On the Failure of Translation: Notes Toward a Poetics

There is always a remainder. When we translate, we leave behind something that resists the crossing — a residue of meaning that clings to the original like dust to a mirror. This essay is about that dust. I began thinking about translation not as a linguist but as a child who spoke two languages and understood neither fully. Shona was the language of dreams; English was the language of school. Between them was a silence I have spent my life trying to name. What does it mean to carry a word across a border? The word *musha* — home, but not home. Homestead, ancestral ground, the place where your umbilical cord is buried. English has no single word for this. So we approximate, and in approximating, we lose the earth. The failure is not a deficiency. It is a threshold.