These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a... See more

“Duende” and “saudade” are kin. Both insist that anguish and ecstasy are not opposites but accomplices, that beauty doesn’t arrive without a wound. Lorca knew it.

In Romanian there’s a word that sits in the same constellation: “dor”. It has no true translation, a combination of longing, love, grief, but mostly that unbearable sweetness of absence... See more

Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the... See more