Ig Credit: Fieldnotesbyfi

photos of dachas by Fyodor Savintev, published in Dacha: The Soviet Country Cottage (2023)

There is a musk that comes from academia, which I'll attempt to describe.

It starts with the smell of wood. Where a building isn't stone, it is old lacquered hard wood that has also been absorbing the elements for centuries. Outdoors, it is wet and slick, but indoors, the dryness preserves it, and absorbs the scents brought in such as leather and cigarettes and cigars and the spilled whiskey.

There is the scent of people as well, permeating throughout. Academia is often thought of as a solitary environment, but lectures and classes and clubs and parties, they bring together women, men and others in a tight space often. There's the scent of sweat and perfume and cologne, but also the inimitable aroma that comes from worn leather and damp wool. Breath these in deep enough, and your mind and soul are transported to events that have transpired over the course of decades, if not longer. The deep bellied laughter, the intimate whispers, and even the silence between two or more forbidden lovers, gazing from across the room.

Finally of course, there's the musk of books. Of paper, flax, cotton and leather, of the glue binding in the spine, and the collected dust of a hundred years. That scent is the book dying, the materials with which it was made slowly degrading over a prolonged period. A finely trained nose might even determine a book's age, from the distinct smell of the materials used by printers at the time.

Breath it all in, and let yourself feel everything that these fragrances evoke in your mind. Longing, desire, nostalgia, lust, anger, sadness, melancholy. The history that has passed may guide your present and future.

― Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935-1951

- Sylvia Plath, from 'Ariel'

Photo by Kristina Delp on Unsplash

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One uncanny aspect of translating is when I am grappling with a sentence that would sound particularly wrong if I tried to preserve any part of the original structure or idioms, because nothing about it matches the way one would phrase such an idea in my language, so what I need to do is mentally divorce the sentence from its syntax and vocabulary, to try and find how my language would give form to the same concepts. It always makes me wonder, what am I working with here? What is left when you remove the grammar and specific word choices from a sentence? I don’t know, a shapeless mental porridge of pure meaning, a nebulous feeling of what another brain has tried to express. I find it amazing that your mind knows just what to do with something so unfathomable—that it’s just like “right, right, give me a minute” as it distillates meaning out of words like it’s nothing then lassoes it down from the platonic realm of forms to give it a completely new shape. What is ‘meaning’ and how does it exist in your mind in this liminal moment after you’ve extracted it from a foreign language but haven’t yet found words in your own language that can embody it? I don’t know.