Impossible Object
Is an untranslatable word an impossible object? Some things make sense in one moment, but not everywhere at once.1
Schadenfreude (German), the pleasure at another's misfortune. Komorebi (Japanese), the sunlight filtering through leaves. Desenrascanço (Portuguese), the improvisational ability to get oneself out of a difficult situation. Uncanny (English), the strange familiarity.
Sitting on a balcony with queers, I learned that Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family (like Hungarian and Estonian). A translator told me that Finnish often gives language models a hard time. A word that appears in a single form in French or English can take many shapes in Finnish, changing as it moves through a sentence, depending on the role it plays and its relations to other words.
Do computational systems prefer words that stay in one form?
If a word can have many shapes, which shape does the body remember? Where do the letters go when they move away? What happens to words that do not fit?
My boobs have never been breasts or poitrine.2 The word poitrine makes me think of what people eat when they're not vegan: breast meat (poitrine de dinde). I've eaten plenty of it myself. Diligently. It helped me stay alive. But the practice of writing comes either before or after that.
On that note, I'm becoming faggot (pédé). In French, some dykes, including my past self, play with the feminine marker -e, turning pédé into pédée. I notice the joy I feel in letting go of the e. I am becoming a gay trans guy. And I've always been a lesbian.
But I doubt this research is the place to elaborate.
1 Impossible objects are integrable only locally but not globally. Meschers, MIT tool
2 Le mot poitrine me fait penser à ce qu'on bouffe quand on n'est pas vegan: une poitrine de dinde. J'en ai bien goûté, assidûment même. Ça m'a aidé à vivre. Mais écrire ça se passe avant ou après. À ce propos, je deviens pédé (pédée, sans le -e- à la fin, c'te fois). Je doute que cette recherche soit la place pour élaborer.
Marlo in the kitchen, 2013.
Last edited: 2026.06.05