A related question is whether translation between different media is possible. Again, the answer is “Of course,” but similar qualifications apply. Take, for example, a print book that is “translated” into an e-reader format. Is it the same work? The words, spaces, and punctuation may be the same, but the reader’s experience of the e-book differs significantly from the print version. For example, a sensory experience that changes dramatically in this translation is the reader’s interaction with the book as a volumetric object. With a book, one is always aware (at least subliminally) of how far “into” the book one is—three-quarters, one-half, barely started, almost done. This knowledge is registered visually, kinesthetically, and proprioceptively. It is simply not the same as viewing a bar at the top of an e-reader screen showing the amount of text remaining.

Many contemporary writers are playing with the media-specific qualities of the print book, as if confronting publishers with works impossible to convert to e-books. Mark Z. Danielewski’s long narrative print poem Only Revolutions, for example, uses complex topographic patterns as important components of its signifying strategy, including a design that requires readers constantly to turn the book upside down and backwards to continue reading. Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent print book Tree of Codes has extensive die-cut holes on every page, a construction that treats the book as a sculptural object.

A clever and determined person might devise strategies that aim for similar experiences in an e-book, but such attempts would simply create new—not identical—aesthetic experiences. This is not to say, of course, that print books are superior to e-books, only that the two media forms are different. It remains to be seen what talented writers and artists will do with the aesthetic possibilities of e-books. Artistic adventures in the field are still in their infancy, hampered perhaps by publishers’ assumption that an e-book is simply a print work in electronic form. It is not, but this is not to say that it cannot have a glorious future of its own.

Once you accept that variation operates within a language, there is nothing particularly scandalous about seeing it work in translation across languages. There might even be something liberating in it. The French critic Roland Barthes once complained that the French language was quite simply fascist, since it obliged him to describe himself as either a man or a woman almost every time he used an adjective to describe himself. Was it really so hard to be queer in French? Perhaps Barthes could have just stayed with the few French adjectives that don’t require a sexual ending. But then, how much easier it is to move one’s text into a non-Romance language, into blissfully asexual adjectives! If a language is fascist, then translation might be less so. A truth that is constrained in one language might be less concealed in another.

All words can be translated, given world enough and time. But there lies the rub: we don’t have unlimited space and time in which to translate—things have to fit into boxes, and on time. There is, unfortunately for translators, what’s called the iconic dimension of language, the physical dimensions that language fills: how much language, for how long, with what rhythms, in what particular place, at what particular time. It is that iconic dimension, certainly aesthetic, that resists displacement. You can tell Hosni Mubarak to leave in as many languages you like, and they might convey many meanings, but what ultimately counts is how many of you are in Tahrir Square when you say it, when you are there, for how long, with what international visibility, and with what latent fear. The force of the words comes from that complex iconic positioning, and that is what we do not translate, even when we can talk about it.

And then, the words themselves may ultimately not matter. When your first love first responded to your timid declaration (hopefully with a yes), or your father’s death reached your ears and electrified the room, the words themselves were not important. What counted was the moment, and all that hinged on the words in that particular time and space. Augustine posited that ideas are illuminations that erupt in the mind, then leave momentary traces, like the flashes you see when you close your eyes after looking at light. Words simply allow us to recall those traces, and since they are no more than that, they can be in any language at hand, then translated into any other language. Translation may or may not be possible, but it doesn’t always matter. What counts is the experience, in its full aesthetic ground.

There seems to be a community-building function associated with the unsaid, therefore. Understanding the unsaid confers in-group membership: you don’t need to have jargon, slang, jokes, euphemisms, or codes explained because you share the same frames of reference. What the expression “We speak the same language” really means is “We understand the unspoken in the same way.” People can, as George Bernard Shaw quipped, be divided by the same language: “not bad” is higher praise to a British English speaker than “quite good,” and “Perhaps you might like to start looking for another job” is a very British way of saying, “You’re fired.” As social creatures, we are constantly creating new in-groups and new language communities, whether professional, generational, regional, gender based, or other.

Translation goes beyond words to include the intended meanings behind words, the values, beliefs, connotations, and unspokens that are implicitly carried by words. The hardest thing to translate is the particular meaning of what has been understood without having been said. If you translate the words alone, you lose out on the implications. If, on the other hand, you explain the implications by providing a gloss (Mubarak as “pharaoh,” his treaty with Israel), you lose out on the sense of being in the know, of belonging.

And yet, it’s not all about loss. Although there is certainly a lot of truth in the claim that poetry is what is lost in translation, there is also incongruity, humour, irony, and serendipity to be found in translation, and surely these too are essential to creativity and art.