In Kannada, the mountain is smoother. In English, the grass is greener

I’ve recently been collecting versions, in different languages, of the phrase, ‘the grass is greener on the other side.’ What surprised me was how different they are texturally, geographically and in the images they bring to mind.

Kannada says, ‘doorada betta kannige nunnage’, or further mountains are smoother. Unlike the English, who looked out at meadows of lush green grass, the Kannadigas looked up at the Western Ghats. A few kilometers away, in the coastal land of Tamil Nadu, the phrase found yet another articulation in Tamil as ‘mathavan meen perusu’, or the other’s fish is bigger. Farther North, the Russians, characteristically, dispense with metaphor altogether. ‘Khorosho tam, gde nas net’, or it’s good where we are not, has no need for allusion to grass or mountains or fish, but merely states the blunt philosophical fact of human dissatisfaction.

Pieces of context, shaped by what each people saw and did, embedded themselves into the language they spoke. Each of these phrases describes the same feeling. None of them, you realise, describes the same world. The metaphor is information about the place that produced the thought.

Which makes translating from one language to another a rather complicated, and decidedly non-neutral task.

A Kannada-English translator I once heard speak about this insisted on retaining ‘mountains further away are smoother’, even if it sounded odder than using ‘the grass is greener.’ The smoother translation, she said, kept the meaning but lost the speaker. The mountain becomes a meadow and the Kannadiga, somewhere in the process, ends up standing in an English countryside she has never seen.

This contradiction, in theoretical terms, is what American translator Lawrence Venuti called the difference between domestication and foreignization. Between making the foreign feel natural to the new reader vs preserving the strangeness of the original. His argument was that a translation that reads naturally has done something to the original – it has rubbed off the friction that made it foreign in the first place.

Smooth translation is a power move. It assumes that the target reader’s comfort matters more than the original speaker’s place. When the dominant language (English) keeps absorbing other languages into its own metaphors, the geographies of those other languages slowly disappear from the global record. The Kannadiga gets translated into an Englishwoman not because that’s a fair exchange but because English has decided that’s the easier direction to flow.

Something else happens too, smaller and harder to articulate. The metaphors we lose access to are also the thoughts we lose access to. A language that says the other person’s fish is bigger hears envy through the texture of catching. Through skill, through luck, through what you pulled out of the water and what you didn’t. A language that refuses metaphor altogether, it is good where we are not, has decided envy is not something to picture, but something to state. Each well-used phrase is a small instrument for noticing the world. When the instrument disappears, so does the noticing.

The mountain looks smooth only from far away. Up close, it is uneven with context, weather, memory, and the marks of where someone once stood looking outward. Good translation, perhaps, is not the art of smoothing the mountain into grass, but of letting it remain difficult enough to stay a mountain.

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