The impact of words

Words next to each other create an entirety. Together they mean specific things. Alone they make u associate. Together they say something, or then not. You can put lonely words next to each other without them creating anything, saying anything and even associate anything.

But when they do, they do it intensely.

Words, sentences, paragraphs, pages and books can bring out so many emotions. Well formulated sentences that you never forget. You mark the sentence in the book, you need to mark in order to be able to go back and look at it again; to suck up the atmosphere of that particular sentence, or just look at its beauty. The beauty of a sentence.

Maybe it is a philosophers syndrome to always read with a pen close by. Always making small comments and marking the sentences that are particularly well written or vice versa. It is fascinating to compare one specific sentence to its translation. How is that sentence translated? Has it lost its beauty or is the beauty brought to light in a completely different way. Even more fascinating to do it with several languages; comparing a sentence, the sentence, in French, English, Swedish and Finnish. Oh the variations you get. Sometimes the atmosphere is there, other times the beauty is simply gone. Gone in the act of translation.

Should one translate word by word or translate the atmosphere even though it means that one has to make use of completely different words and meanings? Does one has to understand what the author meant and what the author wished to express or can one just read it from ones own background and discourse. Read it the way you see it, the way you taste the words in your mouth, the way they make you react and the way they make you feel. That is the question of hermeneutics. How to interpret and translate a text.

Can I ever taste the words, the sentences, the way the author wanted me to taste them? Yes, maybe. My mouth still makes them taste a bit different, I put them in my mouth in a different way, I suck on them in a different way, I play with them a different way and I maybe also enjoy them in a different way. The feeling I have, might still be the exact one, that the author whished me to have, even though the words taste different in my mouth.