Do we need either word in English? Well, there are plenty of démerdeurs to be found on this side of the Channel. Footballers, musicians, politicians, lawyers – their names are to be found in the papers often enough. As for the less adventurous among us, the number of petrol stations selling sad bunches of wilting roses suggests that there must be quite a big market for Drachenfutter.
Koi no yokan
(Japanese)
A gentle, unspoken feeling that you are about to fall in love
It’s not a coincidence that we talk of ‘falling’ in love. It’s a sudden thing, at least according to the songs – involuntary, inconvenient, irresistible, possibly even disastrous. It’s been compared, among other things, to being hit by a freight train. All in all, then, it doesn’t sound like a particularly enjoyable experience.
However, it doesn’t have to be any of those things. Just ask the Japanese. They have a phrase, koi no yokan (KOY-noh-yoh-CAN), which tells a very different story. It translates literally as ‘premonition of love or desire’, and it refers to the sense that you are about to fall in love with someone. There is no certainty, no commitment and probably no mutual awareness – certainly nothing is said – but the feeling is there. It’s not love, maybe not even desire – but it’s the realization that these things could be on the horizon.
The lazy translation into English is sometimes ‘love at first sight’, but koi no yokan is much more delicate and restrained than that. ‘Love at first sight’ is a shared surrender – glances across a room, strong emotions reflecting each other, a feeling of certainty. It’s getting your knife and fork straight into the main course, if you like, without having a starter, perhaps without even looking at the menu. Koi no yokan, on the other hand, is an individual sense of what might happen – the other person involved may at this stage know nothing of how you feel. It’s the difference between catching the faintest scent on the wind and, as we said before, being knocked down by a train. Koi no yokan senses the first tentative tremor of a feeling. It’s a surrender, above all, to the magic of potential.
Koi no yokan can be tinged with sadness as well as anticipation.
With koi no yokan, you have the feeling of a subtle, almost imperceptible awareness, the sense that it will become an emotion that will eventually grow and develop over time. It’s so gentle that you may find, with a shock, that it’s been there for some time, somewhere in the back of your mind, without your realizing it.
So subtle is it that it’s not even the moment when you stand on the brink of a love affair, wondering whether you have the courage to jump in, like jumping from a rock into a pool – it’s more the moment when you wonder whether you might step up to the rock at all.
It might not lead to love immediately, or perhaps at all, and there may be many ups and downs and twists of fate still to come. For that reason, koi no yokan can be tinged with sadness as well as anticipation. Once you’re on the rock, even if you shiver there nervously for a while, it’s hard in the end not to jump in. But at this moment, there’s no pressure on you. You could turn and walk away. And be safe. The point about koi no yokan is that it makes no promises, stakes no claims. If you do jump, it’s your own responsibility – literally a leap of faith.
Having the word doesn’t necessarily give us the feeling, but it does help us to recognize it when it happens. And we can never have enough words to describe our emotions.
Hiraeth
(Welsh)
Intense happiness at a love that was, and sadness that it is gone
Saudade
(Portuguese)
The sense of wistful melancholy experienced when reflecting on lost love
People do fall in love in English, but the language sometimes lacks the means to express the delicate ways in which the experience can affect us. Love and sadness can be inextricably intertwined; there may be a dreamy but intense happiness at the love that was, and regret that it is gone, all touched with an uneasy sense that maybe it was never really as perfect as it now seems. If English had a word for that finely judged balance of emotions when a lover is wronged or a love is lost, there might be fewer bad love songs on the radio. The Welsh, however – the earliest occupants of Britain, as they might occasionally remind you – have just such a word.
Hiraeth (HEER-eth) is a broader, more all-consuming love. It refers usually to the native Welshman’s love of Wales, its valleys, its craggy coastline, its language, its poetry and its history. But this is much more than simply homesickness. When a Welsh baritone like Bryn Terfel sings about the welcome they’ll keep in the valleys when you come home again to Wales, he also promises that he’ll banish your hiraeth with a few kisses. Coming home, he’s saying, will assuage the longing that you feel.
It’s an empty promise. This is an ache that can never be truly relieved. Because hiraeth is also a longing for unattainable past times – for your own childhood or for the historic, much-mythologized past of Wales, the days before the Saxons, or the time of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in the thirteenth century, or of Owain Glyndŵr in the fifteenth. For many, it could be a longing for the days of Wales as an independent nation.
But what has this to do with second-rate songs on the radio? Well, hiraeth can be felt for people, too. Mae hiraeth arna amdanot ti would translate as ‘I feel hiraeth for you.’ You might translate it as simply, ‘I miss you,’ but you would be cutting away all the emotion – handing over a cheap bunch of flowers bought in a supermarket rather than a bouquet, still jewelled with dew, that you picked yourself. The Welsh version means ‘I long for you deep in my soul; I long for the way we were, for the things we did together, the places we went, the dreams that we shared – and that we may share no more.’ You could write that in a poem. The English version, ‘Wish you were here,’ you’d put on a postcard.
Welsh isn’t the only language to boast such an evocative word. The Portuguese saudade (soh-DAHD) has been memorably translated as ‘the love that’s left behind’, and it has the same connotations of wistfulness and melancholy nostalgia, whether focused on a place or a person. Back in the seventeenth century, the aristocratic soldier-poet Francisco Manuel de Melo caught its knife-edge sense of mingled pleasure and pain with his definition: ‘A pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy’ – a phrase that could apply just as well to hiraeth.
Any Welshman will tell you that the difference between the Welsh language and the English language boils down to the fact that Wales is a romantic land of bards, poets and seers, while English is spoken by accountants in suits. But an Englishman might point defensively to the poetry of A. E. Housman and his ‘Land of Lost Content’ – ‘The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.’[3] So an Englishman can feel hiraeth, even if he doesn’t have a word for it.
3
A. E. Housman,