is the differences in these decisions that largely determine whether a translation is working or not. So much rests on the translator and her reading outside of the text being translated, her life experiences, her understanding of both source and text languages, her worldview. This is why I always argue that to try to erase or invisibilise the role of the translator in making a work of literature is not just an insult, but an injury to the source language. When a translator is not given their due credit, they might choose to not translate an author again or, in a worst-case scenario, to give up translation altogether. That is where minor languages – minor not because of the fewer number of speakers, but because of how infrequent translations from that language are made and published – stand to suffer the most. Translation is about its politics, and these politics are about choices made, whether by the author, translator, editor, publisher, and/or reader. Or better still, by the collective that they form during the making of a book.

Works Cited:

Mushtaq, Banu and Deepa Bhasthi. Heart Lamp: Selected Stories. Penguin Random House India, 2025.

Kim, SJ. This Part is Silent: A Life Between Cultures. And Other Stories, 2024.

Ghali, Waguih. Beer in a Snooker Club. Serpent’s Tail, 2010. 

Kochai, Jamil Jan. 99 Nights in Logar. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. 

Saleem, Rabea. 'INTERVIEW: I WANTED THE READER TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMENSITY.' Dawn, 7 Apr. 2019.

Cover image: Nicolas Perriault