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Spanish pain, el dolor 69
pain
(a) X feels something;
(b) sometimes a person thinks like this:
(c) something bad is happening to me now,
(d) I don’t want this to be happening;
(e) at the same time this person feels something very bad;
(f) X feels something like this.
Grief, on the other hand, is much more culture specific, and has a more
elaborate definition (adapted from Wierzbicka 2003: 586–587):
grief
(a) X felt something because X thought something;
(b) sometimes a person thinks like this:
(c) “something very bad happened to me a short time before now,
(d) someone was like a part of me,
(e) something happened to this person (this person died),
(f) because of this this person cannot be like a part of me any more,
(g) I want to think about this now,
(h) I can’t think about other things now”;
(i) when this person thinks like this this person feels something very bad;
(j) X felt something like this;
(k) because X thought like this.
When we compare these definitions with the definition of dolor, we may
see that dolor is a much more elaborate concept than pain, and is actually closer
to grief. In the definition of pain we may read in line d) ‘I don’t want this to be
happening’, and this component is absent from the definition of dolor, because
as I have already said, dolor, although being a negative emotion, is perceived as
a necessary and even positive component of life, as is attested by collocations
such as dulce dolor, ‘sweet pain’, mariposa del dolor, ‘butterfly of pain’ and by
its close relationship with amor, ‘love’ and ternura, ‘tenderness’. 4 With grief,
dolor shares the component of loss of a loved one and the fact that both of them
are overwhelming feelings.
5. Conclusions
The present inquiry into the meaning of the Spanish concept dolor supports
the contention of Clifford Geertz (1973: 81) that emotions are cultural artefacts.
There is no one universal human pain. Different people experience their suffering
differently, and the language they speak, and the culture they live in, play
a key role in their emotional experience (cf. Shweder 2008).
4
In one of the songs one may read about ternura que perfuma el dolor, ‘tenderness that perfumes
the pain’.