Lost in Translation; or, Finnish Peculiarities: “Löyly”

It would be an understatement, really, to say that language is a powerful tool of thought and reason. More to the point, language creates (human) thought and reason; or, if you insist on the tool metaphor, language is the tool of thought of reason. It is essential for conceptualizing and hence for conceiving any issue (of even moderate complexity) clearly, essential for forming contents of propositional attitudes such as beliefs about anything (e.g., Davidson 1984, 155–170). It is hardly surprising, then, that people are intrigued by differences between languages, cases where concepts in one language seem to have no exact translation in another. There are pretty good grounds for surmising that such differences make the world look rather different in different languages (although, probably, far less so than some of the strongest versions of linguistic relativity would have it) (e.g., Deutscher 2011). 

We do not want to overshoot that idea, of course (well, why would we want to overshoot anything, huh!?). Donald Davidson (1984, 183–198), for one, famously believed (perhaps because he wanted to keep faith with there always being the possibility of rational discussion between people coming from different cultural backgrounds) that there just cannot be any ultimate untranslatability between two languages (at least in the sense that those languages should be conceived of as constituting two different “schemas” of conceptualization that would cut the world into objects in two irreconcileably different ways). Nevertheless, even presuming that Davidson was right (which, of course, remains debatable, as pretty much every philosophical question ever), there would still be no shortage of cases of at least slightly less fundamental difficulties with translation. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon to have a situation where a truly satisfactory translation is very, very hard to accomplish (at least for a human translator – leaving aside here the whole issue of machine translation); arguably, some of those situations might even require a translator to have been laboriously trained in the practices of the other culture, even slowly socialized into their way of life. What is more, many of us believe, a perfect translation might in some cases escape translation completely: there may be words and contexts where even the very best, ideal translator could only hope for a sort of “fusion of horizons” between two cultures. (Medina 2003, 468–469.)

We now live in the Age of the Internet, of course, and there are literally hundreds, nay thousands of examples to be found online, of words of this or that foreign language that are reportedly very hard if not impossible to translate into English. I constantly come across with posts and articles where someone lists perhaps five or fifteen or twenty-five terms, expressions, or sayings in some language that apparently lack any precise equivalent in English. To give but a couple of examples from other Indo-European languages (which should prima facie be relatively easily translatable into English), here are ten terms and phrases that they have in Icelandic but are lacking from English; here are ten Swedish words that you supposedly need in English; here are ten Russian terms without proper English equivalents; and here, if you will, find a Wikipedia page listing loads of German words that are often used in English sentences, many of them apparently for lack of a perfectly satisfactory English alternative; and here, finally, is a list of no less than thirty un- or scarcely translatable words collected from a few different languages (German and Swedish are included, so there is some overlap with the previous lists here, but there are also, for example, some Spanish and Japanese words, too).

My own language, Finnish is not an Indo-European language, so one might expect even more difficulties with translations into English than with the previous examples. Sure enough, there are several Finnish words lacking any one exact English translation. We know the usual suspects, like sauna, of course, which is indeed an apt example because it is one of the few to have been actually adopted from Finnish into English as a loanword. There is also the good old sisu (and the adjective sisukas derived from it), a classic example of barely translatable Finnish word. Personally, though, I should mention, I think that there has oftentimes been some unnecessary mystification of sisu and sisukas, and that in most contexts those terms could in fact be translated quite satisfactorily. It is just that, different translations would be advisable in different contexts: sometimes it would be best to use the term “grit”; sometimes you could say the person we are referring to “has guts”; or that it is characteristic of the person to show “perseverance,” or “steadfastness” (in the face of hardships) – that s/he tends to be “persistent” in trying to overcome (even quite bad and/or numerous) obstacles; or that the person is “unyielding”; and so on. It is surely correct to say that there is no single English term that captures sisu or sisukas in every context; but then again, there is no way to translate the English expression “guts” into Finnish with a single term in every context either: no term that literally means the intestines but can also be used in slang expressions like “have guts,” or “gutsy.”

Indeed, this is by no means an uncommon situation between any two languages; for example, as Deutscher (2011, 14), among others, has pointed out, there is no one term in English to cover all the meanings of the French word esprit: you need several different terms for the different uses or senses of esprit (wit, mood, spirit, mind); and, similarly, there is no single concept in French to cover all the meanings of the English word “mind,” which in different connections should to be translated with different terms (esprit, tête, avis, raison, intelligence). That causes problems for translators, especially when the phrase to be translated makes a wordplay or cracks a joke that relies on a double meaning that simply does not exist in the other language. (We Finns come across demonstrations of this more often than people in the many other countries where movies and TV programs are translated by means of vocal dubbing, because since in our country translations are mostly carried out by means of subtitles, we can compare the original, which we can hear, and the Finnish translation, which we can see in text form.)

Now, what I was planning on doing here after this brief intro, was something similar to many of the posts to which I offered links just above: I was thinking of listing a few (at least, five) Finnish terms that I have found hardly or only very laboredly and awkwardly translatable into English (some a little bit fresher examples than the tired old sauna, sisu, etc., too!)

As it turned out, there was a major problem with that plan, however: you see, when I explain anything I tend to be rather, how should I put this, thorough (as well as prone to digressing), and the task of explaining Finnish concepts to foreigners is a subject especially likely to bring out the worst in me in that respect (as you may have gathered from my previous post discussing the concept of kalsarikännit; to say nothing of the one that aimed to offer a full cultural-historical explanation of the notions of spede and spedeily). Accordingly, explaining five Finnish concepts would have constituted an all too lengthy writing for a blog post, like some 20+ pages long as a Word document. So, a change of plan: I cut the text that I was preparing into shorter pieces and will publish it as a series of distinct posts, each of which will discuss one hardly translatable Finnish concept.

In the present post, I will start with an old, indeed ancient term, one closely linked with sauna in our culture but much less known and discussed outside Finland: löyly. 

Löyly (noun) : the hot water vapor and the consequently intensified experience of heat in sauna, usually brought about by casting some water onto the hot rocks of the sauna stove (called kiuas, in Finnish). 

There will always be a löylykaukalo (löyly vat) in a Finnish sauna, and in that vat there should be some nice cool löylyvesi (löyly water) (if the vat is empty, the one who has been doing the löylynheitto (löyly casting / throwing) will be expected to go out and fill it), as well as a löylykauha (löyly scoop), of course, with which you do the löylynheitto.

A typical löyly vat and löyly scoop

The word löyly would therefore seem to have a very useful reference, at least for anyone who at least sometimes go and bathe in a Finnish (or, Scandinavian, Russian, Baltic, and I know some Native American tribes have had something similar) type of sauna where there is a hot stove onto which you are expected to cast, throw or pour water so as to increase the intensity of the heat. I mean, surely, it would have to be convenient to have a single word to capture the complex English notion of “hot water vapor and the consequently intensified experience of heat in sauna (brought about by casting some water onto the hot rocks of the stove)”? Even if in practice you are able to cut it down to something more pragmatic like, “Could you cast some of that water onto those rocks, please?”; you should still find it useful to have this ingenious Finnish word by means of which to pack a few more words into one and simply ask, “Could you cast some löyly, please?”

The reason why löyly has not been adopted into English as a loan word is pretty obvious, though: Finnish sort of sauna has not (yet) become quite popular enough in English speaking countries. The word sauna was adopted, meanwhile, because the English speaking world did find it convenient to have a word for many sorts of hot rooms; the word “sauna,” after all, refers not just to the Finnish kind of sauna but also to the kind of steam room that we Finns would call “steam sauna,” or “turkish sauna,” where there is no hot stove at all and no löyly water. 

In any case, now that I have explained the referent of löyly, some of you might think that the concept is not all that complicated after all, that not much would be lost in translation if you just came up with a new English term with the same referent, or simply translated it as “hot sauna-steam,” or something like that. Alas (well, no, I am not actually sorry about this, that was just a rhetorical device in this case), it is more complicated than that. Reference, as many of us know, is not all of the word meaning. There is also what is sometimes referred to as the internal content of the term; that is, you need to consider not just the extension of the word, but also its intension. With the latter, you would also have to consider the relations that the word has to a number of other words, especially to those by means of which we might try and explain the meaning of that word. Various connotations of the term that are not part of its referent might also be said to be a part of its meaning, broadly conceived, if they are such that tend to come to the mind of a typical speaker of the language. So let me say a little bit more to truly exhaustively explain the notion of löyly...

One thing that is important to know, I think, is that, when you bathe in sauna, it is precisely the löyly that can hurt you! There are not many saunas where the temperature could all by itself rise too unbearable without anybody casting any löyly, but in most saunas, once someone does start casting löyly (especially someone who “likes it hot,” perhaps much hotter than you (as often happens in a public sauna, say at some swimming baths sauna room where there might be a dozen guys at the same time and it is totally up for grabs who happens to be sitting next to the löylykaukalo, perhaps some S&M enthusiast ...)), well then, more often than not, you are about to experience some pain real soon.

Equally important, however, is that to get good löylys is why many if not most Finns go to sauna in the first place: not very many people go there just to sit there, sweating ever so mildly, and to then come out and take a shower; no, instead, most people spend there maybe only ten minutes at a time, take a few relatively intense löylys that really squeeze the sweat out from beneath their skin and make the heat feel at least a little uncomfortable already, and only then come out and take that shower (and then, more often than not, repeat the sauna-shower-sauna-shower circle a couple more times).

Another noteworthy thing about the slight pain that löyly brings about is that, precisely because it is the löyly that hurts you in sauna, it usually is not what kills you there. Now I am not trying to scare you here, and want to stress that, in general, sauna is actually good for your health (regular sauna bathing reduces the risk of various health problems like cardiovascular issues), but it is a simple fact that every once in a while someone dies in sauna, too. However, most of those would be cases of a person having fallen asleep (or, more likely, passed out after too much alchohol) in sauna alone and then dying of dehydration. So, löyly is not to be blamed for most of those deaths; quite the opposite: a bit of burning sensation from löyly would probably have kept those people awake and thus alive! Indeed, usually, it is not the löyly that kills you – although, of course, there have been some exceptions. Some people like having löyly- (or, sauna bathing-) competitions of sort – to compete in who lasts for longest in hot löylys; and that kind of arrangement can be a recipe for disaster. An extreme example is what happened at the (last ever, for obvious reasons) official World Championships of Sauna Bathing, in Heinola, 2010: in the finale, one competitor, an over-60-year-old man from Russia, actually died, and another, Finnish competitor got life-threatening burn injuries – large areas of his skin peeled off and he was hospitalized for three months. (As a grotesque sequel, Finnish tabloids would keep writing about him for an extended period of time, and for that purpose gave him a tabloid name, Sauna-Timo or Saunoja-Timo (Timo is the man’s first name and saunoja is a term referring to a person doing sauna bathing – from the verb saunoa for sauna bathing –, so the latter tabloid name translates “Sauna-bathing Timo” (more than a bit ironically, given that, because of his badly burned skin the man could not do any sauna bathing for a long time after the incident)).)

Another thing I want to mention about löyly is how much it depends on the particular sauna – on the size of the sauna, on the stove and the arrangement of the stones on it, on the materials and structures and ventilation of the sauna, etc.: having bathed in several dozens different saunas over my lifetime, I can assure you that there are truly remarkable, consequential differences between saunas, which do have quite a crucial impact on what kind of löylys you will get in them. In some saunas, casting even a single little scoop of löyly water onto the stones will at once give you an intense burning sensation over your skin, even such that most people will be crouching their face toward their knees, grinning with pain, and will want to wait for a few minutes before risking another scoop. In other saunas, it might take half-a-dozen or so scoops of water slowly poured onto different spots of the kiuas stones over a period of ten or twenty seconds or so to reach a similar sensation, but in many of those latter kind of saunas the löyly will then probably also last much longer, and in some of them it might build up to be in a way even more intense than in the sauna with immediately burning löyly, perhaps: you might see some guy walking out of there with his upper torso so boiled that its color is actually bright red, as if he was a lobster just picked out from a kettle of boiling water. On the other hand, there are also saunas where the löyly is very moist, and where there is not enough ventilation, so that the humidity will quickly get so high that it is hard to breathe. In that kind of saunas, it might actually  turn out to be the humidity that forces you out sooner than any burning sensation. In the best (in my humble opinion) saunas, by contrast, breathing is not a problem, and the löyly may also turn out so soft that you could easily sit there for half-an-hour or even longer, throw in a couple scoops every few minutes, and the intensity of the heat still wouldn’t build up too high, would remain just right, making you sweat properly but not burning you too much. That latter is how I personally prefer my sauna experience; but people are different, and I know that some people actually want to walk out of sauna looking like boiled lobsters – that if they don’t, they will feel like there was something wrong with the sauna, that one can’t get proper löylys in it.

Finally, some trivia about löyly to truly wrap this up:

First, the term has actually had also another, now altogether obsolete and generally forgotten meaning: in pagan times, löyly could be used to refer to a kind of spirit or soul, the breath-soul, so that when someone died and stopped breathing, others might have said the löyly has left him/her. 

Second, as the term’s reference includes the increased intensity of heat in sauna, it is perhaps understandable how it has become customary to use expressions like  Lisää löylyä! (“More löyly!”) or Eiköhän lisätä löylyä? (“Let’s increase löyly, right?”) as metaphors not unlike the English metaphoric expression “Let’s increase the / put on some more heat / pressure.” You might hear an ice hockey player, for example, saying something like that in an interview before the final period: the opponent is getting tired, now we will just put on lisää löylyä and we will surely win this game. Related to this, there is also the verb löylyttää and the noun löylytys, meaning, basically, “utterly beating someone,” and “utter beating,” respectively.

Third, fun fact: in Finnish the translation for English expression “blood bath” (for a massacre or much bloodshed in a battle) is actually verilöyly, which is literally, you guessed it, “blood löyly.” I think the Finnish term is a bit tastier and more expressive, although it is rather idiomatic in the sense that we rarely if ever think about its literal meaning when using it. But if you stop and think about it, the notion of löyly captures the heat and the intensity, indeed the pain of a battle or massacre, much better than the notion of “blood bath.” Granted, blood bath does give us a vivid image of blood flowing and pooling, constituting something where one could wade in, something that splashes everywhere, but blood löyly would be this highly intense, stingingly painful affair, where blood could be imagined to fill the air, hot and steaming, even burning your skin.

References

Davidson, Donald (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Deutscher, Guy (2011). Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. London: Arrow Books.

Medina, Jose (2003) “On Being ‘Other-Minded’: Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Logical Aliens”, International Philosophical Quarterly 43(4): 463–75.