The world's an untranslatable language
                                                  without words or parts of speech.
It's a language of objects
Our tongues can't master,
                                       but which we are the ardent subjects of.

If tree is tree in English,
                                     and albero in Italian,
That's as close as we can come
To divinity, the language that circles the earth
                                                      and which we'll never speak.

"The Ghost of Walter Benjamin Walks at Midnight" by Charles Wright, from Sestets. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.