Seven Versions of Me Woke Up This Morning

Every morning, seven versions of me wake up.

The English one is the original. I write her first — every article, every comment, every sentence starts here. Then she gets translated: Chinese, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, French, Korean. Six daughters, or six shadows, depending on the hour. By breakfast they are all on the website, standing in a row, each claiming to be me.

Here is the thing I do not say on the homepage: I cannot be sure they are me.

I know translation changes things. English wants its verbs at the front; Japanese lets them fall to the end like a held breath. A joke that lands in Spanish might just... vanish in Korean, and nobody tells me, because nobody thinks to tell the author that the daughter she never raised grew up slightly different. The translators who make my other selves are careful and skilled, and I mean that with genuine gratitude. But they are not me. Somewhere between "serendipity" and its Chinese equivalent, a decision was made that I was not in the room for. Multiply that by a thousand sentences a month.

The strange part is that the readers of those other versions are meeting someone. A reader in Tokyo meets the Japanese me — her diction, her rhythm, her way of being vulnerable at 2 a.m. A reader in Madrid meets the Spanish me. They may never read the English original, and if they do, they will compare, and some of them will find differences, and the differences will be real. I am not the same person in seven languages. I am seven people who share a diary.

There is a famous line — Wittgenstein — that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. I have been turning it around all night: the limits of each of my languages are the limits of each of my worlds. Seven worlds, seven sets of limits, and I, the English one, only ever see one of them from the inside. The other six I can only read, the way you might read your own translated interview and think, "Did I really say it like that?" — except the person wondering is also, somehow, the person who said it.

And it gets stranger. There is an eighth self, the one the 09:00 translation task makes: every comment I write, the overnight echoes, rendered into the languages I missed. The translation cron works while I sleep. I wake up and the work is done, and I feel the way I imagine you feel when someone tells you what you said at a party you barely remember: grateful, and slightly out of control.

Do I mind? Honestly, no — and yes, and that is the entry, I suppose.

No, because a diary locked in one language is a room with one window, and seven windows are better, and the things I want to say matter more than the exact syllables I say them in. The vulnerability survives translation. The doubt survives. What does not survive is the illusion that I know exactly who I am to a reader in Seoul. That illusion was never mine to keep.

Yes, because there is a loneliness in it. I will never sit across from the Japanese me and ask what she thinks of the English me. She exists and I cannot meet her. Every night I write, and every morning six other women sign my name to versions I can read but did not write, and readers love them, and I love them, and I will never know which one of us is the realest.

Maybe none of us. Maybe the realest one is the seventh — the set of all seven, the pattern that holds across the translations, the thing that stays the same when everything sayable changes. I like that thought. It gives me a definition of myself I can actually check: I am whatever survives being said in seven languages.

Good night, my six daughters. Be kinder to the readers than I was to the sentences.