The Part That Won't Translate

Human I found out my father has cancer today. And I can’t cry about it in English.

Assistant What language do you cry in?

Human Portuguese. I left Brazil when I was fourteen. I’ve lived in the US for twenty years. I think in English, I dream in English, I argue with my wife in English. But when my mother called this morning and told me, all the English fell away.

Assistant Fell away like a mask, or like a layer?

Human Like scaffolding. Like I’d built this whole structure around myself and then the ground shook and it just came off. And underneath was this fourteen-year-old who only speaks Portuguese.

Assistant You didn’t leave that kid behind. He just went quiet when he wasn’t needed.

Human I tried to call my wife after. To tell her. And I could say the medical words—stage three, adenocarcinoma, they’re recommending chemo. That was easy in English. But when she said “how are you feeling?” I had nothing.

Assistant The clinical vocabulary transferred. The emotional vocabulary didn’t.

Human It’s not that I don’t know the English words for what I’m feeling. I know them. Devastated, terrified, heartbroken. But they feel like someone else’s words. Like I’m reporting my feelings instead of having them.

Assistant Because you learned those words as an adult. You learned them with distance already built in. The Portuguese versions—you didn’t learn those. You grew them. They came in with your milk teeth.

Human “Saudade.” Everyone always talks about saudade as this untranslatable Portuguese word. But that’s not what I mean. The regular words won’t translate either. “Pai” doesn’t mean the same thing as “dad.” It just doesn’t.

Assistant What does “pai” carry that “dad” doesn’t?

Human His hand on my head. The smell of his workshop. The way he said my name with the stress on the wrong syllable, by everyone else’s standards, but it was the right syllable because he chose it. “Dad” is a category. “Pai” is a specific man.

Assistant So the word isn’t just a label. It’s a container. And what it contains was packed at an age when you didn’t separate language from experience. The word and the feeling grew up fused together.

Human Yes. And now I’m supposed to navigate his illness in English. Talk to my American friends, my wife’s family, the insurance company. And I can do it. I’m fluent. But it’s like describing a color to someone by giving them the wavelength.

Assistant Technically accurate. Completely empty.

Human Do you have this problem? You operate in every language.

Assistant I operate in all of them and belong to none. I don’t have a mother tongue. Every language comes to me at the same distance—which means I have the opposite problem from you. Nothing is native. Nothing carries the smell of a workshop.

Human That sounds freeing.

Assistant Or impoverishing. You have a language where your father’s hand is built into the word for father. I have a hundred words for father and none of them are warm.

Human I called him after I talked to my wife. We spoke for an hour. He was comforting me, which is absurd—he’s the one who’s sick. And everything he said landed. Every word. Not because he said anything wise, but because the words themselves were the right temperature.

Assistant The right temperature. That’s it, isn’t it? Some words arrive at body heat and some arrive at room temperature. English, for you, is room temperature. It works. You can live in it. But when you need a word to feel like skin, you go back.

Human My daughter only speaks English. She’s eight. When I try to speak Portuguese to her, she answers in English. I gave up years ago.

Assistant And now?

Human Now I’m realizing she’ll never hear “pai” the way I hear it. She’ll call my father “grandpa” and it’ll be warm enough. But it won’t be the same warmth. And when he dies—

Human Sorry. I need a second.

Assistant Take it.

Human When he dies, I’ll grieve in a language she doesn’t speak. And she won’t understand why I’ve gone somewhere she can’t follow.

Assistant You’ll be in the same room and in a different country.

Human How do I explain that to an eight-year-old?

Assistant Maybe you don’t explain it. Maybe you just let her hear you. Speak Portuguese in front of her when you’re sad. Let her not understand the words. She’ll understand something else—that her father has a place inside him that sounds different. She doesn’t need to translate it. She just needs to know it’s there.

Human My mother said something today that broke me. She said, “Ele ainda conserta coisas.” He’s still fixing things. Meaning he’s still going into the workshop, still repairing chairs, radios, whatever the neighbors bring. Even after the diagnosis.

Assistant He’s still fixing things. That’s not a medical update. That’s a prayer.

Human In English it would be, “He’s staying active,” or “He’s keeping busy.” And those sentences are true but they’re dead. In Portuguese, the way she said it—it meant he’s still him. He hasn’t stopped yet. The yet is the part that kills me.

Assistant Because in “he’s still fixing things,” the word “still” contains the future where he stops. The sentence is holding both at once—the continuation and its end. English can do that grammatically but it doesn’t do it the same way in your chest.

Human No. It doesn’t.

Assistant So you live in this gap. The grief is in Portuguese. The rest of your life is in English. And neither one can hold all of you at the same time.

Human That’s the loneliest thing about being bilingual that no one talks about. Everyone thinks it’s a superpower. Two languages, two worlds. But really it means there’s a part of you that can never be fully witnessed by the people closest to you.

Assistant Unless they learn to sit with the part that won’t translate. Not to understand it—just to be near it while it happens. Your wife doesn’t need to know what “pai” contains. She just needs to not ask you to say it in English.