The Places Inside Us: Love across languages

By Ha Lynn

Being in love with someone who does not speak your language can be a peculiar experience. I am in a relationship with a person who does not speak Korean, my first language, and nor do I speak Polish, which is his. Yet we converse effortlessly in English. And although our English is perfectly fluent, I know that there are parts of me that can be read only through the language of where I am from, the one through which I first started learning the world around me. The shape of the words that I learned to fill my mouth with, in the initial, juvenile efforts to explain myself to others. As a reader and writer especially, I know that I am a person written in the language I have read and written the most in.

I’ve always liked scenes in films where lovers are looking in differing directions, differing places, lying next to each other. In the film Past Lives (2023) directed by Celine Song, there appears a scene in which Arthur, the American husband of the Korean-American protagonist, Nora, confesses such fear. Lying in bed next to her, he tells her—a South Korean woman who emigrated to the US with her family as a young child—that she sleep-talks in Korean, and that she must dream in the language. He says, with somber and worrisome eyes, that sometimes he gets scared. His next words resonate with me. “You dream in a language that I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.”

It reminds me of something I can never forget when thinking about what is lost in translation—what falls between the gaps between different languages. Once in high school, one of my friends who is Czech told me that her language melts on the tongue. The expression sounded so beautiful, but in a way that is so far away from me and so ungraspable, that from time to time, I still think of the sensation that is and will never be mine. The lyricism that I will never be able to own, those to which I can only be a distant and curious beholder.

Similar thoughts cross my mind silently but firmly when I gaze at my boyfriend speaking in Polish with his friends or family. My blank, confused eyes dart after the crowd’s laughter that I do not understand. At every moment, just like that, we miss past each other. Despite our mutual efforts to learn each other’s languages, for now, our languages remain as sounds rather than words to each other’s ears. And I know, deep down, that some words will never reach us, that there will be meanings that cannot be transferred between our very distant languages. There is a melancholic realisation within me that we might not never completely reach one another, even when we step towards each other. And such an everlasting distance, such inevitable loss between two different beings feels like a common tragedy, which I find so ubiquitously beautiful.

I do resonate with the fear of Arthur. There are times when my mind focuses more on what cannot be shared than what can. Such feelings, however, are anxieties that peak through amidst the search and yearning for love as a utopian fantasy of complete connection between people. Things get lost between languages, even in the best of efforts to carefully carry and convey the same thoughts and sentiments.  What I meant might not be what you have received on your end. But things get lost and fall between the gaps all the time anyway, don’t they? I’ve always operated on a firm belief that people can never fully understand each other, even when speaking in the same language.

I recall some mornings—mornings where I awake from under the warm duvet and through blurry sight, see him sitting in front of the desk by the bed, crouching over a big notebook with a focused gaze. When I crawl out of bed to look into it, I see carefully written wrong letters in incorrect orders. Frowning, he asks me questions that I’ve never thought of before, questions that make me see my language from the perspective of an outsider, pushing my understanding further from a way of being that is too obvious for me. In these moments it almost feels like we are building a language together.

And the nights—lying next to him, I type Korean letters on my laptop, my eyes chasing their circular shapes, my dancing fingers crafting sentences with the language of where I am from, one I am made of. On my screen, I feel the warmth composed of words that do not reach him, a temperature that does not penetrate him. He might never truly understand why some sayings cut me deep, reasons why I find certain words so painfully beautiful. And at least for a long time, I will remain as a witness and not a participant in his conversations with his friends and family, waiting impatiently for a translation to be offered to my ears. When I look away from the screen whilst writing, I see his back softly rising and falling as he sleeps next to me. I think of the soft sounds and shapes of his thoughts, moving in rhythms that are not yet known to me, in the world he inhabits.

It reminds me of the times I stared at his fingers dancing on the keys of the piano, the elegant movement that could never be mine. And I wonder, in this ephemeral world of yours, what you are holding onto, where you are headed. I imagine things and places that make up who you are, those that are foreign to me, and hope that the world is enveloping you tenderly, with great generosity. We will always be looking at different places. But if I look away from my world that are composed of endless pages full of language and stories and sleepless nights of typing, I realise, that those you love remain beside you. That even asleep, there are people you meet in your dreams. Someone to wake up to in the morning and talk to about your strange and scary dreams. Someone who pats your back and tells you that it is okay and that it was just a dream. Sometimes from my loud typing he opens his sleepy eyes and looks at me, softly laughing at my focused, pouted lips. Closing his eyes again, he tells me to keep on writing, without being able to understand what I am writing in Korean. In these moments, I feel that this is what love is—what we find the most understanding and encouraging is sometimes found not in cohesive, rational and logical comprehension of ourselves but rather a warm embrace and the kind look in the eyes of the person  you love.

The next morning, he tries again to tell me something in Korean. Along the way, there are a lot of ‘why?’s and ‘I don’t understand’s. These questions, murmurs, hesitations, failures, attempts and the smiles and laughter in between make up our love. Here, there are conversations that don’t die, those continuing curiosities kindling a warm flame between us, slowly opening up the places inside us. When he pronounces words in my language, slowly and very carefully, as if moulding clay, I sometimes feel a joyful crack deep within me. Without hurrying, we sometimes see glimpses of the places within us, these little worlds inside us.