Crafting a human text is like wrestling a wild animal

Language will be lost, and I know how it will happen. It will go like something that took place on vacation in Sicily a few years ago. On the way to our Airbnb, I drove our rental car along increasingly obscure roads. Eventually, a bumpy goat trail led us to an open field. Stranded there, my partner and I finally took a critical look at Google Maps and realized we had been following the walking directions to our destination instead of the driving route. The effect was particularly grotesque that one time, but whenever I’m driving, my sense of direction and my ability to think critically immediately shut off the moment I turn on the app. I follow the app to where I need to go, and I follow the app back home. I usually don’t remember how I drove there. Or back.

I fear that it’s precisely this kind of idiocy that will cause language to crumble. When the app turns on, one’s sense of language turns off. Robots won’t become more eloquent than humans, but humans will become lazier when they let robots do the writing. Lazier, less interested in — or curious about — rich, original language, new and unexpected ways to phrase things. Less critical about whether the words on the page are really the best way to express something. Why try an interesting detour when the computer tells you how to write effectively (or even worse: « beautifully »), and you don’t have to think about it anymore? (Until you find yourself stranded in an open field.) 

Concerns about the decline of language belong in the same category as concerns about « kids these days »: the Romans were already complaining about it. But it really does feel different now.¹ Of course, there will always be the more rustic forms of linguistic decline: people reading less than they used to, children supposedly no longer being able to spell. But I long for a good spelling mistake. One of those glaring grammatical errors, in a sentence where you can tell someone struggled to get the words out — biting their lip, furrowing their brow, working hard. I’ll take that any day over the flawless drivel that appears in LinkedIn posts of people I used to work with, the mattress sellers websites I compared recently, internship application letters, the captions with dermatology-videos that pop up in my Instagram feed, and in personal essays on websites that rely on banner-ad sales. Everything written in the same mechanical rhythm, with the same punchy voice and the same bloodless certainty. Sentences packed with so many « meaningful » words that mean absolutely nothing.²

That strain to put words to paper, the constant self-flagellation that comes with crafting a human text, was brilliantly captured in a book from a few years ago, by the French writer and translator Cécile Wajsbrot. In Nevermore (2021), a French translator travels to Dresden to mourn the loss of a loved one. She spends her time walking through the city, and sitting down to translate « Time Passes » by Virginia Woolf.

In Nevermore’s translation passages, the narrator plows through Woolf’s text chronologically, sentence by sentence. « Time Passes » is the middle section of Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, and it describes how a family’s country house stands empty for ten years, slowly becoming overgrown, swallowed up by time. You first get the English sentence by Woolf that Nevermore’s narrator must translate, after which the narrator shares her struggles and deliberations as she attempts to render the « poetic simplicity of the English » into French. She’s usually dissatisfied with the result. The novel is a tortured journey through the mind of a translator. « Every attempt at translation is bound to fail. Let’s give it a try — with a sigh, but without getting discouraged. »³

I read Nevermore in its Dutch translation published in December 2025. That means it’s a Dutch translation of a sort-of-fictional attempt to translate an English classic into French. Good luck! Translator Josephine Rijnaarts explains her courageous approach in her afterword to the Dutch translation. She writes that she had two options. One was to keep Woolf’s English and the French translations in her own text as they were, and to just translate into Dutch the narrator’s thinking about the translations: issues, doubts, failings. The other option was to « pretend that the French translator is translating the text from English into Dutch. »

Rijnaarts describes her inner conflict: at first, she chose the first option, then threw all of her work out and started over completely with the second strategy. That was a difficult decision, but she gradually realized it would be for the best; she had started noticing that Nevermore’s narrator mainly struggled with translating Woolf’s compact, poetic writing style. The challenges of conveying that in another language are universal. The narrator « had to unravel and dissect [Woolf’s] sentences before they could be rendered in another language, and whether that was French or Dutch didn’t really matter anymore. » Nevermore’s narrator provides insight into the complicated process of translating a text. As Rijnaarts calls it — and experienced it herself: « the doubts, the difficult choices — I would almost say: het gehannes. »⁴ 

This results in passages like this:

Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window-pane. 
Kleine vossen kropen uit hun gebarsten pop en trippelden hun leven uit op het raam. Pattered their life out. Wat staat hier? Wat deden die vlinders? Out suggereert een verlengende, uitbreidende beweging, iets wat in de richting van het leven gaat, iets wat het kruipen uit de pop verlengt.

Here’s my own attempt at a translation:

Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window-pane. 
Tortoise-shell butterflies [literally: « small foxes »] crawled out of their cracked chrysalis and scurried their lives out onto the window. Pattered their life out. What does this say? What were those butterflies doing? Out suggests a prolonging, expanding movement, something that moves in the direction of life, something that extends the crawling out of the chrysalis.

« What does this say? What were those butterflies doing? » is the essence of the translation process and, at the same time, can be read as a cry of despair. 

There is so much beauty in the struggle, the hassle, het gehannes. Trying to get as close as possible to the nuances of the original, while at the same time knowing that you’re going to be disappointed with the end result. Doubting everything, except the importance of the work itself. The narrator describes how she has to take a deep breath before tackling a long, complicated sentence, but also how short sentences are sometimes harder to translate than long ones. She shows just how many possibilities there can be for a seemingly simple sentence, how she soldiers on without finding a satisfactory solution, promising herself she’ll come back to it later. Whenever she receives a translation assignment, she says, she feels « as if a wild animal is pouncing on me. It scares me, and the point is that I have to tame it. »

While reading Nevermore in Dutch, I was struck by the question: how was this book translated from French into English? How do you translate Virginia Woolf into her own language? Tess Lewis did it; the result was published in 2024 by Seagull Books. 

In her afterword, Lewis explains that she had three different strategies — she didn’t choose between them like Rijnaarts, but she alternated. She always kept Woolf’s original sentences in italics. In the first strategy, she immediately followed that line with the English translations of the narrator’s French experiments — to provide insight into the translation process and also to showcase the beauty of Woolf’s choices. For example:

The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands.
The autumn trees with ravaged limbs, utterly ravaged, in their ravage. Autumn trees, ravaged as they are, assume the flash of tattered flags blazing in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle, recount death in combat. Where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and bones bleaching and burning far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees, for all their ravage, take on the flash of tattered flags glowing in the cool obscurity of the cathedral crypts where descriptions of death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands are inscribed in gold letters on marble pages.

Another strategy was to leave the narrator’s French translations in a different font, while only rendering in English the narrator’s comments that show how incompatible languages can be. See, for example, this sentence by Virginia Woolf about the rain pouring into the country house, and the owners of the country house staying away:

The rain came in. But they never sent; never came. 
La pluie entrait. No. La pluie pénétrait. That’s better. Another problem: they never sent. An absolute construction, without an object. Impossible in French. Ils ne faisaient jamais signe? Ils ne donnaient aucune nouvelle? Ils n’envoyaient jamais personne? They gave no sign? They sent no news? They never sent anyone? La pluie pénétrait. Mais ils n’envoyaient jamais rien; ne venaient jamais. This is closer to the rhythm of the original.

At times when Woolf’s translations could be rendered into French fairly easily and directly, Lewis left out the translation attempt altogether. This, for example, is Lewis’s English rendering of the aforementioned butterfly passage:

Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window-pane. 
Pattered out suggests a kind of extension, of expansion, something directed toward life that prolonged their emergence from the chrysalis.

The French translation doesn’t deviate from the original much, and in English, the desperate question of what on earth those butterflies are doing doesn’t have to be asked.

It’s delightful to read how someone tries, hesitates, stumbles, fumbles their way through a text, guided by knowledge and experience but also often simply making decisions based on intuition, mood or whim. This clearly applies to the novel’s narrator, but also to its translators. That’s exactly the kind of relationship people need to keep having with language now and then, in order to keep it alive.

So: I think I know how we’ll rapidly lose our command of language (shutting down our brains while following an app), but I also think I know what it will feel like when we lose it. One recent Dutch novel makes the degradation of language very concrete. In Een woord voor (A word for) by the writer and philosopher Eva Meijer (1980), words start disappearing — one by one, sometimes in small groups. Meijer’s narrator is a kind of omniscient force hovering above the country and the language, describing the moment a word is gone and the immediate effect it has. The decline begins with the word « achteloos » (mindless, inattentive). Second is « archaïsch » (archaic), which at that moment, as the narrator notes, is noticed by only three people: 

a Frisian archaeologist writing an email to a colleague, a classicist at Leiden University researching the portrayal of women in the works of Euripides who’s just starting to write a new article, and a butcher in Zuidlaren telling his first customer of the day about his vacation in Hungary.

When « ekster » (magpie) subsequently disappears, it causes a bit more inconvenience than the first two vanished words did; even more confusion ensues when « neuken » (fucking — the verb) meets the same fate; and the real social problems begin when « geld » (money) drops out of the language. In written texts — in books, documents and on the internet — the words turn into blank spaces. In speech, people can no longer think of the words when they want to use them: there was a word for it, but what was it? They do still remember synonyms, or the word in English. In that regard, it couldn’t have happened in a better country, because the Dutch weren’t particularly proud of their own language to begin with, and most of them can get by in English or, to a lesser extent, German, French or Arabic. If necessary, by using gestures and body language.

Meijer focuses on a number of characters: a young couple (one a poet and the other a woodworker), an academic, some government workers. These characters all read more like a means for Meijer to convey her point of view than as real people. Much more entertaining is the public reaction: a demonstration that gets out of hand after the word « yellow » disappears, in which supporters of calling that color « cheese » come to blows with supporters of « straw » and « sun ». And the backlash that arises when the Dutch government decides that English will be the new official language: is that really the right solution? What about the non-English speakers who will be left in total isolation? And for those who can « get by » in English: is being able « to get by » in your main language really enough?

Meijer is less interested in the question of who or what is responsible for the disappearance of words, than in what is lost. The characters often discuss this in a rather didactic manner. When the woodworker Mik says that it might actually be a good thing if language became a bit simpler (because government communications might become more accessible) Agnes, an academic specializing in lost words, says that it is a misconception that simplification leads to accessibility. « If you don’t have words for the complexity [of life], you lose the ability to talk about it with one another. The answer to the incomprehensibility of bureaucratic language isn’t simple, ugly language, but clarity. » Later, Agnes writes: « Life isn’t straightforward; relationships aren’t straightforward. We need all the words out there to express that. To live together better, to disagree with one another better. » It often takes many words to be able to understand each other; with the disappearance of language, our capacity for understanding disappears.

What makes the book an oppressive reading experience is that, as soon as a word disappears, it disappears from the novel too. This is pretty funny at first (« They were dressed in cheese »), but when more general words are lost, reading the novel becomes challenging. Especially after the disappearance of « ik » (I) or « dat » (that) and all words containing « dat » (such as « omdat », which means « because »), some sentences in the second half of the book become a puzzle to read. Like when one character reflects on how small her father’s role is in her life, while the Dutch words for « because », « family », « I » and « people » have disappeared:

Omdie het weinig meer met vaderschap te maken heeft. En de rest van haar verwanten kent ze niet. Ze denkt vaak: wat heeft mij met die personen te maken.

My attempt at a translation:

Bereason it doesn’t have much to do with fatherhood anymore. And she doesn’t know the rest of her kinsfolk. She often thinks: what does me have to do with those persons.

The more words disappear, the more frustrating and exhausting reading becomes, and the more keenly you, as a reader, become aware of just how anxiety-inducing the erosion of language actually is. You begin to long for a sentence that flows easily, to fear which words will disappear next. 

The characters experience the same thing: as words disappear, thoughts vanish before they’re finished. They’re exhausted and annoyed from the effort it takes to express themselves — in what little Dutch remains, or in the limited English they know. That familiar feeling of a mental error that everyone experiences from time to time (as one woman muses: « when she suddenly forgot her PIN at the vet’s reception desk, when she couldn’t remember her oldest daughter’s name on her birthday, when she suddenly couldn’t figure out how to turn off the windshield wipers ») becomes a constant state of being. Has a word I can’t think of disappeared, is this early onset dementia, or am I just very tired? Toward the end of the novel, characters struggle against feelings of total dissociation; amid all the confusion, they suddenly can’t think of a single word, in any language.

Eva Meijer has written twenty books to date, including eight novels. Her work has been translated into twenty languages, and Meijer’s website neatly lists the languages in which each publication has appeared. As I write this, there are no plans to translate Een woord voor. While reading it, the novel struck me as untranslatable: it is so dependent on the sound and structure of the Dutch language — even when in the end all Dutch words have disappeared, and the novel shifts entirely to English.⁵

But if the translators of Nevermore managed to solve that puzzle, then Een woord voor should be no problem either. I can picture a translator seeing that novel storming toward them like a wild animal, sighing, and confronting the beast sentence by sentence. Searching for solutions to the loss of a word that has very different consequences in Dutch than in the target language, discarding solutions, finding new ones. Tackling a sentence in which half the words have disappeared in Dutch, for which the alternatives in the new language don’t seem to fit. A translator who feels anxious about having to capture in their translation the anxious atmosphere of the novel. Not a robot that generates the most likely outcome in a new language for every sentence, not a human editor who doesn’t question that outcome, but a translator who hanneses through it, word for word for word.

1. I’m one hundred percent certain that’s also something a Roman has said at some point. ↩︎
2. To read more about this particular problem, go and find the rousing essay « If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you » by Sam Kriss on his Substack, Numb at the Lodge. ↩︎
3. English excerpts from Nevermore I’ve cited in this piece are all from Tess Lewis’ English translation, unless otherwise noted. ↩︎
4. « Gehannes », from the verb « hannessen », is a Dutch word that’s difficult to translate. The verb means something like: being very busy with something while failing at it. Acting inefficiently, blundering through something. In this context, it’s used like: the hassle. « Hannes » is a male name but also a word for idiot or dunce. ↩︎
5. The ridiculousness of Dutch-English is beautifully illustrated in a scene in the middle of the novel, during an emergency government meeting after the name of the city of Tilburg disappears. Several crisis ministers and the mayor of the newly-nameless town brainstorm a new name for the city. After a number of options are suggested and rejected, the mayor mentions that during Carnival, the city is called « Kruikenstad », and people already have a positive — even festive — association with that name. Since the government is encouraging people to speak English, they have to set a good example with an English name. This is a straight quote from the book, no translation on my part:
   
   « What is a kruik in English? » vraagt John aan Aukje.
   « A jug. Jug City, » zegt Aukje.
   « Jug City, » beaamt Karin.
   « Great. Jug City. Thanks everybody, » zegt John. « I will see you all back here tomorrow at nine. » ↩︎