pH Balance

32. Found in Translation

I. THe reckoning

It was a rainy day in the West End. Much like the rainy day before that. And the one before that. Tomorrow promised to be a similarly rainy day. Even when you managed to get out of the rain and dry off, you could still smell it. There would always be a thin layer of mud on your Wellies and your coat. Every time you go inside, you breathe a huge sigh of relief, shake your umbrella dry, and thank god that it didn’t flip up on you this time.

On days like these, leaving the house seems like a terrible option; second in terribleness only to feeling trapped inside by something as simple and mundane as water. So you brave the rain and march outside, hunching over while clomping down cobblestone streets. You’ll take breaks, of course. Every so often, you’ll duck into the nearest building to warm up, wipe your nose, and unscrunch your face. Most shops will let you loiter if you feign interest in buying something.

Entering a record store on that rainy day in the West End was one such escape. It was better than the sticky-floored pub from the day before. Something forgettable plays on the speakers as you walk through the aisles shivering, trying not to squeak so loudly in your Wellies—a near impossible task: everyone else is squeaking too.

You and a sales associate lock eyes. You immediately look away, pretending to search for something in particular while actually doing nothing of the sort. You’ve never seen any of these albums before. You don’t even own a record player. The associate leaves their post behind the counter and starts walking in your direction. You slip on the nearest pair of headphones to avoid further contact.

And suddenly—you’re not sopping wet in your Wellies anymore. You’re not worried about Alex the associate or whether your damp socks are worsening your athletes’ foot. Instead, what you hear is a sound—the sound.

It’s the sound that was made when the universe was first created; and it’s the last thing anyone will hear before the fabric of space-time shatters, destroying everything. It’ll go on for long after that. Forever and ever, it seems.

Your physicist brother annoyingly interrupts your fantasy to inform you that sound is not possible in the vacuum of space. You relegate him to the periphery of your conscience, as you’ve always done. And once more, you’re lost in that sound–the sound.

You don’t know how long you were standing there. The rain must’ve stopped, started, and stopped and started again. But then again, you weren’t really there, were you? You were somewhere else—if the state you were in could be classified as a place at all. It was nowhere and everywhere, all at once.

Years, months, or minutes later (really, it was hard to tell how much time had passed), the track finished. The next song, unlike its predecessor, had words. And something inside of you stirs. You have to know what the words attached to such powerful emotions describe. You have to understand what they’re saying. How else do we understand someone else’s happiness, their pain, their stories—if not through song? Buddha himself first felt sorrow when he listened to someone singing outside the palace walls. Music is the closest we get to the soul existing in material form.

A few more tracks pass. You turn and look at the CD cover: The Ravi Shankar Collection: Portrait of a Genius. Years later, you would learn that this musician mentored The Beatles at the height of the band’s fame. But at the moment, you couldn’t be bothered by anything but trying to decipher sentiments conveyed in a language you didn’t understand at all.

Through decades of scholarship, travel, and practice, you learned what those words meant. You were paid to translate such words, and to teach them. After earning your third degree, you come to realize that not all knowledge is contained in books. The most important knowledge can’t be found between pages. It comes in the form of surprise and wonder. Like on that rainy day in the West End: great music is powerful enough to understand, even if you can’t understand the words to a song—even if there are no words at all. At least when it comes to what really matters.

II. The rest of it

The above anecdote was inspired by the author of Teach Yourself Hindi. I’m currently learning a new language and reading books like Cloud Cuckoo Land and Babel that explore language and its related themes (such as translation). People come to learn languages in all sorts of ways. Some of us are forced, either by our families or societies. Others are interested in scholarship. The most interesting paths to me are those that we find in adulthood: a connection with a language, population, or culture that’s so strong it compels us to study a foreign means of communication.

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