« Barnes and Noble cooking the books? | Main | O'Reilly aims for new shark-jumping record »
November 28, 2004
New Feature! Yiddish Proverb Sundays! Read, so you should learn!
You asked for it!* Regular readers** wanted to see some weekly features†, and I'm only too happy to oblige. So today I inaugurate...
Yiddish Proverb Sundays!
Unless noted, all proverbs will be from the 1970 book "1001 Yiddish Proverbs," by Fred Kogos.
I'll start the series with the last proverb in the book:
Everything ends in weeping.
That's got to be the ur-proverb, right there. Could be pulled straight from Ecclesiastes, and for all I know it is. There it is, distilled into a few words, hard and sharp as diamonds: Ladies and gentlemen, the human condition.
This might be a good time to note that I don't speak Yiddish. Several people have called me an honorary Jew, though. Perhaps that's why these proverbs speak to me; I mean, the human condition is the human condition, but some cultures face it a little more squarely than others. And with a little more humor, might I add.
(Language nerd stuff coming up. Avert your eyes if you are sensitive to dorkiness or products processed in a dorkiness-processing facility.)
I'm going to include the Yiddish version whenever I can, because the originals often have lilting cadences and rhymes that don't carry over into the translation. (I imagine anyone with even a slight familiarity with the sound of spoken Yiddish or German could easily "hear" what the Yiddish might sound like.) Plus, I like spotting English cognates. In this example, there's Altsding ("all things") and gevain (sounds like "whine," certainly shares a root). And I'm guessing lozst shares DNA with "lost."
(Okay, the dorkiness-sensitive can resume reading now. If you are a dorkiness-sensitive patron and you got any of the above paragraph in your eyes, please proceed immediately to the nearest eye-wash station, where your eyeballs will be flushed with issues of Maxim and Sports Illustrated until all traces of dorkiness have been expunged. Thank you.)
* No you didn't.
** Of which I had, at last count, between 0 and 23, depending on whether you count the voices in my head.
† If the voices in my head do count as regular readers, and I don't know why they shouldn't, then this statement is true.
Posted by EtherPundit at November 28, 2004 04:19 PM Category: Language , Yiddish Proverbs
Comments
You know, Hemingway said something along the lines of "all art ends in death."
Posted by: Karen S at January 17, 2005 08:56 PM
As a trranslator of Yiddish to English (my web site is: www.yiddishtoengish.com) I would respectfullly suggest that your Yiddish transliteration follow the YIVO guidelines.
instead of gevain it would be geveyn.
Can I be of any assitance to you? Please feel free to contact me. I thank you in advance for the courtesy of a response.
Mindle Crystel Gross
Posted by: Mindle Crystel Gross at July 29, 2007 06:50 PM
As a trranslator of Yiddish to English (my web site is: www.yiddishtoengish.com) I would respectfullly suggest that your Yiddish transliteration follow the YIVO guidelines.
instead of gevain it would be geveyn.
Can I be of any assitance to you? Please feel free to contact me. I thank you in advance for the courtesy of a response.
Mindle Crystel Gross
Posted by: Mindle Crystel Gross at July 29, 2007 06:51 PM