Emotions
The full emotional taxonomy of the work — universal descriptors and lemmas that exist only in particular languages.
Some feelings have no English equivalent. Those native terms stay untranslated; they are the keyword. Each lemma maps analogically onto paintings in the catalog.
Universal descriptors
Untranslatable lemmas (56 languages)
Arabic
- حنين — tender yearning; nostalgia that is almost prayer
- وجد — ecstatic mystical finding — love that annihilates the self
- طرب — musical ecstasy; being carried by sound into feeling
- غربة — exile- estrangement; being a stranger even at home
Bashkir
- һағыныу — Bashkir sagynu — to miss, to long
Basque
- irrika — Basque yearning; eager ache
Belarusian
- туга — Belarusian tuha — grief-longing
Bengali
- বিরহ — separation-sorrow in the Vaishnava / folk register
- বেদনা — poignant pain; grief with lyric tenderness
Bulgarian
- тъга — sadness that occupies the chest
Cantonese
- 掛住 — hanging-on-the-mind: missing someone in everyday Cantonese
- 心淡 — heart gone bland — disillusion, emotional fade
Catalan
- enyorança — Catalan longing for what is absent
Chinese
- 乡愁 — homesickness of the spirit — longing for a lost home or era
- 惆怅 — melancholy disappointment; a sighing restlessness
- 心酸 — heart-sourness — tender grief that stings
- 思念 — aching remembrance of someone absent
Croatian
- čežnja — yearning; a South Slavic ache
Czech
- lítost — Kundera's litost: torment of seeing one's own misery
Danish
Dutch
English
- limerence — involuntary obsessive romantic longing
- spleen — Baudelairean melancholy — irritable, poetic gloom
Esperanto
- sopiro — Esperanto sigh-longing
Estonian
Filipino
- kilig — the shiver of crush-feeling; butterflies as a full-body event
- gigil — the urge to squeeze what is overwhelmingly cute or infuriating
- tampo — hurt withdrawal from a loved one; sulk as attachment
Finnish
- kaiho — Finnish longing, often wordless
French
- ennui — existential listlessness — boredom with metaphysical weight
- dépaysement — the disorientation of being out of one's country or frame
- spleen — Baudelaire's spleen: spleen as modern malaise
Galician
- morriña — Galician fog-homesickness; saudade's Atlantic cousin
German
- Sehnsucht — addictive longing for an unnamed elsewhere or elsewhen
- Weltschmerz — world-pain; sorrow at the gap between ideal and world
- Torschlusspanik — gate-closing panic — fear that life's door is shutting
Greek
- μεράκι — doing something with soul, love, and full presence
- νόστος — homecoming as destiny; the root of nostalgia
Hebrew
- געגוע — longing; missing that is almost a mitzvah of memory
- ערגה — yearning; poetic thirst
Hindi
- विरह — the ache of separation from the beloved
- विषाद — deep dejection; sacred sorrow
- वियोग — yogic/poetic separation — absence as a spiritual state
Hungarian
- honvágy — home-desire; patriotic and personal homesickness
- bánat — sorrow with a Magyar cadence
Indonesian
- rindu — longing that is both sweet and sore
- kangen — intimate missing-you; informal ache for a person
Interlingua
- nostalgia — Interlingua nostalgia — constructed-tongue homesickness
Irish
- cumha — Irish lament-longing; keening as feeling
- uaigneas — lonesomeness of place and soul
Italian
- struggimento — melting anguish; being consumed by feeling
- malinconia — Italian melancholy — lyrical, not clinical
Japanese
- 物の哀れ — the pathos of things; tender awareness of transience
- 懐かしい — a fond ache for the past that is almost sweet
- 切ない — a painful tightness in the chest from love or beauty
- 侘寂 — beauty of imperfection, impermanence, incompleteness
- 甘え — the sweet presumption of being loved; dependent intimacy
Korean
- 한 — accumulated grief, rage, and longing of a people and a person
- 정 — sticky affection that binds through time and slight
Latvian
- ilgas — Latvian longings (plural of ache)
Lithuanian
Malay
- merindu — to be in a state of longing
Maltese
- dwejjaq — Maltese sorrow / annoyance of the heart
Marathi
- विरह — Marathi viraha: separation as poetic state
Mongolian
- гүниг — sorrow, grief
- санаа — thought-as-worry; missing that lives as thought
Norwegian
- vemod — Norwegian wistful sorrow
Persian
- دلتنگی — heart-narrowness: homesickness of the heart
- غربت — exile; the strangeness of being far
Polish
- tęsknota — a longing that is almost a weather system
- żal — sorrow, regret, and grievance braided
Portuguese
- saudade — presence of absence — love for what is gone that still lives in the body
- desassossego — disquiet; the restlessness of a mind that cannot sit
- banzo — Afro-Brazilian lethal nostalgia of the enslaved for a lost homeland
Romanian
- dor — longing so specific it is a national untranslatable
Russian
- тоска — spiritual ache without a single object — longing, angst, ennui fused
- тоска души — ache of the soul
Slovak
- túžba — desire that has a direction
Slovenian
- hrepenenje — yearning; stretching toward what is not here
Spanish
- duende — earth-spirit of art: the raw, dangerous possession of a performance
- añoranza — wistful longing for what is gone
- pena ajena — vicarious embarrassment that lives in the body
Swahili
- huzuni — sorrow, mourning
- shauku — passionate desire; longing with heat
Swedish
- vemod — tender melancholy; sadness without bitterness
Tamil
Telugu
- విరహం — separation-sorrow in Telugu lyric
Thai
- เหงา — lonely in a way that is also empty air
- คิดถึง — thinking-until-you-arrive-at-missing
Turkish
- hüzün — collective melancholy Pamuk named for Istanbul — grief with dignity
- hasret — yearning for a person, place, or time that will not return
- özlem — missing-with-love; a warm ache
Ukrainian
- туга — a wide Slavic ache — grief, longing, and the steppe
Urdu
- ہجر — the burning of separation in the ghazal tradition
- غم — grief that is also a companion
- تڑپ — writhing longing; desire that cannot rest
Vietnamese
- nhớ — to remember-and-miss in one verb
- thương — love-as-pity; to love by hurting for someone
Welsh
- hiraeth — Welsh homesickness for a home that may never have existed