Shivering Like a Bastard: What Holden Really Felt

Why One Word in Salinger’s Novel Says More Than We Think

Language, identity, translation – and the loneliness no one sees

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❝ Sometimes, a word we almost miss reveals everything. ❞

There’s a scene in The Catcher in the Rye that barely takes up a paragraph.
Holden is sitting alone in a hotel room. He hasn’t slept. He just told a prostitute that he doesn’t want to do anything. She leaves. He turns off the light. And then:

“I was shivering like a bastard and I couldn’t stop.”

That’s it. No dramatic explosion. No threat. No tears.

But it’s one of the most emotionally naked lines in the entire novel — and perhaps one of the most quietly mistranslated.

🌫️ A Seventeen-Year-Old in a Cold Room

And no one is coming to pick him up

Holden is 16. Expelled from school. Hiding from his parents.
He’s wandered into a big city with no real plan and no one to turn to.
This isn’t a war scene. No gun to his head. No trauma in the usual sense.
Just emptiness, shame, and a deep feeling that he doesn’t belong anywhere.

And so he shivers. Not from fear. Not from cold. From something deeper:
the inner chill of someone no longer sure they matter to anyone.

📖 The Translations: What Changed in Each Language?

Let’s look at how the line “I was shivering like a bastard and I couldn’t stop.”
was translated into Russian and Ukrainian — and what each version keeps or loses.

📘 Original (English):

I was shivering like a bastard and I couldn’t stop. You couldn’t have stopped shivering the way I was shivering if you’d been in a refrigerator.

This line carries physical tension, but also social abandonment and emotional collapse.
“Bastard” here is not just a word — it’s Holden’s entire identity in that moment.

🧩 Russian translation (Rita Rait-Kovaleva):

Я дрожал, как осиновый лист. Никак не мог остановиться. Так дрожать, пожалуй, и в холодильнике не замёрзнешь.

✔ Rhythm preserved
✔ Leaf = trembling image
✖ “Bastard” = erased
✖ Emotional identity = lost

This version chooses a safe metaphor, removing the harshness and shame embedded in the original.
The phrase becomes neutral, almost poetic — but loses the raw loneliness Holden feels.

🪶 Ukrainian translation (Oleksa Logvynenko):

Я тремтів, наче в лихоманці, й ніяк не міг угамуватися. Так тремтіти, як я тоді, годі було б навіть у холодильнику.

✔ Natural Ukrainian phrasing
✔ Body imagery (“fever”) preserved
✖ No trace of “bastard” or identity pain

This version suggests physical weakness — a feverish shaking — but avoids any social or psychological reference.
Holden sounds sick, not abandoned.

🧬 Bastard ≠ Bad Guy

It means alone. Left out. Unclaimed.

The word bastard comes from Old French bâtard, literally meaning a child born out of wedlock, often without rights, without recognition.

In medieval times, a bastard wasn’t just someone born outside marriage —
he was excluded from inheritance, from the family, from the system.

Holden’s use of the word doesn’t mean “I was a jerk.”
It means: “I was shaking like someone who has no one.”
That’s the kind of trembling that can’t be cured with a blanket.

🧠 What the Translations Missed — and Why It Matters

Yes, “bastard” is a strong word. Maybe even uncomfortable.

But when translators replaced it with “aspen leaf” or “fever”,
they removed the social pain, the identity wound, the self-loathing.

It’s no longer about a boy who feels abandoned by the world —
it’s just about a boy who’s cold.

And that’s the difference between reporting emotions and translating them.

💬 So What Should the Translation Be?

If we were to translate the spirit of the line, not just the grammar,
a more honest version might be:

Я тремтів, як той, кого ніколи ніхто не чекає.
(I was shivering like someone no one ever waits for.)

Or:

Я тремтів, мов сирота в чужому місті.
(I was shivering like an orphan in a strange city.)

Because that’s what Holden is in that moment —
not afraid, but fundamentally alone.

🧩 The Bigger Picture: Translation as Choice

Every translation is a choice.
Between clarity and poetry. Between literal and emotional.
Between what is said — and what is really meant.

Salinger’s line is short, but it says everything:
The way a teenage boy, pretending to be grown up,
starts shivering like someone the world has forgotten.

That’s not a line you fix.
That’s a line you honor.

🔗 Related reading:

• Understanding Realia in Translation: Cultural Nuances Across Languages
• What a Dictionary Won’t Tell You — and Why Intuition Might

🗂️ Rubric: Author’s Column — Tymur Levitin on Language, Emotion, and Translation

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© Tymur Levitin, author, translator, educator
Founder of Levitin Language School & Start Language School by Tymur Levitin
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