Miscellanea / Manjula Padmanabhan
A man scalded by milk blows on yoghurt
Winter is the season for migratory humans. This year, a friend
brought a small booklet which he had picked up in Mongolia. It's
called Pearl Rosary of Wisdom: a concise dictionary of English-
Mongolian and Mongolian-English proverbs.
In his preface, the author Go. AKIM states that his purpose is
to juxtapose the proverbs of Mongolia with equivalent ones in
English, thereby revealing the similarities which connect
dissimilar societies. As he points out, by an interesting
coincidence, a character in Gabriel Garcia Marques' novel One
Hundred Years of Solitude, cries from within his mother's womb,
while the hero of the Mongolian epic Geser is said to have sung
from within his mother's womb. Despite the distance of a planet
between them, two fictional characters reveal that they have a
shared birthplace in the imagination of the human mind.
The 555 proverbs of the dictionary make the same point. The
author has organised them so that the reader can find a proverb in
one language, then read its translation as well as its equivalent
in the other language. What is charming and amusing is the way
in which the most familiar ones are transformed by their context and
the combined caprices of translators and proof-readers. For
instance, "More powerful, gathered magpies, than unassembled
tigers" and "United magpies nag a dragon to death" are the
Mongolian versions of "United we stand, divided we fall!"
Here are a few other examples: "Out of the wolf's mouth into
the tiger's mouth" for "Out of the frying-pan into the fire." "To
be a king in his black yurt (circular tent) and a lord in his grey
yurt" for "An Englishman's home is his castle." "Don't tuck up
your shirt before you get to the mountain, don't take off your
shoes before you get to the river" for "Cross that bridge when you
come to it." "A man scalded by milk blows on yoghurt" for "Once
bitten, twice shy." "He sees not the camel on his own head, but
notices the straw on another's head" for Christ's admonition to
remove the plank from one's own eye before complaining about the
splinter in another's.
Some of the sayings are either so badly translated that they
make no sense or they are too exotic to find an echo in a non-Mongolian reader: "A draft hamster is put to death because of its
ill-words"; "When meat is in lack, a radius is best" and "Set the
mouse to make an incense offering, the cat to keep the meat."
Others are obvious enough; they don't require translations:
"Thousand camels slip on the droppings of one camel"; "To cry after
the thunderclap"; "What is joke for a cat will be death for a
mouse"; "The fox that waits for falling of a bull's testicles,
starves"; "Two far away seas, united by clouds and mist"; "Vodka
slips into the mouth like a golden mosquito but roars out like a
mammoth." And some are so familiar they could have been coined in
downtown Bhogal: "Don't strew earth in your own wine-cup"; "A man
takes care of his name, a peacock of his tail"; "If you are
wealthy, many relatives, if you are poor, many enemies."
Proverbs reflect the unconscious values of a society. Black,
for instance, is so obviously unsavoury that "Crow laughs at the
pig for being black". The social position of daughters is made
clear by: "One daughter is better than none" and "Judge a son by a
work, a daughter by a needle-work." A camel's physical charms
assumed to be nil as in: "Although a camel is ugly he likes his
young." And they are slyly knowing, as in this one: "Penis of a
silent man is damp." Its nearest equivalent is given as "Dumb dogs
are dangerous!"
One feature that all the examples given in the book have in
common, which ever culture they belong to, is that their origin
appears to be ancient rather than modern. I have been trying to
think of up-to-date proverbs and the only one which came readily to
mind was "The other line moves faster." Yet that could just as
easily belong to the middle ages as to a bus queue. What are the
proverbs of today? Here are a few of mine: "There's never any
traffic when you're early"; "The power-cut lasts only as long as
your deadline"; "There's no colour as fast as the one that runs
from one fabric onto another"; "Luggage checked-in first, exits
last". Do you have any proverbs to share? Keep in mind, it's not
enough merely to substitute new terms for old. The situation
itself should be contemporary. If enough of you send in
suggestions, I'll print them in my next column. And if that's not
incentive enough, here's one more: a set of my postcards for the
most original and witty maxim to reach me!
Illustration: Dominic Xavier
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