& other mistranslations

Abel asks me "comment est-ce que on peut peindre la lumiere?" which means "how can we paint the light?" He is looking at Turner's paintings, the ones that are whitewashed in sunlight and the ones where the sea and sky are impossibly gold. It was because of the ash - volcanic ash in the sky led to particularly beautiful sunsets - but that's neither romantic nor conceivable so I do what adults do: I evade his important question that painters have been fighting to answer for years and explain instead how, in English, light means both illumination and weightlessness. At seven years old, Abel is more readily able to accept the reciprocity, the relativity, between weightlessness and illumination.