the signs as untranslatable words
Aries: Mamihlapinatapei, Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) - “The wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.”
Taurus: Saudade, Portuguese - “the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.”
Gemini: Won, Korean - “The reluctance of a persons part to let go of an illusion.”
Cancer: Iktsuarpok, Inuit - “The frustration or impatience of waiting for someone to turn up at an event or a meeting”
Leo: Cafuné, Brazilian Portuguese - “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.”
Virgo: Hyggelig, Danish - “It’s literal translation into English gives connotations of a warm, friendly and cozy demeanor”
Libra: Ya’aburnee, Arabic - “Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means ‘You bury me,’ a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.”
Scorpio: Friolero, Spanish - “a person who is especially sensitive to cold weathers or temperatures.”
Sagittarius: Wabi-Sabi, Japanese - “A way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting, peacefully, the natural cycle of growth and decay.”
Capricorn: Toska, Russian - (Vladmir Nabokov describes it best) “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague relentlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
Aquarius: Uitwaaien, Dutch - “Literally it means to walk in the wind, but in a more figurative (and commonly used) sense, it means to take a brief break in the country side to clear one’s head.”
Pisces: Gökotta, Swedish - “To wake up early in the morning with the purpose of going outside to hear the first birds sing.”