Nov 10 2008
Kärleken väntar
Love waits.
I have only recently started to learn Swedish, as I think I mentioned in passing a while ago in this blog. It is fun to learn a new language. I have always found that cracking a different code, diving into a new culture in the way of words is a good means of shedding our skin to become someone else. Even a person’s voice changes when they speak a foreign language. My Spanish voice differs from my English voice. I don’t know…it could be the tone, but I guess it’s more the character. Yes, that must be it. It is as if we were actors on a stage, performing in a new play. Language is a vehicle to connect with another side of ourselves. I don’t know if I would make a good viking, probably not, but there will be this particular slant to the new sounds that emerge from the complex postures my tongue is forced to find, this moment of bliss when I will discover that a word is only “that” word in “that” language, and it is untranslatable. Well, being a translator myself, I should be perhaps worried about the impossibility of rendering one word into its counterpart in another system. Oddly enough, I am not. I feel that being unable to put a word into another language is just sublime, a unique experience. Believe me, I have never been able to translate enjeu from French into Spanish, English, Italian or even Swedish (I should find out, though, maybe I can break the spell).
Kärleken väntar. I think it means something like “love waits”. I took it from a song by Kent, a Swedish pop band. Indeed love waits. We have to wait for love to be love, because at its very beginning it is only what we would like it to be, a collection of expectations, cravings and desires, above all. It is only when we can wait that it becomes what it should be, when it relaxes, when we understand it as we understand the soul we have chosen as our mate. This is perhaps, only in a way, similar to learning a new language. We only know we have grasped it, that our love for the language is there, when we cannot tell whether we are reading in our vernacular or in the newly acquired friend. We only know that we love someone when we do not have to think who she is, because we simply know her.
