Kolikjazykii znds, tolikrdt jsi clovekem. This wonderful Czech proverb, impossible to translate exactly, proclaims that you live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once.
It is plain, especially in recent history, that eastern European people have had an awful lot to cope with, and all have found their ways of dealing with it. These races are vividly alive, incapable of being lackluster about anything, and their various languages are correspondingly full of vigor and color. In Slovak, you don't just "perspire freely," you "sweat like a donkey in a suitcase." A Hungarian, by his own definition, is someone who enters a swinging door behind you and comes out in front of you. And as for the Czechs, well, their iconoclastic sense of humor is justly famed. Poland is renowned for zalatwi?, its way of getting around officialdom by going through "someone you know." Modern Russian is said to have numerous untranslatable euphemisms for shirking work, a legacy of seventy years of dispiriting Communist rule.
Most of these eastern European cultures are related through their Slavic inheritance. Hungarian stands out linguistically and is closer to Finnish than to the tongues of its Slavic neighbors. The Serbian author Dragan Veliki? writes of the confusing impact that his first experiences of the Hungarian language had on him:
I have a large collection of Hungarian words in my head, a collection that is both full and empty at the same time.
Full, because I remember the words, I can repeat them, they exist, they exist even for me, as mine - a kind of souvenir of the past from a life I am only now starting anew.
Empty, because I do not know what all these words mean. I remember the words the way one remembers one's own name . . . For instance: Pillanó utca. I translated that name to myself as "Pillangó Street," in other words, I did not translate it at all, convinced that it was a name a street bearing somebody's name. I walked through Budapest as if I had just arrived in Babylon where, by the grace of a god who had yet to become angry or disappointed, everything had a personal name, untranslatable, and thus immediately understandable. Nothing about that feeling changed even when my friend explained to me smilingly that pillangó means "butterfly." You are talking about the street of butterflies, she said, about Butterfly Street. But the word pillango was ever after engraved in my mind as the name of a butterfly. There was a "Pillangó butterfly" and it lived in Budapest.
There is a nice echo in this story of how we all learn languages in our childhood. We hear a spoken sound, a noise, and make an association, and even when as adults we may see it is wrong, we never quite lose that "meaning" that we once created for the noise. Here are some untranslatable words from a rich and varied region of the European continent.