Space and Rum: An English Note on Espacien and Rumian Meaning

Like most things that accumulate and grow, these thoughts build upon earlier thoughts; thoughts in a note from Torsten Higerstrand to Anne Buttimer in 1978 (Higerstrand, 1978), thoughts further elaborated in a paragraph to me nearly a year later (Higerstrand, 1979). Now another year has gone by, but I have not been able to put aside these private exchanges about the meaning of space. Nor have I been able to resolve the question completely. For several weeks on end I think it has disappeared, but then it suddenly appears again, sometimes with a gay Peek-a-boo ... here I am of a small and delighted child, sometimes with the sneering You'll never get me alive of the hardened criminal. Others around me have kept my concern fresh by their own writing and thinking along parallel lines, and at the end of this essay I acknowledge gratefully their efforts to draw other perspectives to my attention. Even within a shared mother tongue, the conveyance of meaning from one person to another may be a brutally difficult and highly creative act. Sometimes words must even be created to carry the meaning of things which at one time were not presenced to be conveyed, for many acts of creation are founded upon the task of bringing into the unconcealment of language that which was concealed before (Heidegger, 1975, pp. 13-59). But between languages the task may be even more difficult, because words carry with them such nuances of meaning, and alter these meanings so subtly in the context of others around them, that sometimes one despairs of deep, and literally meaning-full, communication (Steiner, 1970, pp. 21-34). Dichten, for example, is usually translated as poetizing, because we have no exact equivalent in English, but at first acquaintance the mapping of dichten onto the well-defined verb form can only carry a totally distorted meaning, raising a host of images and connotations in the English that one learns later where never intended by the German. The mappings, the 6versdittnings, are easy to define, for we define what we like. But the meanings frequently slip between our fingers, and are often left behind in our transformations.