The Untranslatable Comfort of Home
Last Tuesday at 2 AM, while doom-scrolling through increasingly apocalyptic news, I found myself reaching not for my beloved copy of The Shadow of the Wind or My Struggle, but for a battered paperback of Anne of Green Gables. There’s something about crisis that sends us scrambling back to our native linguistic territory, to books that don’t require the mental gymnastics of parsing cultural context or trusting a translator’s choices. When my anxiety is already doing backflips, do I really want to wonder whether Ferrante’s narrator would use that exact phrase in Italian, or if Murakami’s melancholy hits differently in Japanese?
This realization unsettled me more than it should have. As someone who champions translated literature, who argues passionately that monolingual readers are missing entire universes of human experience, I felt like I was betraying my own principles. But maybe there’s something deeper here about how we seek comfort in language during difficult times.
The rhythm of our mother tongue during stress isn’t just about comprehension. It’s about the cellular memory of being soothed by stories in the language we first learned to dream in. When my grandmother read me Goodnight Moon, she wasn’t just sharing a story, she was embedding English cadences into my nervous system as a pathway to safety.
What Gets Lost When Everything Feels Lost
Translation, even at its most masterful, requires us to bridge gaps that we might not have energy for when we’re already stretched thin. Consider the way Lydia Davis renders Flaubert’s precise, almost clinical observations in Madame Bovary. Her translation is brilliant, but it asks us to trust her interpretation of Flaubert’s irony, his particular brand of restrained contempt for bourgeois life. During normal times, this intellectual dance feels invigorating. During a global pandemic or personal crisis, it can feel like one more layer of uncertainty in an already uncertain world.
But here’s what troubles me about my own retreat to anglophone comfort reads: am I unconsciously buying into the idea that “foreign” literature is harder work? When I automatically reach for Marilynne Robinson instead of Clarice Lispector during tough times, am I feeding exactly the kind of literary xenophobia that keeps translated books marginalized?
The answer isn’t simple, because translation does add cognitive load. When Haruki Murakami writes about the weight of memory in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, we’re experiencing his ideas filtered through Alfred Birnbaum’s linguistic choices. That’s not a flaw, it’s the nature of the medium. But it means we’re always reading at least two authors simultaneously, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
The Translator as Emotional Intermediary
Some translators understand this emotional vulnerability better than others. Ann Goldstein’s work with Elena Ferrante creates such fluid intimacy that many readers forget they’re reading a translation at all. The Neapolitan novels feel immediate, urgent, like Ferrante is speaking directly into our ear rather than through an intermediary. This is the translation equivalent of perfect comfort food: nourishing and satisfying without drawing attention to its own construction.
Compare this to some of the more experimentally minded translators who deliberately preserve the foreignness of their source texts. When Susan Bernofsky translates Franz Kafka, she maintains the strange, bureaucratic rhythms of German that make his protagonists’ alienation feel linguistically embedded. This approach works beautifully for the literature, but it’s not necessarily what we crave when we need books to be a soft place to land.
The question becomes: should translators adjust their approach based on the emotional function of the text? Should comfort reads be translated differently than challenging literary fiction? This feels vaguely patronizing, like we’re assuming readers of translated literature need their foreign authors domesticated during difficult times.
Building Comfort in Translation
Maybe the issue isn’t with translation itself, but with how we build relationships with translated texts over time. My copy of Anne of Green Gables is comfortable partly because I’ve read it dozens of times, because I know exactly how Anne’s voice will rise and fall, because Lucy Maud Montgomery’s prose rhythms are as familiar to me as my own pulse. But I also have a Swedish crime novel, Åsa Larsson’s Sun Storm in Marlaine Delargy’s translation, that I’ve returned to three times during particularly stressful periods. The combination of Larsson’s atmospheric storytelling and Delargy’s clean, unobtrusive prose has become its own kind of linguistic comfort food.
This suggests that comfort in translation might be about repetition and familiarity rather than linguistic origin. When we know a translated text well enough, when we’ve absorbed the translator’s voice alongside the author’s, the gap between languages starts to feel less significant. We’re no longer consciously navigating the translation; we’re simply returning to a known emotional landscape.
The challenge is giving ourselves permission to develop these relationships with translated literature. It means reading Isak Dinesen’s African stories not once as a cultural duty, but multiple times until they become part of our internal library. It means allowing Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to become as familiar and comforting as any childhood favorite.
The Courage to Stay Curious
Perhaps the most radical act during difficult times isn’t retreating to familiar linguistic territory, but insisting on the importance of other perspectives precisely when our world feels small and frightening. When everything seems uncertain, there’s something deeply grounding about encountering the different ways humans have processed uncertainty across cultures and languages.
Reading Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories in translation during the current global moment doesn’t feel like work, it feels like essential witnessing. Her translators, Keith Gessen and Anna Gunin, give us access to voices that expand our understanding of how societies process collective trauma. This isn’t comfort reading in the traditional sense, but it offers the deeper comfort of connection across vast differences.
The next time crisis sends me reaching for books, I want to remember that sometimes the most comforting thing isn’t the familiar, but the reminder that human experiences of joy, loss, love, and resilience transcend any single language. Maybe what I need isn’t just the smooth cadences of my mother tongue, but the slightly foreign rhythms that remind me how vast and varied human responses to difficulty can be.
What about you? Do you find yourself retreating to books in your native language during tough times, or do translations offer their own particular kind of solace? I’m genuinely curious whether other readers experience this same linguistic nationalism during stress, or if I’m overthinking my own reading habits.
