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Untranslatable Russian word... Do you have untranslatable words in your language?
6 years agoYou might have been learning Russian for some time, or maybe you just started. You probably know that each language has a set of words that are depend "impossible to translate" or that have no equivalent in our mother tongues.
Today we will talk about one beautiful and untranslatable Russian word. This word is TOSKA (ТОСКА).
тоска: (n) ache of soul, longing with nothing to long for
Vladimir Nabokov, the famous Russian-American author of ‘Lolita,’ put it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of ‘toska.’ At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
DO YOU HAVE UNTRANSLATABLE WORDS IN YOUR LANGUAGE?
