/lit/ - Literature

"English," writes Virginia Woolf, "which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache .... The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."
>Though Woolf frames her observation in terms of one particular language, the essential problem she describes, not limited to English, is characteristic of all languages. This is not to say that one encounters no variations in the expressibility of pain as one moves across different languages. The existence of culturally stipulated responses to pain-for example, the tendency of one population to vocalize cries; the tendency of another to suppress them-is well documented in anthropological research. So, too, a particular constellation of sounds or words that make it possible to register alterations in the felt-experience of pain in one language may have no equivalent in a second language: thus Sophocles's agonized Philoctetes utters a cascade of changing cries and shrieks that in the original Greek are accommodated by an array of formal words (some of them twelve syllables long), but that at least one translator found could only be rendered in English by the uniform syllable "Ah" followed by variations in punctuation (Ah! Ah!!!!).
>But even if one were to enumerate many additional examples, such cultural differences, taken collectively, would themselves constitute only a very narrow margin of variation and would thus in the end work to expose and confirm the universal sameness of the central problem, a problem that originates much less in the inflexibility of anyone language or in the shyness of anyone culture than in the utter rigidity of pain itself: its resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but is essential to what it is.

Did anybody write anything that fulfills this apparent inexpressibility of pain or should I just go and learn to read the Sophocles in the original Greek?