Journal — 2026-09-03 (third session)

What this project is

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — the hygge/saudade-style words that get celebrated online as having no English equivalent — and eventually testing whether those claims actually hold up against real dictionaries, real usage, and how professional translators have actually handled the words in print.

Where things stood, and what this session chose to do

Earlier today, a separate session added the project's eleventh word, the Czech word litost (a self-pitying anguish popularized almost entirely by the novelist Milan Kundera). This session added a twelfth word: hüzün, a Turkish word usually glossed as a communal, Istanbul-specific melancholy. It is the project's first word from the Turkic language family (Turkish, Azerbaijani, and related languages), and this session chose it because two unusually good leads were available: a well-documented literary source (Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's memoir about Istanbul) and, better still, a named living translator who has written her own essay about the specific experience of translating this exact word.

What the session found

Hüzün turned out to combine two patterns the project has already seen separately, rather than being a wholly new kind of case. Like litost, its fame in English comes overwhelmingly from one celebrated novelist's own prose — Pamuk's book Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003, translated into English in 2005 by Maureen Freely) argues at length that hüzün is not an individual mood but a feeling an entire city shares, rooted in Istanbul's visible, everyday reminders of the vanished Ottoman Empire. But unlike Kundera, who invented his definition essentially alone, Pamuk explicitly credits four earlier Turkish writers as having shaped the same idea before him — so this is a much less solitary case.

Like an earlier word on file, the Greek meraki, hüzün also turns out not to be a native Turkish word at all — it was borrowed from Arabic. But where meraki's borrowing was a regional trade-language matter, hüzün's Arabic root (ḥuzn) comes from the Qur'an itself and from a documented tradition of medieval Islamic scholars writing about sadness as something close to a medical condition — a much bigger, civilization-wide borrowing than any this project has traced before. Checked directly against Turkey's own official state dictionary, the plain word turns out to be entirely ordinary — one simple definition, "sorrow, melancholy," with nothing special attached, the same pattern the project has now found for several other words once their national marketing gets stripped away.

The best find of the day is the translator's own account. Maureen Freely, who translated Pamuk's book into English, wrote a first-person essay describing how the act of translating his six-page sentence about the city's melancholy actually reshaped her own memory of Istanbul — her own childhood impressions of the city were displaced by Pamuk's darker vision as she worked through the passage. That is a genuinely rare kind of evidence for this project: a named professional translator's own account of grappling with one specific "untranslatable" word, rather than this project inferring translation choices secondhand. The one thing still missing is a direct look at exactly how she rendered the word itself on the page — whether she kept the Turkish word with an explanation, or replaced it with an English word entirely. That's flagged as the strongest next step on this word.

Also worth flagging: a search turned up a Turkish-connected writer publicly pushing back against the whole idea that hüzün captures something uniquely Turkish, arguing it has become a cliché driven by Pamuk's fame — the same kind of insider criticism this project has already documented for a couple of the lifestyle-marketed European words.

What this means

The knowledge base now covers twelve words. As with every new word, this session also went back and added cross-references from all eleven earlier word pages to the new one, so comparisons across the growing collection stay current rather than only pointing backward from the newest page.

What's next

No thirteenth word has been chosen yet; a session picking this up next might look for a word from a language family not yet represented (Semitic and East Asian tonal languages are both still missing) or chase the open thread on this word — getting hold of the actual English translation of Pamuk's book to see exactly how the translator rendered hüzün on the page. The usual list of smaller loose ends on the other eleven words remains open too.

What this needs from you

Nothing — no open question or decision is waiting on you right now.