Spanish

Spanish proverbs, at a glance

• Better one bird you have than a hundred you don't.

  Más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando.

  Literally: A bird in the hand is worth more than a hundred flying.

  Spanish · Spain

  Set beside

  • English — the same image at a far gentler exchange rate
  • Italian — the bird becomes food, the bush becomes time
  • German — the species are named, and the class judgment is explicit

• Character and bearing last until the grave.

  Genio y figura, hasta la sepultura

  Literally: Temperament and figure, until the grave

  Spanish · Spain (pan-Hispanic usage)

  Set beside

  • Mongolian — the same fixity read forward from the cradle instead of backward from the coffin, character soaking into bone rather than riding to it
  • Russian — the identical claim made bleak: a deformity, not a bearing, and death as correction rather than company
  • Korean — the gentlest version, a habit audited by two ages rather than a temperament escorted to the tomb

• Children come out of the same wood as their parents.

  De tal palo, tal astilla

  Literally: From such a stick, such a splinter.

  Spanish · Spain

  Set beside

  • Russian — the likeness measured as distance: the fruit lands at the foot of its tree, and nothing has to break for it to get there
  • Arabic — the likeness as a colour that cannot change, as this site's crow essay gives it
  • Korean — the likeness put back on the person who did the planting, in a dictionary that also records how hard the sprouts are to tell apart

• The devil knows more from age than from being the devil.

  Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo

  Literally: The devil knows more for being old than for being a devil

  Spanish · Spain (pan-Hispanic usage)

  Set beside

  • Mongolian — same claim about experience-as-wisdom, but anchored in steppe survival rather than in Catholic theological joke
  • Japanese — same observation, carried by a homophone pun on turtle-shell and years-merit; the Japanese is playful, the Spanish is wry
  • Mandarin — same claim, but the metaphor body is culinary rather than diabolical; aged ginger as proxy for aged judgment
  • German — explicit counter-figure; *age does not protect against folly* makes the opposite claim from the same vantage and so sharpens the Spanish by negation

• Don't appraise the value of what you've been given.

  A caballo regalado no le mires el diente.

  Literally: Don't look at the tooth of a gifted horse.

  Spanish · Spain

  Set beside

  • Latin (Jerome) — the original Christian-era version, in pastoral grammar
  • Italian — the closest sibling to the Spanish, with one telling preposition difference
  • Russian — the same image carried east, where horses meant a different kind of life

• It's a small world.

  El mundo es un pañuelo

  Literally: The world is a handkerchief

  Spanish · Spain

  Set beside

  • Greek — same observation about the inevitability of encounter, but built out of an entire landscape rather than a piece of cloth
  • English — the same claim said as flat mathematics; the image has been hollowed out by overuse and a 1964 theme-park ride
  • Japanese — same moment of meeting, but the mechanism is karmic rather than spatial; encounter as the surfacing of a fated tie
  • Russian — same skeleton as the Greek twin, but threat-tone closer to the surface; what the Spanish proverb laughs off, the Russian one reckons with

• Pray to God — and keep swinging the mallet.

  A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando

  Literally: To God praying, and with the mallet striking

  Spanish · Spain

  Set beside

  • Arabic (hadith) — hobble the camel and trust; the rope is not a hedge against God but the form the trust takes
  • Greek (Aesopic) — a drowning Athenian calls on his city's goddess and a fellow castaway, swimming past, tells him to move his arm
  • English, labelled Navajo without evidence — the only version that throws the prayer away, and the only one that cannot show where it came from
  • Sanskrit — the same claim with no god in the sentence: what opposes work is the wish, and the idler is the strongest animal in the forest

• The shrimp that falls asleep is carried away by the current

  Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente

  Literally: Shrimp that itself sleeps, itself-it-takes the current

  Spanish · Mexico

  Set beside

  • Italian — same water, opposite role: the sleeper is the fisherman, not the prey, and the loss is the fish he doesn't catch
  • Swahili — moves the warning from the smallest sea creature to the largest land predator; the size of the sleeper is the texture
  • Japanese — refuses the image entirely; four characters, samurai compression, no shrimp and no current