Latin

Latin proverbs, at a glance

• Even the master, sometimes, falls asleep at his work.

  Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.

  Literally: Sometimes even good Homer drowses.

  Latin · Italy

  Set beside

  • Japanese — the master calligrapher, named, makes the wrong stroke
  • Mandarin — a thousand careful thoughts will still produce one mistake
  • English (Pope) — the same admission, but generalized from the master to the species

• A great show of effort, and out comes nothing much.

  Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

  Literally: The mountains shall give birth, and a ridiculous mouse shall be born.

  Latin · Italy

  Set beside

  • Greek (Aesop) — the original fable from which Horace borrowed the line
  • Japanese — the same image, almost intact, with a kabuki rumble in it
  • English (Shakespeare) — the same observation, with the mountain replaced by an entire play

• Make haste slowly

  Festina lente

  Literally: Hurry slowly

  Latin · Roman Empire

  Set beside

  • Italian — the same restraint, but moved into the body and rhymed into a peasant's walking song
  • Arabic — the paradox restated as theology: hurry is satanic, patience is divine
  • Russian — the same restraint cast as a craftsman's discipline at the bench, not a ruler's at the table

• Necessity is the mother of invention.

  Mater artium necessitas.

  Literally: Mother of arts, necessity.

  Latin · Italy

  Set beside

  • Greek (Plato) — older, and slightly different: necessity as the *teacher* rather than the *mother*
  • Persian — the same image, in a literary tradition with its own long romance with hardship-as-teacher
  • Mandarin — the closest cousin, with the metaphor compressed: in haste, wisdom is born

• The pig is teaching Minerva.

  Sus Minervam docet

  Sūs Mi-NER-vam DO-ket

  Literally: The pig teaches Minerva

  Latin · Rome (classical)

  Set beside

  • Chinese — 班门弄斧; showing off carpentry before the master carpenter — presumption as spatial transgression
  • English — a domestic, comic version; the pig becomes a grandmother and the goddess becomes an egg

• Repetition is the mother of learning.

  Repetitio est mater studiorum

  Literally: Repetition is the mother of studies

  Latin · Medieval European school tradition

  Set beside

  • Chinese — 熟能生巧; mastery emerges from familiarity, not from instruction
  • Japanese — 'get used to it rather than learn it'; practice over theory, the body before the book

• Speak of him, and there he is.

  Lupus in fabula.

  Literally: The wolf in the conversation.

  Latin · Italy

  Set beside

  • English — the wolf has become the devil; the folklore has become the warning
  • Spanish — the wolf is the King of Rome, and the door is the doorframe
  • Italian — the devil shows up only as horns, peering around the corner first

• Take the present; don't bank on a future you can't count on.

  Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

  Literally: Pluck the day, trusting the next one as little as possible

  Latin · Ancient Rome

  Set beside

  • English — the same claim with a forge instead of a flower: pluck becomes strike
  • Japanese — the present as a once-only meeting, bowed to rather than seized
  • Hebrew (Ecclesiastes) — the same finitude answered at the table, under a watching sky

• To labor at what cannot, by its nature, come to anything.

  Cribro aquam haurire

  Literally: To draw water with a sieve.

  Latin · Italy

  Set beside

  • Mandarin (竹篮打水一场空) — the same porous vessel as a correctable mistake: the Chinese carrier chose the basket and can put it down; the Danaids were handed the sieve and forbidden to stop
  • Russian (Дурака учить — решетом воду носить, Dal') — the sieve relocated into the fool's head: teaching him is carrying water in a sieve, because the leak is in the listener
  • Vietnamese (Dã tràng xe cát biển Đông) — the vessel holds and the work completes; then the sea erases it. Futility arrives from outside, wave by wave

• What strength cannot do, repetition can.

  Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo

  Literally: A drop hollows the stone, not by force but by often falling.

  Latin · Italy

  Set beside

  • Persian (Saadi) — the same drops, the opposite direction: where Ovid hollows a stone, Saadi builds a sea
  • Mandarin — the same physical demonstration on the same materials, made portable as a four-character maxim; folk register, not exilic
  • Hebrew/Aesopic — the same claim through an animal that has no force at all, only the accumulated weight of return trips

• What we don't know, we magnify.

  Omne ignotum pro magnifico est

  Literally: Everything unknown [is taken] for magnificent

  Latin · Ancient Rome

  Set beside

  • Russian — the same inflation, but the unknown swells into something frightening rather than grand
  • Japanese — the bodily proof: the imagined ordeal outweighs the real one
  • Mandarin (庸人自扰) — the inflation relocated inside the person who manufactures it

• The wheel of Fortune turns — I go down as another goes up

  Fortune rota volvitur: descendo minoratus; alter in altum tollitur

  Fortunae rota volvitur: descendo minoratus; alter in altum tollitur

  Literally: Fortune's wheel is turned: I descend, diminished; another is lifted on high

  Latin · Medieval Europe

  Set beside

  • Khmer — the reversal made ecological and fast: fish eat ants at high water, ants eat fish at low
  • Persian — the same impermanence turned into consolation, and extended to the good times as well
  • Mandarin (三十年河东，三十年河西) — the same reversal at geological speed, with nobody operating it