What makes proverbs proverbial? So much wisdom in so few words. Pithy. That’s what they are. They get right to the core of what’s important or true or real or at least common to our experience.
Maybe that’s it. There is cause; there is effect. Over and over again. Repeatable. Observable. Millennia of repeated human experience is coalesced into a simple, powerful phrase, full of imagery or fulsome sounds and constructs, and handed down, if not as Truth, then at least as accepted wisdom. Proverbs are our ancestors’ “I told you so”.
It’s not necessarily an “I told you so” so obvious as to be easily dismissed as trivial. Wisdom is wisdom after all. And then again, some of them are deliciously intriguing. The passage of years has given them a patina that both enriches and obscures their meaning. The application of a little mental elbow grease makes the wisdom more powerfully our own.
Those from foreign lands, embedded in experiences nearly incomprehensible to us and couched in imagery wearing the seven veils of exotic culture, tantalize. We can read them in translation and find ourselves exclaiming, “Now what could they have meant by that!” It makes me want to learn every language so that I can roll their proverbs around in my mouth to enjoy the taste of their rhythms and rhymes, to really get the flavor of their meaning as best as I can.
For all the commonality of experience, our shared humanity, the proverbs of foreign lands can throw into stark relief the differences in our lives. What do they mean? What do they hold dear? What do they fear? Their proverbs give us a sense of them, an appreciation for them, and a longing to know more, a longing to understand, so that their proverbs can become proverbial for us as well.
Magdalen
