I just came from the company of friends. In the face of exams we talked at length about the concept of view opinion and even experience being intimately tied to language - how the means of expression you have at your disposal almost predetermine how anything presents itself to you. Your mind packages things simultaneously with their occurrence, as they come up rather than after the fact, subconsciously categorizing and organizing, choosing what information to take and which to ignore, where to go from here. Language is intimately linked to that process of mental sorting - you can only communicate your experience through the limitations of the language you employ. Orwell's newspeak simplistically illustrates the causality of this perfectly - control language and you control thought.
The fact that there is so much to know means I know nothing about anything, I feel. There are seminal works in every field that I don't even know I don't know - I learned who Hegel was a year ago (and haven't gotten past "philosopher" in the time since), I learned the very extreme Magic Schoolbus-style basics of how a neuron fires around that time, how a bottom bracket works is still a mystery to me. I am accepting of, and perhaps almost detrimentally comfortable in, this ignorance. Often I don't read the news.
Being through no merit of my own fully bilingual brings a more unsettling, profoundly divisive ignorance to light. I am culturally Czech and American. I can function in both systems and think in both cultures, and this brings something up - each language, with its accompanying modes of cultural expression, attains sentiments and ideas that are inaccessible to the other. That cannot be translated, that cannot be explained. Not small things, either - fundamental ways of looking at the world, keystone ideas.
These are, mind you, two modern western countries sharing many of the same mores and conventions. What then must it be like to be Mongolian? To speak Creole or Urdu or Icelandic or any of the thousands of tiny dying tribal languages that dot the globe. I am unaware not just of facts and ideas, then. There myriad entire frames of thought absolutely inaccessible to me. To borrow a phrase, entire doors of perception infinitely shut.
A lifelong fascination with this wall of perception, in a nutshell, is why I translate, or attempt to. A bit like an irate American tourist storming the Bastille with a toothpick, admittedly, but we stand only to gain.
I came home from that conversation (with two friends who between them speak English French Russian Spanish and Urdu, no big deal) to another friend's one-word facebook status - Saudade. She is part Iranian, part Portuguese. I looked up Saudade. It is again fundamental and untranslateable. I know what it means, now, I identify with the feeling it describes very strongly, but I will never know what it means. I will never be culturally Portuguese. I know this and accept it - I also, despite my (American) second grade teacher's proclamations to the contrary, will never be an astronaut - but it makes me wish, just for a second, that saudade triggered for me what it does for Maryam.
