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Untranslatable Words

The Unspoken Language Between Horse and Rider

By Julia SmithPublished 6 years ago 11 min read
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Only when there’s about two football fields in between you and the shore will the horse reluctantly pick its hooves up off the ocean floor. They’ve memorized the patterns of the sand and the fluctuating depths of their ocean. Down there, you want to imagine the water as a mirror, or diamonds, but it moves too fast for you to really see straight down to the bottom.

This translucent opaqueness of Caribbean water blurs your mental vision, and everything I thought I knew about movement and balance became hazy as I watched the white sand tornado around this foreign horse’s fetlock and up past his knees, and I realized I couldn’t tell the difference between walking or swimming or flying.

Kalpa. In Sanskrit, a noun defining the passing of time on a grand, cosmological scale.

We were twelve westerners, lead by two Cayman Island locals from Jamaica into the Caribbean Sea that hugs the island on all sides. The saddles and blankets hung from branches back on the shore, where trees lined the dunes, providing shade for the various trail groups that frequented this section of beach. The leather and hand-loomed wool flapped like wings in the breeze. Both the guides took turns bringing up the rear and leading the herd of predominantly inexperienced riders through the water.

I arched my back, sat up straight, and lifted my seat two inches off his back to alleviate the nuisance of my weight while he swam for both of us.

He yearned to explore, trying in every way to find a kink in my instructions, a loophole in my carefully articulated request to move forward with the crowd. Chin up, chest out, leg on, heels down, toes up, and smile. Half halt on the left rein, bend his body around the left leg, look towards the shore and don’t turn your head for a second. But the water would entrance me, my eyes would fall to catch a glimpse of the sun crystallized on the water’s surface.

Ukiyo. In Japanese, a sense of fleeting beauty, detached from the pains of life.

Loss of focus and my muscles relax. He is not obligated to listen to my half-assed request.

I only realized we reached shallow water again when I felt the expansions and contractions of his stomach against my legs slow. I loosened my rein and softened my leg, and he jumped into a trot, splashing both of us with lukewarm salt water in burning July. We played in the water, and watched a middle-aged woman with flailing limbs attempt to return back to shore. Her wide-brimmed straw hat hung from a string around her neck, her face beet red and water splashing up around her, soaking her cover-up with each kick. Her horse was watching a bird dive into the water for lunch.

According to philosopher Sapir and his student Whorf, the English-speaker’s fascination with “untranslatable” words stems from their theory of linguistic relativity, or the notion that language shapes how humans understand, perceive, and experience the world. It amazes us when another culture has given a word or phrase the power to put into words feelings we still need full sentences to understand. These words are not untranslatable in the sense that people of different tongues cannot grasp their meaning, but simply due to the fact that no other language has developed a single word or phrase for that particular phenomenon.

Slowly we rose from the water and above sea level, the sun reclaiming the excess water dripping from my horse’s back. The sand loosened its grip on his hooves as we continued to dry off, returning to the ground only to be churned up at the next storm. It fell with each step, a harsh contrast against the untouched parts of the beach, heavy, and a deep brown against the pale white. Mid-afternoon air tickled our throats and engorged us with the salty tartness of seaweed and tropical foliage.

Prostor. A German word encompassing the desire for spaciousness, roaming free in limitless expanses, not only physically, but creatively and spiritually.

Underneath the trees, we came to rest. Lean forward, right leg swings clockwise around his tail end, push away from the horse, two feet on the ground, knees bent, soaking up the blunt slap of human on earth. Take the reins over his head, loop around the left arm and loosen the noseband. He heaved a sigh of relief, comforted by the shade and the weight off his back. Tilfreds. Danish for satisfied and at peace.

Here the two guides tied the horses to several posts spread between a small cluster of trees at the tip of the beach. Rather than taking us down Seven Mile Beach, the trail led us through local streets and through shrubbery cut only to allow us entryway into the private beach on the opposite side of the island. They used to race horses on the only dirt road circling the end of this inhabited tip of land, Roje explained to me, methodically flipping each saddle pad over on the tree branches to air-dry.

He told me he sees people who have been riding before they could walk, but when they are allowed to ride, completely unconfined on the beach, they freeze up. He didn’t understand why they were afraid. He told me we have no reason not to trust the horse, no reason to fear them. They feel our fear, which is what makes them afraid.

I pulled a water bottle from the bag stowed underneath one of the nearby palms, Poland Spring somehow. A father asked me for two, for him and his daughter. The girl was young, I guessed nine or ten, but she could have been a grown woman judging by the hardness in her eyes. Not lacking curiosity or a taste for adventure, but illuminated by having lived. They came from Scotland for business, and had been horseback riding since the girl could walk. He thanked me kindly for the water, handed one to his daughter and the other he emptied into the mouth of his horse.

Others believe in a theory called linguistic determinism, which suggests that language constitutes and constricts thought, rather than shaping it. Charles Taylor argues that concepts can only be understood with reference to other concepts in that same language.

The horse rubbed his face up and down the man from Scotland’s arm.

Baraka. Arabic for a gift of spiritual energy or sanctifying power that can be transferred from one person to another. Yutta-hey. A Cherokee battle-cry. “It is a good day to die”.

The group began to line up, each person waiting their turn to use the wooden mounting block centered in the clearing. One tour guide stood next to the wooden steps, keeping each horse from taking advantage of their rider’s hesitation to get back on. Roje watched me throw the reins back over the horses head and mount without instruction.

Rest ignited this horse’s spirit, he picked his legs up swiftly with each step, leading the herd back to shelter. With the return of my weight came his eagerness. He grew impatient with the redundant circles we continued to make around the rest of the group, tossing his head into the breeze and flaring his nostrils. Guttural nickers pounded at the sides of his ribcage, begging to be released. I kept a tight rein, waiting for the signal to continue forward. My shoulders had turned a pale pink, but creeped uncomfortably quickly towards resembling hibiscus flowers. My navy hat was stained with salt water and the course, untreated leather saddle had torn persistently at the skin on the inside of my lower calves, forming blisters the size of seashells. Finally, Roje asked me if I wanted to race down the beach.

Sabsung. A Thai word for being revitalized through something that livens up one’s life.

When I was young, I used to run up and down the shoreline on the beach and imagine I was Seabiscuit. My mom would draw START and FINISH lines, extend her thumb, index, and middle finger into the shape of a pistol and shout “And they’re off,” and I’d tear down the beach, wind in my hair that I wished was a mane. My 6-year-old feet would land sloppily in the waves with each stride, splashing me perfectly.

The real thing was not much different. It was flying, it was being strapped to the outside of an airplane, it was tasting each pound of his hooves on the hard sand and listening to each spray of salt water seep into my bloodstream. It was commuovere, it was dadirri, sisu, and it was joie de vivre. Maybe you can look those up, if you don’t already know the feeling.

Tears etched their persistent tracks into my freshly freckled cheeks as we flew, parallel to the ebb and flow of the waves. Still, I kept my eyes open. I was sure we could run on water, it looked like glass but I knew it wouldn’t crack underneath us. We were moving too fast for it to absorb the impact. We would’ve beat Seabiscuit and kept on for miles.

Desbundar. Shedding one’s inhibitions, in Portuguese.

The distance between us and the rest of the group increased as we came steadily closer to the entrance of the dirt road we arrived on. About a mile away from this clearing of trees, the man from Scotland and his daughter caught up to us. Flanking us from both sides, our horses gossiped and we held on, convincing ourselves that they were listening to our unspoken words. Now I know they were just running, galloping together in the summer breeze, unknowingly fostering awe in the young girls eyes and unleashing the untamed stallion in mine.

Soon the horses gradually slowed their pace as we neared the exit to the dirt road on the opposite side of the dunes. I started to regain awareness of the sweat perspired on my forehead and the burn flaring on the tops of my shoulders. As we came down to a walk, I looked down to find a thick, partially dry but still a violent red, mass of blood caked on the torn skin just underneath the bend of my right calf muscle. The blister would leave a scar.

Shemomedjamo. Georgian for eating to the point of satiety due to sheer, gustatory enjoyment.

It took the rest of the group several minutes to catch up, and our horses a minute to catch their breath. Roje let me lead us off the beach. He asked me how I liked the stallion. Maybe more than life, I said.

We marched in single-file back to the barn and listened to the birds call to one another over our heads, the only sound besides hooves and the crinkle of plastic water bottles. Dust from the road swallowed us and spit us back out, leaving the sun to do the rest, sizzling my already dehydrated skin. Dense forests of palm trees and shrubbery lining both sides of the road thinned out, replaced by dilapidated houses and eventually road signs. A black Chevy roared past us, shooting nerves down every horse’s spine, but mine didn’t flinch. We passed through three blocks of the neighborhood, houses with gardens and gates, beware of dog signs and a Church.

The barn sat 20 yards at the end of a gravel driveway, across from a second Church. Palms on the verge of losing their color hung low over the unpainted fence on my left side. I led the group past the small field of horses and down the driveway. Gravel turned into a deep brown soil as we circled around another wooden mounting block. To my right, a yellow dog with unkempt scruff under his chin lay asleep under a white, plastic table. Behind the mounting block, dense brushery parted just enough to catch a glimpse of the deep blue. When we came to a halt, I took my feet out of the stirrups, swung my right leg behind me and dismounted.

I barely had time to absorb the impact before someone took the reins from my hand and led the horse to get untacked, hosed down, and released into the pasture. A thin layer of dirt covered the tops of my thighs and the palms of my hands.

Mamihlapinatapei. Yagán, an indigenous Chilean language. A look between people that expresses unknown but mutual desire.

I couldn’t find Roje in the crowd, so I waved thank you to the woman behind the plastic table and headed down the driveway. I assumed he was tending to the horses. My mother sat in our rental car on the side of the main road, smiling as she watched me walk towards her. I wiped the sweat from my brow and it left a brown streak on my forehead.

Only because I turned my head to the right to cough into my elbow did I notice her. The tips of her ears would have barely reached my collarbone. A painted foal, resting in the shade of the decaying palm trees. She stood next to the trough, filled with more soggy grain and leaves than water. I tiptoed to the edge of the fence as though not to wake her. Faint lines of a ribcage stood out underneath her skin. She opened her eyes, letting out a soft nicker as I placed a hand on her neck, her white and chestnut-spotted coat matted with dirt.

horse
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About the Creator

Julia Smith

Equestrian. Slytherin. Student. Writer.

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