Every translator confronts, sooner or later, a word that refuses to cross the border. The Portuguese saudade, the German Sehnsucht, the Japanese mono no aware - each names a feeling that its language treats as a single, indivisible thing, and that another language can only approximate by piling up qualifiers. The naive response is to call such words untranslatable and to leave them in italics, as if quarantined. But the better translators resist this surrender. They understand that a word is untranslatable only if one insists on replacing it with a single word. Given a phrase, a sentence, even a whole scene, the translator can often reconstruct the feeling by other means, building in the reader a state of mind the original word merely labels. What is lost is not the meaning but the illusion of effortlessness - the sense that the feeling arrives whole, without explanation, as it does for a native speaker. A translation that works too hard to reproduce a single word may capture its sense while betraying its ease. The paradox is that fidelity to the word can amount to infidelity to the experience, and that the translator most faithful to a text is sometimes the one most willing to abandon its individual words.