Toska is one of the many words of the Russian language that are considered untranslatable. Vladimir Nabokov describes it like this: “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.”
So, melancholy, sorrow, lugubriousness, anguish, nostalgia, boredom. Those words come close to some definition of toska, but none of them manages to capture its poetry and richness, the Russianness of the word, the imagery of snow and vodka and gloominess that comes with it. A full grasp of the word will always be lost to non-Russian speakers.
So what happens when we try to define ourselves? Even if we could speak all the languages in the world, would there be a word out there that could fully capture our poetry, the Russianness of us? And if there existed a language that was just ours and no one else’s, that could provide an accurate description of who we are, would we be able to find the equivalent words in other people’s language?
We can exchange experiences, share thoughts and feelings with one another and find a common ground, but there is a side of us that remains forever untranslatable, impossible to convey in someone else’s language. They might seize a certain sentiment or mood of whatever it is that we’re trying to express, but an exact match is unattainable. Some shades of us are bound to get lost in translation. There’s a place in all of us that is beyond other people’s reach, shut off from the outside world, ineffable to anyone but us. There’s a place where we’ll always be alone.
