This publication arose from the seminar “Sense-to-sense Translation,” taught in Spring 2025 at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Sense-to-sense” was a graduate-level seminar in the graphic design department, though it was open to all MFA students in VCU’s School of the Arts. It was a writing seminar for artists, but more specifically it was a seminar on translation and the senses, on translating from the perceptual — from the “non-verbal” (Ursula Le Guin) — to the linguistic. From scent or sound or art into language. From feeling, thought, and sensation into words.
It was a seminar, at first, about making things legible. But about halfway through, things started to turn. When we got back from spring break, we read poet and translator Anne Carson’s “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” where she writes,
Carson pulls out the word cliché to illustrate this, a word with no English translation. In French, cliché is the past participle of the verb clicher, a term that originally comes from the printing industry. Its literal translation is “to make a stereotype from a relief printing surface.” That the word is something of an onomatopoeia — mimicking the sound of the printer’s die striking the metal — is also part of what makes it, per Carson, untranslatable.
She writes,
After we read this, I showed the class my friend Juliana Castro’s Are.na channel called Feelings english doesn’t have.
… Like the German Zweisamkeit, or in English: the intimacy shared between two people, which indicates a kind of loneliness around the pair due to their special bond.
… Or the Korean word 어이없다, which translates literally to “without a why” and describes a situation that has no reason, or that is so absurd that it leaves you dumbfounded.
Or the famously untranslatable Portuguese word saudade, which others define as a kind longing like nostalgia or melancholia, but Valeria Luiselli describes as the “presence of an absence.”
In her book Sidewalks, Luiselli has a whole essay on this word, which she wrote in Spanish, and I read in English.
In an interview, Luiselli said,
So we started thinking about the kind of writing that starts with a lack, with an absence. That comes out of, and revolves around, a silence. There is something almost magnetic about the untranslatable. We are drawn into its gaps and silences like the gravitational pull of a black hole.
For Pope L., the attempt at description is always accompanied by loss. He said,
Early in the semester, we decided to attempt to write from images and sound and scent, and we knew that just as something would be gained, something else would be lost in translation. We made a deal with language. Our agreement was unspoken, but it was an agreement all the same.
We accepted that language can only approximate meaning, and we decided to embrace that ambiguity. But we still thought that attempting to convey meaning — how we see things, what we feel, how things truly are — was a worthy pursuit.
It’s the deal we make with language.
For the latter half of the semester, we started to ask ourselves, what happens when language doesn’t hold up its end of the deal?
What happens when language fails us, or stops itself or stutters? Is scarred or silenced or broken with grief. How can we write into a space of uncertainty or unknowing? What do we do with the untranslatable?
The following essays are our attempts to answer these questions. They are pieces about sound that only a body remembers; the porousness of memory; accents that are unplaceable. They are about family and lineage, lost time. They are about the language of machines, and what might happen (in, say, a dystopian future) if all communication was scripted by technology. They are each really moving in their own way, they say a lot with a little, and they are beautiful examples of how circling around the thing can bring us closer to the essence and the truth of the experience than saying it directly.
With that, I’ll be quiet and let you get reading,
Meg Miller
Meg Miller is a writer and editor living in Richmond, Virginia who has contributed writing to the New York Times, Frieze, BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, and other web and print publications, mostly about the ways design, art, language, and technology shape culture and society. She’s editorial director at Are.na and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Sense is Not Everything was authored, edited, and designed by the participants of this seminar: Rasim Bayramov, Hwiy Chang, Molly Garrett , Tariye George-Phillips, Aya Khalifeh, Diego Pablo Màlaga, Nneoma Njoku, Tyna Ontko, Irene Piazza, Quinn Standley, Weitong “ShanMu” Sun, Lorna Williams, and Wren Tiffany.
Website designed and coded by Weitong "ShanMu" Sun and Tariye George-Phillips.