There are words that cannot be translated with a single expression because they contain entire cultural universes. They often describe emotions, sensations and concepts that are so deep that no exact equivalent can be found in other languages.
At Finking, we have selected some of the most fascinating ones:
Fernweh refers to “longing for faraway places” or “nostalgia for elsewhere.” It comes from the German Ferne (distance) and Weh (pain), and expresses that feeling of wanting to be somewhere else, the desire to leave, travel and explore. It can relate both to places one has lived in and to places one has never visited.
Wanderlust, meaning an irresistible desire to travel and discover the world. It also derives from German, combining the verb wandern (to walk, to wander) and the word Lust (desire, longing).
Saudade, from Portuguese, instead conveys a bittersweet, slightly melancholic and almost poetic sense of longing for something that may be real or imagined, distant in space or time, or lost altogether.
Tsundoku, from Japanese, refers to the habit of compulsively buying books without ever reading them.
Bibliosmia, on the other hand, comes from Italian and describes the pleasure of smelling the scent of newly bought books.
Wabi-sabi, also from Japanese, refers to the beauty of imperfection—the charm found in things that bear the marks of time. It invites us to see beauty even where, objectively, it may not seem to exist.
Every language, then, tells a different way of seeing and interpreting the world. Untranslatable words are not just linguistic curiosities: they are small fragments of culture that teach us to think in different ways. And who knows, perhaps in each of us, even here at Finking, there is a little Fernweh, or Saudade, or even a touch of Wabi-sabi.
