About things that are lost in translation and the quest for ya la suo

I’ve been studying Chinese for a while now, and I truly have a relationship of love and hate with it. I hate when I cannot pronounce perfectly the tone of a simple syllable, but I do love the knowledge it brings. I believe the study of different languages can give one new perspectives about the world that surround us, ‘cause, in many aspects, languages sum up the spirit of the people who created it throughout the centuries. People shape the language, but languages also shape people. And that’s the problem of translating stuff. Sometimes you cannot just translate a single word directly, ‘cause in the context of a particular language it has different layers of meaning that are likely to be lost during translations. People who work with translations or are used to translate things know that very well.

Words are not natural things. They don’t grow in trees or pop up from the ground, they are created and shaped to express things people feel. They are like tools. Or like paintings. And when you study more than one language, you start to realize that different people in different ages and locations across the planet sometimes developed similar ways to express their feeling. The grammar may differ a lot, and also the structure of the language and so on, but sometimes the way isolated words relate to each other are curiously similar. Sometimes, however, they have nothing to do with each other and can’t even be translated. The point is that once they are created and accepted by people, they become something that stands alone. And, as I said, they do carry a handful of meanings. So we come to my story…

A few months ago I started a personal quest to understand the meaning of the expression ya la suo (呀啦索). I heard it for the first time in the lyrics of a Chinese song about Tibet, and I could not understand it nor find a direct translation, once it’s not in Mandarin, but in the Tibetan language. I don’t know why it called my attention so much, but it surely did. So I started an unpretentious research on that, and, to be honest, I didn’t find many useful things – at least not in English or Portuguese. But I did gather a short amount of information, so I could start talking to Chinese people about it. I asked them when would it be used, and how would they describe the meaning, and they could not explain it to me perfectly, ‘cause it’s not something they use in a daily basis. So I started picking puzzle pieces… I heard that people say ya la suo to express the magnitude of something, like when something is too beautiful – a landscape, for example, as I was told by some Chinese friends. I also read an article that described someone saying ya la suo in the middle of a sentence, like some kind of mantra used to reinforce a statement. And then I talked to someone else, and this person told me that it doesn’t have any particular meaning (“just a way of expression to call for the spirit, just ahhh”, as she said). Somehow, I could feel all of them were right, but there was something missing.

Well, by now, my best guess is that ya la suo means something like “Everything is alright”. It’s more like a sigh, and I think it may have Buddhist roots. I say that because I’ve been reading about Tibetan Buddhism for a while, and, considering Buddhist beliefs that everything is ephemeral and one should not get attached to happiness or suffering (once they will all vanish eventually), it’s reasonable to think that everything is always alright, ‘cause every little thing will go away. If you are used to accept whatever life gives you, you are likely to believe that everything is always ok. That’s beautiful, and ya la suo makes sense in that perspective. But I may be totally wrong, who knows? My point here is that not everything  is easy to translate; sometimes some words or expressions are quite hard, and they can give you a lot of trouble to unveil what they represent. But, after all, if you dig them deep enough, you may find more than what you were looking for. (G.P.)