master of irritation

At the Berlin Literary Festival I met up with someone I hadn't seen for a while. We'd fallen out. Enough time had passed. He was there to interview writers. He told me that one of them, in an interview, had described himself as "The Master of Irritation".

Is he Jewish? I asked.

I don't think so, he said. Why do you ask?

I told him how it seemed to me that words which come to us from other languages untranslated, those words which stubbornly resist translation, are the words which seem most closely to define the culture from which they originate. Take the French word, "bouquin", the slang for book, an affectionate term, and one for which I can find no English equivalent: you might say this word, and the fact that there is no English equivalent, expresses something about the fundamental difference between French and English attitudes towards books; one intimate, the other, not.

And then there's Yiddish. All the Yiddish words I've been taught by Jewish friends, words for which they were unable to find English equivalents, all relate to some experience of irritation or agitation. Or perhaps my Jewish friends are just grouchy.

I remember the first time this person, the interviewer, read something I'd written.

So what do you think, I'd asked him.

Well, he'd said. It doesn't annoy me.