Dor, a Romanian word loosely translated as ‘longing’ or ‘nostalgia’, resists full definition. Its meaning defies translation not due to a lack of equivalents in other languages but because its essence—the sensibility it expresses—cannot be neatly conveyed. As Susan Sontag observed in Notes on Camp, ‘A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about.’
In dor, we can discern the outlines of the expatriate experience. Life as an expat, while enriching, is also marked by absences. Language, foremost among them, becomes precarious terrain. Humor often fails to translate, and emotions, expressed in words from a different cultural context, may feel distorted. Familiar foods, once unremarkable, become symbols.
Living in a foreign culture often feels unreal. The world seems dreamlike, its contours unstable. This disorientation sharpens awareness of one’s own cultural habits, which suddenly appear constructed, performed. Simultaneously, distance from home creates a vague nostalgia, perhaps for a version of oneself that is inaccessible.
This fragmentation accumulates. The expatriate’s identity stretches across languages and contexts, each shaping them in different ways. Speaking one’s native language becomes an occasional occurrence, while the loss of dreaming in it feels like quiet surrender.
The expatriate’s identity stretches across languages and contexts, each shaping them in different ways
Dor offers a lens for understanding this sensibility, but talking about it is uncomfortable. Sontag notes that ‘to name a sensibility, to draw its contours and recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion’. The revulsion in articulating dor begins with the failure of language itself; every attempt at communication risks misrepresentation.
For the expatriate, this revulsion also stems from the vulnerability of admitting to dor. The feeling is not mere homesickness but something more ambiguous, a pull with no clear direction. Then, there is also the awkwardness of longing for one’s culture while living in another, a duality that can feel both self-congratulatory and self-pitying.
Revulsion deepens with the recognition that much of what feels intrinsic—language, humor, taste—is contextual. Displacement exposes the constructedness of identity, often leaving the expatriate alienated from both their adopted and native cultures.
To name dor is to confront this fragmentation, to face an unstable sense of self. Yet any articulation risks reducing dor to abstraction, stripping it of its lived intensity. This tension—between the desire to explain and the futility of explanation—is itself part of dor.
To live with dor is to inhabit this tension, to recognize that some feelings can only be gestured towards; to stop writing with the lingering sense that, even now, I have failed to fully convey what I mean.
VALERIA CERNEI