Happy Monday! 👋
Vladimir Nabokov was fluent in Russian, English and French. He translated Eugene Onegin into English across four volumes.
And when he reached one particular Russian word, he stopped, and wrote a whole paragraph instead of a translation — because he couldn't find one.
Language: Russian — "тоска" / "toska" (tahs-KAH)
Meaning: Nabokov's own attempt is still the best one in English:
Why it's fascinating:
Look at what he's describing: not one feeling, but a scale. Toska runs from mild boredom to spiritual anguish, and Russian uses the same word across the whole range.
English splits that range into separate words: boredom, restlessness, melancholy, yearning, anguish, and treats them as different things.
Russian treats them as one thing at different intensities. That's a genuinely different way of carving up inner life, and you can't get at it by picking the nearest English word.
In use:
На него напала тоска.
Literally "toska fell upon him" — the word takes you as its object. You don't feel toska so much as it arrives.
English used to have a word doing similar work, and lost it.
"Wanhope" — from Middle English wan- (lacking, as in "wan" and "wane") and hope. It meant despair, but specifically the kind that comes from hope draining away rather than from any disaster.
Chaucer used it. It survived into the 1500s, then faded out, replaced by the blunter Latin-derived despair.
English didn't lose the ability to feel it. It just stopped keeping a word for it.
Your turn
I'd like to know whether English is unusual here or whether every language has gaps like this.
Does your language have a word for this?
Hit reply with the word if you have one, I'm building a collection from readers and I'll publish the best of them.
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